The Social Script of Objectifying Men

I find the story of the Duke "fuck list" to be very interesting, in a perverse sort of way. I admit my first reaction was very similar to the one I had after the Larry Craig scandal broke -- that is, how many women are looking at the list and saying "been there!" I feel like this list shows up in every other issue of Maxim, no?

One of the things I've noticed about dominant social views on sexuality is that men really believe that a zone of sexual inviolability surrounds them and get really angry when it's penetrated. They want, at all times, to be in complete control of any sexual event or happenstance that involves them--but they don't seem to believe that women deserve the same courtesy. So when there is even the slightest risk of breaching a man's sexual perimeters (e.g., a gay man coming on to you in the bathroom), we erect all sorts of social and legal barriers to block it. Some jurisdictions seem to allow or at least condone violent assaults by heterosexual men being hit on by a gay man at a bar. And as Senator Craig's case shows, even something as tenuous as possibly signaling a sexual proposition of another man in a public place can get you arrested. Stacking that sort of treatment up against the yawning silence we give to the massive amount of street harassment women (especially urban women) face is mind-blowing.

These things seem to only become "problems" when the victims are men. What makes this list so shocking is that it makes men into women -- that is, casts them in the social script typically reserved for women. They stand passive and naked, judged solely on the amount of sexual pleasure they gave to this woman, and (horrors upon horrors!) some of them didn't make the grade. At the risk of hyperbole, that never happens in the American public sphere. And while I certainly understand why it would be disconcerting to be cast into that spotlight, once we get past the gender-inversion, it's hardly uncommon.

My second thought was that there is simply no winning position for women in this sort of scenario, whereas for guys there's at least something of a mixed bag. There are basically three roles one can play: the list writer, at the top of list, or at the bottom. If you're the guy whose at the bottom, well, yeah, that sucks pretty unambiguously. If you're a guy at the top, though, that's a little awkward, but also kind of a badge of pride. And if you're the guy who wrote the list -- well, you'll probably be seen as a cad. But you're also a stud who banged 13 ladies (hells to the yeah!). Again, at least a mixed blessing. By contrast, a female writer of this list is a slut, a woman who tops this list is a slut, and a woman who is at the nadir is either a frigid bitch or an untalented slut. Yeah, that's no-win.

Finally, I'm curious about the social meaning of this designation for the guys involved. As a society we have basically no experience with this sort of naked sexual objectification of the male body. It just doesn't happen. So if this list becomes a top 10 google hit for these guys in the future, what's the likely result? We don't know if we're supposed to be sympathetic, or high-five them, or shun them, or mock them, or what (for women in analogous situations of course, the answer is shame and shun). I think our collective confusion will result in it being effectively ignored.

This, I think, goes back to my old post, Second Thing We Do, Objectify All The Men. Because men aren't in a situation where, as a class, their moral subjectivity is unrecognized, recognition of their objectivity is considerably less threatening.

This doesn't mean that this list didn't cause a lot of pain and embarrassment, or that we shouldn't be attentive to it. But it does illuminate some deeper issues of sexual inequality that are clearly, I think, more intense (and more ignored) when the victims are women.

Become Jewish

Nike's been running a fairly entertaining series of ads for its Air Jordan line of sneakers, under the tagline "become legendary". Basically, they show college hoops fans showing an irrational dislike of a name, place, or event due to its association with a heartbreaking defeat by their beloved fan. So a Texan at his daughter's sixth birthday party talks about how "it was a day he'd never forget" in a miserable monotone -- then cutting to clips from that day when Syracuse drubbed Texas to win the NCAA championship. Or a manager from Syracuse who says that none of the 600 employees at his manufacturing plant are named Ray ("no Raymonds either"), with a cut away to Ray Allen lighting up the Syracuse University Orangemen.

And I'm thinking, these are good ads. But the one I really want to see is the Kentucky town which converted en masse to Judaism in response to Christian Laettner's famous last-second fade away OT winner. That would be edgy advertising.

