Germaine Greer, the Camille Paglia of the early 1970s, has decided that now, in light of the disturbing revelations of pervasive sexual violence in Australian sporting culture earlier this month, is the perfect time for the saucy feminist that even men like to make her triumphant return to the top of the pop anti-feminist slag heap.

feministe has had the unpleasant experience of being disillusioned with Greer; having first encountered her through The Complete Woman rather than her earlier manifestations she made the understandable mistake of thinking that Greer is a feminist. [Now she’s understandably pissed about the whole thing ](http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/000815.php “feministe: What The Hell Is Wrong With Germaine Greer?”) :

Once among my favorite feminist authors, Germaine Greer gets particularly disgusting in this article, referring to sports groupies as rape fodder and asserting that athletes who rape are only succumb[ing] to the groupies’ onslaught.

And this. This! Good god, woman.

They’re not embarrassed to say they agreed to sex with one man they’d only just met, or even with two, but they insist that they hadn’t agreed to being brutalised, insulted or humiliated, and they want redress.

(Editor’s note: yes, Greer actually wrote that with a straight face. I checked myself. You would assume that something has to have been taken out of context here, but it hasn’t. Back to feministe:)

…

Frowning upon these girls’ perceived sexual immorality hardly absolves athletes of rape.

And when you say things like this,

Now that the women are beefing and the papers are printing and wives are walking out, the players are more vulnerable than ever.

I want to yank the F-card right out of your damn wallet.

I do have one bone to pick with the commentary that has gone around from feministe and others, though. It’s a mistake to say that Greer’s article is one long exercise in victim-blaming. In fact, Greer is not just absolving rapists and haranguing survivors over their alleged sexual proclivities. She’s also tarring rape survivors who speak out as gold-diggers, too:

They might well be insisting on the right to free expression of their own desires, which include shagging the odd hyper-fit footballer, provided he doesn’t abuse the privilege. But they also seem quite interested in another factor in sex with footballers - namely, indecent amounts of money.

The chances of a conviction for rape, in a case where footballers have had sex with a half-drunk woman, say, are virtually nil, but the chances for a significant pay-off from the club or the individual players are good.

I would say something more at this point, but I’ve already quoted four paragraphs from Greer, and I’m left with the feeling that just quoting says everything that needs to be said.

And not in a good way, either.

Incidentally, I recently got a box full of CDs by feminist artists for resale. If you’re interested in CDs of Ani DiFranco, Bitch & Animal, Le Tigre, Alix Olson, or Margaret Cho, I have just gotten several in. let me know, and I’ll give you a bargain rate.

Cheers! — RG

The United States military, like almost every military throughout the history of the world, is something of a boys’ club—a violent boys club, by its nature. This is not surprising; and in light of it it’s also not terribly surprising that military units and military boys have been involved in terrible acts of violence against women—both against civilians in countries to which they are sent, against their wives and spouses, and—increasingly, as the number of women in the military increases—against their fellow troops. This is all not very surprising; but neither are lots of terrible atrocities, and the organized culture of violence against women in the military is no different. With the exception of some pioneering feminist work—such as Susan Brownmiller’s landmark Against Our Will—it has rarely been taken seriously as a political fact, but it needs to be. Fortunately, some people are starting to take notice, thanks in part to the vital, life-saving work of The Miles Foundation:

The Miles Foundation is a private, non-profit organization providing comprehensive services to victims of violence associated with the military; furnishing professional education and training to civilian community-based service providers and military personnel; conducting research; serving as a resource center for policymakers, advocates, journalists, scholars, researchers and students; and serving to ensure that public policy is well-informed and constructive.

The problem is real and it is huge. We first began to see it from Tailhook and the Air Force Academy, but those were only high-profile cases that indicated a much more pervasive problem. Betrayal in the Ranks, a heart-rending exposé by the Denver Post, first showed me the real scope of the problem and how the command of the military all too often acts like a big frat house with uniforms and guns: it fosters a cultural attitude of male sexual entitlement, pervasive sexual harassment and outright assault, a lack of accountability for sexual predators and batterers, and silencing and intimidation for the women who suffer violence at the hands of the military boys. The statistics are terrible (30% of female veterans report a rape or attempted rape during active duty; 14% of those survived gang rape; about 75%-80% of men who are accused of attacking their wives while in the military are honorably discharged…). But frightening though the numbers may be, the human stories of suffering and injustice are far more terrible. After all, rapes and beatings don’t happen to numbers. They happen to women, women like Sally Fictum. And the crimes are commited—and dismissed—by men—men like Joseph Holguin and his commanding officer:

Marine Joseph Holguin sank to the floor, hugged his knees and told the polygraph examiner that fellow lance corporal Sally Fictum had said no.

Accused of raping Fictum, Holguin had maintained in previous interviews that the act was consensual. But he changed his story twice after the polygraph results showed deception.

Holguin stated he continued through with the act … although she had told him to stop, because he felt things had gone too far to stop, an investigator wrote in an Aug. 11, 1993, report. Holguin stated he had made a mistake.

