Archive for the ‘Feminism and Gender’ Category
BRIGHT IDEAS: Anita Allen’s Unpopular Privacy
posted by Danielle Citron
Lucky for CoOp readers, I had a chance to talk to Professor Anita Allen about her new book Unpopular Privacy, which Oxford University Press recently published. My co-blogger Dan Solove included Professor Allen’s new book on his must-read privacy books for the year. And rightly so: the book is insightful, important, and engrossing. Before I reproduce below my interview with Professor Allen, let me introduce her to you. She is a true renaissance person, just see her Wikipedia page. Professor Allen is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is also a senior fellow in the bioethics department of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a collaborating faculty member in African studies, and an affiliated faculty member in the women’s studies program. In 2010, President Barack Obama named Professor Allen to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is a Hastings CenterFellow. Her publications are too numerous to list here: suffice it to say that she’s written several books, a casebook, and countless articles in law reviews and philosophy journals. She also writes for the Daily Beast and other popular media.
Question: You began writing about privacy in the 1980s, long before the Internet and long before many of the federal privacy statutes we take for granted. What has changed?
I started writing about privacy when I was a law student at Harvard in the early 1980s and have never stopped. Unpopular Privacy, What Must We Hide (Oxford University Press 2011) is my third book about privacy in addition to a privacy law casebook Privacy Law and Society (West Publishing 2011). My original impetus was to understand and explore the relationships of power and control among governments, individuals, groups, and families. In the 1970s and 1980s, the big privacy issues in the newspapers and the courts related to abortion, gay sex, and the right to die. Surveillance, search and seizure, and database issues were on the table, as they had been since the early 1960s, but they often seemed the special province of criminal lawyers and technocrats.
To use a cliché, it’s a brave new world. Since my early interest in privacy, times have indeed changed, the role of electronic communications and the pervasiveness of networked technologies in daily life has transformed how personal data flows and how we think about and prioritize our privacy. Terms like webcam, “text messaging,” “social networking,” and “cloud computing” have entered the lexicon, along with devices like mobile, personal digital assistants, and iPads.
The public is just beginning to grasp ways in which genetics and neuroscience will impact privacy in daily life—I have begun to reflect, write, and speak more about these matters recently, including in connection with my work as a member of President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
Question: Your book coins the phrase “unpopular privacy.” In what way is privacy unpopular?
First let me say that I think of “popular privacy” as the privacy that people in the United States and similar developed nations tend to want, believe they have a right to, and expect government to secure. For example, typical adults very much want privacy protection for the content of their telephone calls, e-mail, tax filings, health records, academic transcripts, and bank transactions.
I wrote this book because I think we need to think more about “unpopular” privacy. “Unpopular” privacy is the kind that people reject, despise, or are indifferent to. My book focuses on the moral and political underpinnings of laws that promote, require, and enforce physical and informational privacy that is unpopular with the very people that those laws are supposed to help or control. (I call such people the beneficiaries and targets of privacy laws.) “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” for instance, was an unpopular government mandated privacy for military service members. My book suggests that some types of privacy that should be popular aren’t and asks what, if anything, we should do about it.
Question: If people don’t want privacy or don’t care about it, why should we care?
We should care because privacy is important. I urge that we think of it as a “foundational” good like freedom and equality. Privacy is not a purely optional good like cookies and sports cars. Since the 1960s, when scholars first began to analyze privacy in earnest, philosophers and other theorists have rightly linked the experience of privacy with dignity, autonomy, civility, and intimacy. They have linked it to repose, self-expression, creativity, and reflection. They have tied it to the preservation of unique preferences and distinct traditions. I agree with moral, legal and political theorists who have argued that privacy is a right.
I go further to join a small group of theorists that includes Jean L. Cohen who have argued that privacy is also potentially a duty; and not only a duty to others, but a duty to one’s self. I believe we each have a duty to take into account the way in which one’s own personality and life enterprises could be affected by decisions to dispense with foundational goods that are lost when one decides to flaunt, expose, and share rather than to reserve, conceal, and keep.