Shane Battier

I've been a lifelong Duke Basketball fan (one of the benefits of giving to a tiny liberal arts school is that you can keep your childhood college sports affiliations -- my brother, who went to UVA, can't really go out screaming for Kentucky anymore). And possibly my favorite player in Duke history is Shane Battier. This New York Times magazine article helps explain why. It's full of things that my untrained eye observed but didn't really understand. Battier isn't the most gifted talent or natural athlete. But he has an unbelievably court IQ. He does all the little things that make his team better, and his opponents worse. In college, I was impressed that Battier was always stepping up to take charges. It was the cornerstone of his defense. He gets by on smarts and grit, and I like that.

Reggie Love

Say it low and slow.

I saw that Senator Obama's bodyman (his Charlie, West Wing fans) is a man by the name of Reggie Love. And I thought, "could it be"? And yes, it is: the same Reggie Love who played both Basketball and Football at Duke only a few years ago.

Duke President Apologizes To Lacrosse Players

The right thing to do. Now, if only there were similar remorse for all the other wrongly accused people who didn't have the eye of the media cast on their case, and served time in prison for it. But a step in the right direction.

The Blue Devil You Know....

As the Duke rape case receded into the background, I wrote a post noting that most people wrongly accused of crimes fare much worse than the Duke defendants. Indeed, in at least some sense, the justice system behaved exactly as it should have in this sort of situation. Certainly, we all agree that the Duke players should have never been charged. But ideally, the justice system has fail-safes to account for that situation, and they kicked in beautifully. At the end of the day, the case never went to trial, the innocent men were exonerated in the public eye, and the prosecutor whose ethical breaches were what caused the problem in the first place was harshly disciplined.

Sadly, this is very atypical. While men and women are wrongfully accused of crimes every day, few end up with even the modestly "happy" ending the Duke players received. Most cases at least go to trial, often times they are convicted, and even once they are exonerated, only in the rarest of cases is the prosecutor even admonished, let alone disciplined, for any ethical violations they may have committed in the course of pursuing the all-important conviction. By and large, the conduct that provoked the calls for Mike Nifong's head is conduct that we are all too willing to condone. In other words, for all the gross injustices Nifong perpetuated in his prosecution of the Duke case, his real mistake, as CUNY Law Professor Victor Goode argues, was "treating three middle class white defendants as if they were poor and Black."

Richard Moran, a Sociology Professor at Mt. Holyoke College, found that two-thirds of wrongful death penalty convictions are the result, not of "innocent" mistakes or errors, of "intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel." Moran continues:

Yet too often this behavior is not singled out and identified for what it is. When a prosecutor puts a witness on the stand whom he knows to be lying, or fails to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, or when a police officer manufactures or destroys evidence to further the likelihood of a conviction, then it is deceptive to term these conscious violations of the law — all of which I found in my research — as merely mistakes or errors.
[...]
Strangely, our misunderstanding of the real cause underlying most wrongful convictions is compounded by the very people who work to uncover them. Although the term “wrongfully convicted” is technically correct, it also has the potential to be misleading. It leads to the false impression that most inmates ended up on death row because of good-faith mistakes or errors committed by an imperfect criminal justice system — not by malicious or unlawful behavior.

For this reason, we need to re-frame the argument and shift our language. If a death sentence is overturned because of malicious behavior, we should call it for what it is: an unlawful conviction, not a wrongful one.

Alexandra Lahav comments:

Moran suggests that we change our rhetoric (calling these “unlawful” instead of “wrongful convictions”) and establish more specific standards for overturning convictions. These suggestions are too weak. The real problem, as he points out, is “the hearts and souls of those whose job it is to uphold the law.” I am not sure whether law or ethics rules can change hearts and minds, but setting that philosophical debate aside the law surely can put fear into the hearts and minds of prosecutors by actually punishing them for misconduct. All prosecutors who engage in such conduct should be fired and disbarred.

For a long time now, my impression of the mentality many prosecutors seem to hold is that their job is to pursue convictions, not justice. There are a variety of reasons this might have developed, from a natural outgrowth of having an adversarial system to a political desire to seem "tough on crime." Nonetheless, too often the lust to put someone, anyone, behind bars leads to illegal activity that needs to be punished. The integrity of our entire criminal justice system is jeopardizes when its agents can freely get away with illegal and unethical conduct that comprise everyone's right to a fair trial. If we are to do justice to what happened to the Duke players, we need to state a firm commitment to never tolerating this sort of behavior--even where the defendants don't have the resources to make it onto our TV screens.