Holguin was charged with rape. By October, however, his commander dropped the criminal case, using discretionary power granted under military law.

A retired Marine attorney who reviewed the examination results for The Denver Post said: Based on the documents I’ve reviewed, they let a rapist walk.

The 19-year-old Fictum faced her own punishment. She said her commanders humiliated her and deprived her of sexual-trauma counseling. She also was investigated for lying, even after Holguin’s admissions.

How many young ladies’ lives have to be ruined before the military listens? asked Fictum, who left the Marines after attempting suicide later that year.

Let me be as clear as I can. This bullshit is terrible. It is irresponsible. It is criminal. Now, none of it means that there are not many brave and honorable men in the Armed Forces. There certainly are. It doesn’t mean either that all men, or even most men, in the Armed Forces are sexual predators or batterers. They aren’t. But the military is an environment where these crimes are all too common and where men committing violence against women all too often have _every reason to believe that they can and will get away with it. That can change, and it needs to change. Thus, I was glad to see an e-mail alerting me to the following petition campaign.

Take Action!

This is an e-mail circular from The Miles Foundation. I’m sending an e-mail and a print letter, and preparing a version to send as a letter to the editor of my local paper. You might want to do the same:

Friends and colleagues,

Please send an appeal to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expressing your concern about sexual and domestic violence associated with the U. S. Armed Forces. Please urge the Pentagon to address the issue fully, to adopt emergency protocols and practices, and to establish long term solutions to the issue.

Contact information:

The Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld The Pentagon Washington, DC 20301 Fax: 202-647-1811 Email: Please go to the Department of Defense comment page at: http://ermsapps-web.afis.mil/cgi-bin/rightnow_DefenseLink.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php

and submit your appeal

Salutation: Dear Mr. Secretary

The following is a sample text:

Dear Mr. Secretary,

I am writing to express my concern about sexual and domestic violence associated with the U. S. Armed Forces. I urge the Department of Defense to address this issue fully.

I welcome your decision to order an investigation into the force protection issues associated with the sexual assaults occurring in the current theater of operations. As you consider ways to stop sexual and domestic violence among the ranks, I ask you to consider adopting emergency protocols including making rape evidence kits available at the unit level; supplying personnel with training and education to collect and process evidence; and ensuring that victims are informed of their rights and the status of any investigations, criminal or administrative.

I ask that you reform policies of the military departments and establish standardized responses for the protection of victims and accountability of assailants. Priority must be given to ensuring confidentiality and safety for victims and survivors.

Senior leadership should set a standard for behavior and ensure instruction to officers, senior noncommissioned officers and noncommissioned officers to fully establish a zero tolerance policy. The U. S. Armed Forces must ensure a safe environment for solider, sailors, marines and airmen, as well as their families and partners.

In order to ensure the issues are addressed consistently, I urge you to develop a military wide protocol to standardize responses within the services including Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs), Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs) and Domestic Violence Response Teams (DVRTs).

I urge you to build upon the victim advocate program established by Congress in 1994 by creating an Office of the Victim Advocate. I also urge you to approve a $10 million appropriation for Fiscal Year 2005 to support the Office, contract victim advocates and establish a victim advocate protocol.

The Office of the Victim Advocate would be located within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Office would provide coordination and navigation of services, oversight, training and offender and system accountability. The Office would enable the establishment of a privacy privilege for victims and survivors.

I urge you to ensure that emergency and long term protocols are adopted for victims and survivors of violence associated with the military. Thank you for time and attention to this matter. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Please distribute widely.

===== The Miles Foundation, Inc.
P. O. Box 423
Newtown, CT 06470-0423
Telephone: 203-270-7861
Email: milesfd@yahoo.com or Milesfdn@aol.com

So what are you still reading my lame weblog for? Go and write a letter!

(Typos fixed, revised for clarity.)

About a month ago, neoconservative creepy spendthrift fascist David Brooks wrote an article which he took to be in support of Latino immigrants. In this he took himself to arguing against Samuel Huntington’s anti-immigration essay in Foreign Policy, in which Huntington (famous for his contribution to contemporary fascist sociological thought, the so-called Clash of Civilizations thesis) offers the following bit of post-Enlightenment Volksgeschichte:

Most Americans see the creed as the crucial element of their national identity. The creed, however, was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a city on a hill. Historically, millions of immigrants were attracted to the United States because of this culture and the economic opportunities and political liberties it made possible.

…

In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives.

Brooks has a bone to pick with Huntington’s analysis. As he writes:

You’ll find that Huntington marshals a body of evidence to support his claims. But the most persuasive evidence is against him. Mexican-American assimilation is a complicated topic because Mexican-Americans are such a diverse group. The educated assimilate readily; those who come from peasant villages take longer. But they are assimilating.

It’s easy to find evidence that suggests this is so. In their book Remaking the American Mainstream, Richard Alba of SUNY-Albany and Victor Nee of Cornell point out that though there are some border neighborhoods where immigrants are slow to learn English, nationwide, Mexicans know they must learn it to get ahead. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican-American children speak only English at home.