If people are completely morally and legally free to pick and choose the degrees of privacy they will enter, they are potentially deprived of highly valued states that promote their vital interests, and those of their fellow human beings. For me, this suggests that we need to restrain choice—if not by law, then by ethics and other social norms. Respect for privacy rights and the ascription of privacy duties must comprise a part of a society’s formative project for shaping citizens. Read the rest of this post »
January 13, 2012 at 9:24 am
Posted in: Bright Ideas, Feminism and Gender, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Race, Technology, Web 2.0
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Women in Big Law
posted by Sarah Waldeck
This week the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) released its Survey on the Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, which compiles data on the professional progress of women in the nation’s 200 largest firms. Most of the reporting on NAWL’s survey results has focused on the decrease in the number of female first and second year associates. While the decline is only slight—47 percent of first and second year associates are women, compared to 48 percent a year ago—it is the first decrease since NAWL began reporting survey results in 2006. NAWL speculates that the decline is attributable to changes in law school enrollments, where there have also been slight decreases in the percentage of female students.
The most interesting part of the report, however, discusses where women find themselves in the hierarchal complexities of today’s law firms. As the NAWL survey points out, large law firms are no longer comprised of simply partners, associates, and a few of counsel. Instead, firms are a mix of equity and non-equity partners, associates, staff attorneys, and of counsel. Read on after the jump for sobering highlights about how women tend to fit into organizationally-complex large law firms. Read the rest of this post »
November 12, 2011 at 8:48 pm
Posted in: Feminism and Gender
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What Derb doesn’t get (about the reality of sexual harassment)
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
As noted in earlier discussions, conservative pundit John Derbyshire recently wrote: “Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing? Is there anyone who doesn’t know it’s all a lawyers’ ramp, like “racial discrimination“? You pay a girl a compliment nowadays, she runs off and gets lawyered up.” (Some other pundits have expressed similar views.)
For comparison, here are a few snippets from the facts of some court opinions in actual recent sexual harassment cases. (major trigger warning — these cases contain some extremely disturbing fact patterns) Read the rest of this post »
November 10, 2011 at 5:01 pm
Posted in: Feminism and Gender
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On Female Privilege
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
You mention male privilege in a blog post, and it’s inevitable: Someone else (usually male) will start asking about female privilege. If men have privilege, don’t women have privilege too? And does that undercut the idea of male privilege as a type of gender subordination which is built into society? (Because, the implication goes, we all have privilege — and so feminists should stop complaining about male privilege.)
And, so, predictably, some critics of feminism, “men’s rights” blogs, and the like have assembled lengthy lists of female privilege. (Women get their dates paid for — it isn’t fair!) And it’s true that there are areas where, taken on a stand-alone basis, male and female treatment appears to favor women. As we’ll see, I don’t think these areas really provide an analogue to male privilege.
We’ll start with the obvious, descriptive matter: Some areas exist in which women have some advantages. For one obvious example, some bars offer free drinks to women on some evenings. (Ladies night.) Looked at in isolation, these could be viewed as areas of female privilege. However, in context, it seems evident that this apparent female privilege fills one of two roles. Read the rest of this post »
November 9, 2011 at 9:01 pm
Tags: female privilege, feminism, gender, male privilege
Posted in: Feminism and Gender
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Harassment, male privilege, and jokes that women just don’t get
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
A familiar theme comes up frequently in internet discussions: Women who complain about online harassment are just missing the joke.
As an initial descriptive matter, it’s pretty clear that women and men are often treated differently in online discussion. (Quick, name a case in which someone was harassed online. Was the person you thought about a woman? I thought so.)