Agitators and Race-Baiters: A Rhetorical History From Past To Present

Recently, the Wall Street Journal (with concurrence from Marty Peretz) compared the Duke Lacrosse Defendants to the Scottsboro boys. It's a vile and inaccurate comparison--one can recognize the injustice in the Duke case while noting the massive qualitative distinction between being released before trial and having your prosecutor disbarred, versus being sentenced to death twice and spending up to 20 years in prison before being released.

I spent much of last summer reading local news coverage of the Scottsboro Cases in the Montgomery Advertiser. I was curious to see how they dealt with the case, how they responded to the sentiment that the defendants were facing a "legal lynching" and the stunning rebuke the Supreme Court dealt when it reversed the death sentences and sent the cases back to trial.

Here's an editorial from the Advertiser responding the Court's ruling in the first Scottsboro case:

“But one significant fact stands out in this long and sordid story:

While Alabama has been blackguarded the round world over for the manner in which these men were tried and convicted, there was no conscious attempt on the part of any group of Alabamians to intimidate the Jackson county court that tried them, while intimidation of the crudest, more spectacular, and most obnoxious sort has been practiced by agitators who appointed themselves the special friends of these felons.”

“In the end insolent mobs marched in Washington with the sole purpose in mind of intimidating the highest court in the republic...

But no mobs marched in Alabama demanding the conviction of these men when they were put to trial.”

“But if there is any reasonable doubt in disinterested, responsible minds as to the fairness of the first trial, another will be granted cheerfully.

But Alabama stands conscience-clear and unashamed before the world!” [“The Supreme Court and the Scottsboro Case,” 11/8/32, (editorial), pg. 4]

It's worth noting that the paper is being somewhat disingenuous: there were mobs demanding the "conviction" of the defendants, and the paper reported them:

“Feeling as intense here last night as mountaineers from throughout the section came trooping into town…At times the crowd was estimated to number 300 and a few times there were shouts of ‘lynch them.’” [“Negroes Taken to Etowah Jail: Judge Orders Removal of Prisoners to Gadsen Under Military Escort,” MA, March 27, 1931 at pg. 1]

When the trial occurred, the paper also reported a crowd of 10,000 people gathered outside the courtroom but remained "orderly."

But what I want to focus on is the rhetoric in the editorial. Specifically, the word "agitators." "Agitators" is a word that seems to serve a very specific purpose in this article. It is designed to discredit the advocates of racial reformers just on face. In other coverage of the trial (including news pieces), the paper called the Scottsboro defendant's advocates "radicals" or "radical sympathizers."

To an extent, such wording strikes as quaint. But I think that it has some contemporary cousins whose potency might help illuminate what "agitators" and "radicals" did then. Imagine if a paper today wrote "terrorist sympathizers" and you have, I think, roughly the stimulus that "agitators" served in 1930s Alabama.

Yesterday, for my research this summer, I ran a Lexis search for "race-baiter." Here's some of what came up:

“Ex-producer for Imus calls Sharpton 'race-baiter',” Mobile Register (Alabama), May 12, 2007 Saturday, Pg. A08.

“LETTERS - Race baiters on both sides,” The Providence Journal (Rhode Island), April 15, 2007 Sunday, All Editions, EDITORIAL; Pg. D-07, 85 words. (“[Don Imus] should be punished further as a result of his whiny mea culpa at the feet of that race-baiting punk "the Rev. Al Sharpton," and the equally vile "Rev. Jesse Jackson," the worst spokesman of any ethnic group in history.”)