Nor is it true that Mexican immigrants are scuttling along the bottom of the economic ladder. An analysis of 2000 census data by the USC urban planner Dowell Myers suggests that Latinos are quite adept at climbing out of poverty. Sixty-eight percent of those who have been in this country 30 years own their own homes.

Mexican immigrants are in fact dispersing around the nation. When they have children, they tend to lose touch with their Mexican villages and sink roots here. If you look at consumer data, you find that while they may spend more money on children’s clothes and less on electronics than native-born Americans, there are no significant differences between Mexican-American lifestyles and other American lifestyles. They serve in the military — and die for this nation — at comparable rates.

I have to confess that I simply don’t understand this argument between Huntington and Brooks. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not that they are using unfamiliar words, or that I don’t see the point of contention between Huntington and Brooks, or that I don’t get follow the way in which Brooks and Huntington draw divergent conclusions from the premises and empirical evidence that they cite. All of that seems fairly clear. The part that I don’t understand is this: why in the world does Brooks present himself as posing a serious objection to Huntington? And why in the world does Brooks, in presenting his disagreement, simply leave Huntington’s fundamental premise concerning immigration policy standing there unmentioned, like the proverbial elephant in the room?

This point is particularly imiportant, because Huntington’s (and Brooks’s) fndamental premise concerning immigration policy is completely ridiculous.

By way of illustration, let’s consider a bit of a story.

Say that you’re moving to a new city in order ‘re moving across to a new city to work, and you need a place to stay; fortunately, a friend of yours who lives in the city says you can stay at her house until you find a place of your own. As you turn onto the street where she lives, I ran out in front of your car and demand that you stop. When you roll down the window and ask what’s going on, I demand What’s your business here?

You blink a couple of times and finally say, Well, I’ve got this new job, and my friend Liza invited me to stay with her while I look for a place of my own.

Whoa whoa whoa! I shout, You mean you’re from out of town, and you intend to stay here?

Yes… you say, shifting a bit in your seat.

Sir, I’m afraid you need to fill out this form before I can let you enter the neighborhood, I say, as I hand you a form entitled Top Ten Albums of All Time.

Excuse me? you ask. What in the world is this?

Your top ten LPs of all time. I need you to fill it out before I can let you stay at Liza’s.

Just who are you, anyway? you ask, as you ponder whether you can just speed past to Liza’s house without running me down.

I’m the Neighborhood Patrol! The citizens of this neighborhood rely on me to ensure that only those who adhere to our traditional devotion to 1970s Southern Rock live here. I’m afraid I can’t let you go through to Liza’s house until you give me a list of your top ten albums of all time. We can’t have a bunch of people moving into this neighborhood undermining our neighborly devotion to Freebird!

Look, why don’t you just go knock on Liza’s door and ask her whether I can come through? She invited me here and she’s expecting me.

I get a little anxious and explain, Well, Liza didn’t exactly agree with our decision to implement the Top Ten List…

You stare at me. I’m going to Liza’s house. So what in the world are you blocking my way for?

At this I become visibly irritated. Sir, I’m an official Neighborhood Patrol officer. Liza didn’t agree to the Top Ten List, but more than 1/2 of her neighbors did. I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car…

Isn’t this story absolutely absurd? And if it is, wouldn’t it be just as absurd for one of the neighbors to run out and argue with me to let you in — because he’s talked with Liza, and he can vouch for your massive collection of Skynyrd?

So how is Huntington’s and Brooks’s argument over whether or not Latino immigrants are assimilating to the surrounding WASP culture different in any salient respect? Why in the world should success or failure at adopting the language, dress, or other cultural trappings of one’s prospective neighbors be a criterion for deciding whether or not a peaceful individual is forced out of the country?

If you’ve been to my website in the past couple days, you may have noticed something new: I’ve added some of those ugly little Google AdSense text ads to the navigation bar. In light of this, there are a few things that ought to be obvious about the ads run on this site; but, pedant that I am, I figured that it would be a good idea to explicitly say them, too:

1. If an ad you see interests you, by all means click on it. There’s some good stuff that comes up, and your click-through will kick a few cents back to the Rad Geek People’s Daily. What could it hurt?
2. The ads are generated directly by Google. Not by me. I don’t take responsibility for any wacked-out or repulsive sites that Google mysteriously decides would be a good match for readers of this website.
3. Nevertheless, I do try to use Google’s internal tools to filter out ads that I notice coming up which are wacked-out or repulsive. So if you see something in the sidebar that you think comes under this category, feel free to contact me with the URL, and I’ll see about filtering it.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, thanks to something of a cash crunch (being freelance academic just doesn’t pay as well as it used to), these ads will probably stay up for the near future. But like all matters of the human will, this is a future contingent; it is in your power to change it. If you would like to make a small contribution to support the Rad Geek People’s Daily I’ll be glad to take the ads down for one week for each Supporter contribution, or one month for each Sustaining pledge, that I receive.

That’s all for now. Happy surfing!

— The Editor