A few months ago, John Scalzi noted that:
In my experience, talking to women bloggers and writers, they are quite likely to get abusive comments and e-mail, and receive more of it not only than what I get personally (which isn’t difficult) but more than what men bloggers and writers typically get. I think bloggers who focus on certain subjects (politics, sexuality, etc) will get more abusive responses than ones who write primarily on other topics, but even in those fields, women seem more of a target for abusive people than the men are. And even women writing on non-controversial topics get smacked with this crap. I know knitting bloggers who have some amazingly hateful comments directed at them. They’re blogging about knitting, for Christ’s sake. . .
I can contrast this with how people approach me on similar topics. When I post photos of processed cheese, I don’t get abused about how bad it is and how bad I am for posting about it. People don’t abuse me over my weight, even when I talk explicitly about it. I go away from my family for weeks at a time and never get crap about what a bad father that makes me, even though I have always been the stay-at-home parent. Now, it’s true in every case that if I did get crap, I would deal with it harshly, either by going after the commenter or by simply malleting their jackassery into oblivion. But the point is I don’t have to. I’m a man and I largely get a pass on weight, on parenting and (apparently) on exhibition and ingestion of processed cheese products. Or at the very least if someone thinks I’m a bad person for any of these, they keep it to themselves. They do the same for any number of other topics they might feel free to lecture or abuse women over.
It’s this sort of thing that reminds me that the Internet is not the same experience for me as it is for some of my women friends. (Emphasis added.)
That bears repeating: The Internet is not the same experience for men as it is for women. (No wonder women are numerically underrepresented in prominent internet discussion spaces.)
Why is the internet a different place for men than for women? There are doubtless a number of contributing causes, but one of the major factors is that the internet is largely a male-constructed discursive space, and internet discussion norms often build on assumptions of male privilege. Read the rest of this post »
November 8, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Tags: Blogging, Civil Rights, feminism, gender, harassment, male privilege, online discussion
Posted in: Blogging, Feminism and Gender
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Bigoted Harassment, Alive and Well Online
posted by Danielle Citron
With the help of law and changing norms, invidious discrimination has become less prevalent in arenas like schools, workplaces, hotels, and public transportation. Due to our social environments, anti-discrimination law is fairly easy to enforce. Because leaders usually can figure out those responsible for discriminatory conduct and ignore such behavior at their peril, bigotry raises a real risk of social sanction. So too hate discourse in the public sphere is more muted. A hundred years ago, Southern newspapers and leaders explicitly endorsed mob violence against blacks. As late as 1940, a newspaper editor in Durham, North Carolina could state that: “A Negro is different from other people in that he’s an unfortunate branch of the human family who hasn’t been able to make out of himself all he is capable of” due to his “background of the jungle.” In the post-Civil Rights era, the public expression of bigoted epithets and slurs occurs infrequently. One rarely hears racist, sexist, or homophobic speech in mainstream media outlets. Some interpret this state of affairs optimistically, as a sign that we are moving beyond race, gender, and arguably even sexual orientation. The election of the first black President provoked proclamations of our entry into a “post-racial” era. Many contend that we no longer need feminism anymore. Prime time television is filled with images of female power, from Brenda Leigh Johnson’s chief on The Closer to Dr. Miranda Bailey’s “take no prisoners” surgeon on Grey’s Anatomy. Who needs feminism anymore as its goals have been achieved?
But a new era is not upon us. In some arenas, hate’s explicit form has repackaged itself in subtlety. In public discourse, crude biological views of group inferiority are often replaced with a kinder, gentler “color-blind racism,” as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls it. The face of modern racism is, in journalist Touré’s estimation, “invisible or hard to discern, lurking in the shadows or hidden.” The media has also better disguised sexism with its anxiety about female achievement, renewed and amplified objectification of young women’s bodies and faces, and the dual exploitation and punishment of female sexuality, as media scholar Susan Douglas explains.
Offline public discourse may now be on more neutral ground but its online counterpart is not. While virulent bigotry continues behind closed doors, it increasingly appears in online spaces that blend public and private discourse. Although televised sports commentary rarely features anti-gay rhetoric, online sports message boards are awash in in-your-face homophobic speech. Racial epithets and slurs are common online, whether in Facebook profiles, Twitter posts, blog comments, or YouTube videos. College students encounter more sexually inappropriate speech in online interactions than in face-to-face ones.