David Limbaugh, “Why Would Bush Adopt the Wild Rhetoric of the Race-Baiters?, “ Human Events Online, September 20, 2005 Tuesday 9:58 AM EST, , IN THE NEWS, 766 words (“The president said: "As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."I was more than a little disappointed when I heard him utter these words…. his injection of race into the speech is troubling if for no other reason than it gives ammunition and a degree of legitimacy to the race-hustlers' unconscionable ploy to blame delays or inadequacies in the federal response on the administration's alleged racial prejudice against blacks…. It is difficult to quantify the cumulative destructive impact of all the reckless, knee-jerk charges of white racism leveled by race-exploiters of both races who have something to gain by their accusations and by fanning the flames of racial tensions.”)

LIES OF THE RACE-BAITERS, The New York Post, December 19, 2006 Tuesday, All Editions; Pg. 42, (Noting that a majority of the officers implicated in the Sean Bell shooting were Black, “But the race-baiters never let facts get in the way of their trouble-making.”)

MEDIA, OTHERS ARE BUSY RACE-BAITING, Modesto Bee, September 8, 2005, Thursday, ALL EDITION, LOCAL NEWS; Pg. B7 (“Am I the only American who sees Jesse Jackson, the Congressional Black Caucus, CNN, MSNBC and some in the print media as race-baiters and a serious problem to our country?... When will the administration, members of Congress and responsible media call out these troublemakers and tell them simply they are creating racism where there is none? When will we, the consumers, speak out with our wallets and insist that this cabal of hate-promoters be ignored?)

In a subsequent post, I wish to explore the function such rhetoric serves by its wielders. I think the comparison of Duke to Scottsboro is instructive in this regard. But for now, I'm interested in how the current use of "race-baiter" strikes y'all when juxtaposed next to the past use of "agitator." Do you see a link? Does it distress you? Or are you completely confident that we have jettisoned that aspect of our past and our descriptions are fair and accurate?

Quick Thoughts on the Duke Lacrosse Case and Other Innocent Folk

LGM documents what happens to innocent men who aren't rich enough to afford top-flight legal talent and don't have DNA evidence that can "prove" their innocence. Fernando Bermudez was ID'd in a shooting by five witnesses. The problem is they were all coerced into making the ID, and have all since recanted. He's still in prison. This was the part that made me want to bang my head against a wall:

The reason is based in the prevailing wisdom of the American justice system, which views recantations as untrustworthy, acts not of conscience, but of sympathy or bribery or coercion. That view is so deeply ingrained that one judge, rejecting one of Mr. Bermudez’s appeals in 1995, said candidly that five recantations were simply too many to believe.

Wow is that annoying. Quick poll: Are all five witnesses more likely to recant their testimony because they've all been bribed, or because there was a systematic problem in how their testimony was obtained in the first place that they're trying to correct? Of course, if only two of the witnesses recanted, I have no doubt this same judge would point to the other three as proof that the conviction is still valid.

I bring this up, because the now exonerated Duke Lacrosse players say that their ordeal has exposed them to the manifest injustices in the criminal justice system. I don't doubt it. They've pledged to work to reform some of these excesses, and I wish them all the luck in the world towards it. The Duke players had access to excellent lawyers, constant media exposure (which must have been painful but also is responsible for publicizing much of the exonerating evidence), and DNA evidence. Many people can't count on any of that. One hopes that these recent events can spark reform efforts that benefit not just innocent upper-class Whites, but innocent men like Mr. Bermudez.

I've been waiting to hear from the feminist blogosphere on this development in the Duke case. Commentary by feminist bloggers can be found at Alas, a Blog, Feministing, Feministe, Reverse Paranoia, and Slant Truth. They're hardly of one mind, and my links don't necessarily signal agreement. But they're thinking hard about the implications of the announcement. And that's worth noting.

For my part, I do now believe that these men were innocent of rape. That does not mean that a sexual assault did not occur (other people were at the party that night). It doesn't mean that one did, either--I don't know. That they are innocent also does not mean that they are particularly good people--one has an assault conviction, another spouted some pretty racist stuff, and its relatively uncontested that the folks at the party harassed the stripper at the party, probably using racial language. But that falls through the wayside. I've stated before that I am terrified of being falsely accused of a crime. In all likelihood, that's what these men went through. They deserve our empathy for that. And I'll reiterate my hope that their story encourages us to make reforms in our legal system so that it is less likely to railroad innocent men who can't afford top-notch legal talent to prison.