Saudi rape gangs and farming

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing click to enlargeThis has to be one of the most disgusting stories of the year and it has been well reported in the MSM and the blogosphere. But here is my take on it... This reads like Alabama in the mid 20th century. Roving gangs of white Klansmen would kidnap, beat and rape Black women and girls for the crime of being Black. (Wait, maybe this reminds me of early 21st century West Virginia). Now in Saudi Arabia, the Klan hood has been replaced with the Arab Keffiyeh. From the International Herald Tribune: To understand the heinous double standards at play, look no further than the case of a 19-year-old Saudi woman who was gang-raped last year. Despite being abducted and raped by seven men, a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced her to 90 lashes because she was in a car with an unrelated man before she was abducted. Saudi Arabia's ultra-orthodox interpretation of Islamic law preaches a strict segregation of the sexes. The young woman had the temerity to appeal - and publicize her story in the media. And so, earlier this month, the court increased her punishment to 200 lashes and six months in jail. Her lawyer, a prominent human rights defender, was suspended and faces a disciplinary hearing. And the actual abductors and rapists? They got between two and nine years in jail. A rape conviction in the kingdom usually carries the death penalty, but the court said it did not impose it due to the "lack of witnesses" and the "absence of confessions." Once they rape all the women, you know the farm animals are next. Anybody know how you say "squeal" in Arabic?

Bend Over, Boyfriend

Here's a guy who's obviously studied the how-to manual Sexual Abuse For Dummies: Albert (his middle name), a good-looking 29-year-old who’s fairly well-known in the music industry, says he asks the women he dates to have anal sex with him because it raises the level of intimacy in the relationship. He doesn’t demand anal sex—especially not if it’s a one-time hookup—but he won’t commit to a woman who refuses to grant him a backstage pass. “I had a girlfriend who I was with for a long time and she wasn’t into it,” Albert says. “There was definitely a thing in the back of my head like, ‘I can’t marry her.’ How can I, knowing I can’t go to all the places I can go with her? The physicality of it, being painful or whatever, shows how comfortable the girl is with you.” Here, he pointedly stops short of romanticizing screwing a woman rectally. “Ideally, every girl is a disgusting pig who wants it,” he says. “But only with you.” Thirty years ago, when I moved from New York to Connecticut, my first job was at a paper recycling company. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a shady operation that was rumored to have connections with the mob. There was no union, I wasn't paid much, the work was boring, nasty, and dangerous, and some of my co-workers were there only because they couldn't get a job anywhere else. One evening I gave a guy a ride home and during our conversation he mentioned that he'd did time in jail. He raped his girlfriend. After a long, awkward silence he said, "Wasn't no big thing, y'know? It wasn't as though I took something that wasn't mine." Even now, the casual brutality behind his words still disturbs me, and this punk "Andrew" creeps me out the same way. The only difference between him and the guy I gave a ride to years ago is that "Andrew" hasn't been arrested yet. He's objectifying her to get what he wants. If a man doesn't listen to the word "No", and doesn't care that he's hurting his partner as they're having sex, then he's a rapist. If a man is calling what he's doing "making love", he's a damned liar. And dangerous. A tip of the derby to Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon for bringing this hateful article from Details magazine to our attention. It's only fair that Amanda should have The Last Word on this topic: "Let’s all pray to the Great Cat that one day Albert asks a woman for anal sex and she pulls out her strap-on and says, 'Sure baby. You first.' And when he blanches, she sighs and says that she’s going to have to move on to find her husband."

Dicks

Gag Order A Nebraska judge bans the word rape from his courtroom. By Dahlia Lithwick Usually we leave it up to the linguists and philosophers to muse on the crazy relationship between words and their meanings. In the law, words—the important ones, at least—are defined narrowly, and judges, lawyers, and jurors are trusted to understand their meanings. It's precisely because language is so powerful in a courtroom that we treat it so reverently. Yet a Nebraska district judge, Jeffrey Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004. Safi's first trial resulted in a hung jury last November when jurors deadlocked 7-5. Responding to Cheuvront's initial language ban—-which will be in force again when Safi is retried in July—-prosecutors upped the ante last month by seeking to have words like sex and intercourse barred from the courtroom as well. The judge denied that motion, evidently on the theory that there would be no words left to describe the sex act at all. The result is that the defense and the prosecution are both left to use the same word—-sex—-to describe either forcible sexual assault, or benign consensual intercourse. As for the jurors, they'll just have to read the witnesses' eyebrows to sort out the difference. Men don't rape women. Dicks do. But dicks never take responsibility for the horrible things that they do to women. Instead, they play the sick game of Blaming The Victim. ("That stupid bitch made me rape her!") What's worse, although dicks are too stupid to understand the word "No", they're still cunning enough to manipulative the language and give themselves an alibi. And dicks always get help from other dicks. In this barbaric interpretation of the law, Jeffrey Cheuvront proved himself to be no different than the rapist in his courthouse: That stupid bitch made me rape her again! In this case the subtext is this: We Own You. And property doesn't have any rights. Or a voice. As George Orwell wisely observed, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity". In other words, don't piss on my face and call it rain. That's what dicks do. Go to Slate and read the rest.