Matters have not improved since I started talking and writing about it since 2007, when we woke up, for a brief second, and paid attention to sexualized, misogynistic attacks on Kathy Sierra on her blog and two others and the targeting of female law students on AutoAdmit. Then, technologist Tim O’Reilly and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales called for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct. That effort failed to gain traction, and ever since the bigoted online abuse continues, silencing victims, ruining their online reputations, costing them jobs, and interfering with their ability to engage with others online and offline. Newsweek’s always insightful Jessica Bennett has published important new piece on online misogyny and the Guardian’s Vanessa Thorpe and Richard Rogers similarly explore the rape threats and abuse of female bloggers. I will be blogging about bigoted online harassment, as I am amidst writing a book about it and serving on the Inter-Parliamentary Task Force on Online Hate, which recently held a hearing at the House of Commons. This all has to stop, and now.
November 7, 2011 at 10:56 am
Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Feminism and Gender, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Web 2.0
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Pregnancy and Disability
posted by Jennifer Hendricks
Yesterday I posted about a dilemma in parental leave policies: The desire for formal sex equality leads to equal “caretaking” leave for men and women; when this leave is paid by the employer, it is typically quite short. The reality of biological differences is dealt with by providing separately for “disability” leave for pregnant and birthing women, often for a much longer period. In practice, that means that a woman who gives birth has an extended opportunity to bond with and care for a new child, while people who become parents in other ways do not. This creates an early discrepancy in caretaking between birthing and non-birthing parents. When children are adopted, the family as a whole suffers from not having that extra leeway for caretaking.
A woman in New York has filed a suit challenging these inequities in a novel way: Kara Krill received 13 weeks of paid maternity leave when she gave birth to her first child. Krill was unable to bear another child, and she and her husband hired a gestational surrogate, who gave birth to twins. This time, Krill was allowed only 5 days of leave, under the company’s policy for adoptive parents. Her suit alleges disability discrimination, saying that if it weren’t for her disability, which required her to have her children through a surrogate, she would have given birth and been entitled to the full 13 weeks of leave.
Krill faces an uphill battle under current law. I’m drawn, however, to the idea of designing parental leave policy around the idea that the inability to give birth is a disability that should be accommodated—and not just for women. Read the rest of this post »
October 5, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Posted in: Employment Law, Family Law, Feminism and Gender
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Sex Equity in Parental Leave
posted by Jennifer Hendricks
Many thanks to Solangel, Dan, and the rest of Co-Op for inviting me to blog here this month. I’ll start out with a few posts about parental leave policies, inspired by this story about a woman named Kara Krill. (H/T Family Law Prof Blog) Krill had children through a surrogate mother. When her employer refused to give her the same maternity leave that is available to employees who give birth, she sued for disability discrimination. But first some background on the core dilemma of U.S. equality law when it comes to parental leave:
U.S. law aspires to formal equality for women and men in the workplace. When it comes to parental leave, that has meant maintaining a sharp theoretical separation between pregnancy leave and caretaking leave. Under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, pregnancy leave is treated as disability leave and is supposed to cover the period of time in which pregnancy and birth disable a woman from doing her job. Caretaking leave—time to bond with and care for a new baby—is supposed to be available on a sex-neutral basis. In Nevada v. Hibbs, when the Supreme Court upheld the Family and Medical Leave Act as applied to the states, it said that Congress could legitimately force employers to give (unpaid) caretaking leave to everyone, in order to address the problem of many employers giving such leave to women only, by calling it “pregnancy leave” even when it was much longer than necessary for physical recovery from birth.
The distinction between pregnancy/disability leave and caretaking leave is neat in theory but breaks down immediately in practice. Read the rest of this post »
October 4, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Posted in: Employment Law, Family Law, Feminism and Gender, Uncategorized
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National Association of Women Judges Conference
posted by Frank Pasquale
I just wanted to make this announcement about an extraordinary conference:
The National Association of Women Judges is hosting their annual international conference in Newark, New Jersey on October 12-16. On October 14th, there will be a symposium at Rutgers Law School entitled Promoting Global Equality for Women Through the Law and on the 15th Seton Hall Law School will host break-out sessions on various topics including domestic violence, urban revitalization, immigration, forensic evidence, cross-cultural issues in the courts and leadership training. Seton Hall Law student Megan Altman will be receiving the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg scholarship which will be presented at the NAWJ Gala Saturday night at the Newark Club with Justice Ginsburg delivering the keynote address.
More information here at the NAWJ website. According to an email I received, “There are more than 50 international judges registered for the conference from countries including Argentina, Canada, China, Gambia, Guam, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jordan, Korea, Lagos, Malawi, Moldova, Navajo Nation, Nepal, Philippines, Sarajevo, South Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania, and Uganda.”
September 10, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Posted in: Conferences, Feminism and Gender
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Same-Sex Couples and Divorce
posted by Courtney Joslin
Later this month, New York will join six other jurisdictions in permitting same-sex couples to marry. The other six jurisdictions are Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. When the marriages begin, same-sex couples from all over the United States will be able to marryin New York, because New York (like the other jurisdictions listed above) has no residency requirement for marriage.
As a recent article in the NYTimes describes, however, many of the estimated 80,000 married same-sex couples are finding it difficult to divorce if and when the need arises. As I explain in forthcoming article in the Boston University Law Review, this difficulty is “the result of the confluence of two factors.” First, many same-sex couples are unable to get divorced in their home states because they live in states with statutory and/or constitutional provisions stating that the jurisdiction will not recognize marriages between two people of the same sex. Second, they may be unable to divorce somewhere other than their home state because “it is widely understood that for a court to have the power to grant a divorce, one of the spouses must be domiciled in the forum[.]”
Being unable to get divorced is not simply a theoretical problem. During the time in which the parties remain married (despite their efforts to the contrary), the parties continue to accrue rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis each other. They may, for example, continue to accrue rights to marital property and obligations for debt incurred during the continued relationship.
My Article, Modernizing Divorce Jurisdiction: Same-Sex Couples and Minimum Contacts, considers why this anomalous jurisdictional rule arose in the first instance, why it has persisted over time, and whether it can be squared with contemporary principles of personal jurisdiction. Previously, divorce jurisdiction and the domicile rule were subjects of significant interest to the courts and to legal scholars. Likely to the surprise of many today, the Supreme Court decided a number of cases involving these issues in the middle of the last century. More recently, however, (with a few notable exceptions) there has been little contemporary judicial or scholarly engagement with the issue. Instead, the domicile rule is generally accepted today as an example of family law exceptionalism.
In my piece, I resist the myth of family law exceptionalism by critically considering whether the domicile rule can be reconciled with general principles of state court jurisdiction. Ultimately, as others including Rhonda Wasserman have done, I argue that the domicile rule should be abandoned. Instead, actions to terminate a marriage should be governed by the usual rules of personal jurisdiction. While this change alone would help many of the “wedlocked” same-sex couples (to borrow an apt phrase from Mary Pat Byrn and Morgan Holcomb), some may still be stranded. Accordingly, I conclude the Article by offering a set of normative proposals to ensure that all spouses have at least one forum in which to divorce.
July 12, 2011 at 11:30 am
Posted in: Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Family Law, Feminism and Gender, LGBT
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The Ministerial Exception Part III
posted by Caroline Mala Corbin
In my previous blogs, I explained the basics of this judicially-created doctrine, and argued that the ministerial exception can’t really be justified by either the Free Exercise or the Establishment Clause. The main Establishment Clause justification for the ministerial exception is the fear that in adjudicating discrimination claims, courts will become entangled with theological questions or endorse one religious vision over another. In this last post, I want to argue that application of the ministerial exception can entangle a court in religious doctrine more than application of anti-discrimination law.
For the ministerial exception to apply, the plaintiff in a discrimination suit must be a “ministerial” employee. Who counts as a ministerial employee? That is the question before the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC: is a teacher at a religious school who mostly teaches secular subjects but also leads students in prayer and teaches a religion class a ministerial employee? Courts do not simply defer to a religious organization’s characterization of a position, as it could insist that all its employees were ministers. Instead, courts have taken a functional approach, looking at the main duties of the employee, and essentially asking whether plaintiff’s job “is important to the spiritual and pastoral mission of the church.”
In order to decide whether a position is “important to the spiritual and pastoral mission of the church,” however, a court might have to delve into the religious beliefs of a particular religion. In ruling that a church’s music director was a minister, for example, the Fourth Circuit analyzed the religious significance of music. The plaintiff argued that she was not a ministerial employee because she merely taught people to sing and perform music. The court disagreed, noting that “music serves a unique function in worship” and concluding that the music director’s job was “an integral part of Catholic worship and belief.” In reaching this determination, the court did exactly what the Establishment Clause forbids: choose between competing religious visions. In the plaintiff’s vision of the Roman Catholic faith, music’s significance did not rise to the level of ministry, such that teaching it made her a minister. In the defendant’s vision, it did. The court essentially resolved a religious dispute about the role of music. Hosanna-Tabor potentially presents a similar risk. In determining whether Perich is a minister or not, the Supreme Court may end up resolving a religious dispute about the role of school teachers in Evangelical Lutheran Church schools.
April 12, 2011 at 4:53 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Employment Law, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Race, Religion
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The Sext Wars: Consent, Secrecy, and Privacy
posted by Mary Anne Franks
The sexting phenomenon reveals much about contemporary social attitudes towards sexual expression, consent, and privacy, especially with regard to minors. One of the most troubling aspects of the debate over what can and should be done about “sexting-gone-bad” scenarios is the tendency to treat the parties involved as more or less moral and legal equivalents. A typical “sexting-gone-bad” scenario is one in which a young person takes an intimate cellphone photograph of him- or herself, forwards it to an actual or potential romantic interest, and discovers that this photograph has been forwarded to many other individuals, including strangers, classmates, and family members. There are at least four distinct categories of individuals involved in such a scenario: the creator of the image, the intended recipient, the distributor, and the unintended recipient. The second and third categories are sometimes the same person, but not always, and the number of individuals in the fourth category is potentially enormous. The legal response in many of the first sexting cases was to bring child pornography charges (creation, distribution, or possession) against all the individuals involved; the social response has likewise treated the various players as roughly morally equivalent. In some sexting cases, the distributors of the images have not been charged at all, whereas the creators have been. The view that the creators of sexual cellphone images are as bad as or worse than the distributors of those images combines many troubling social attitudes about sexual expression and privacy.
First and most obviously, child pornography is clearly not the right frame of reference for the majority of these cases. The specter of child pornography, rightly invoked in relationships marked by coercion, exploitation, and serious asymmetries of age and power, is too often applied to any situation involving minors and sexuality. Whatever legitimate concerns society might have about sexual activity among consenting teenagers of roughly the same age, they should be clearly distinguished from concerns about pre-pubescent sexual activity and sexual contact between adults and children. The fact that the consequences of a conviction for child pornography include lifelong registration as a sex offender illustrates how poorly suited child porn charges are for most sexting cases.
Thankfully, states have begun to move away from the knee-jerk use of child pornography charges in sexting cases, but the treatment of creators as equal to or worse than distributors persists in both legal and social responses to sexting. The most alarming feature of this equivalence is its erasure of the significance of consent. In the typical sexting scenario (I leave to one side what I would call “harassment sexting” and deal only with images that the creator reasonably believes are welcome) a minor makes a choice to reveal herself sexually to one other person. We may think her choice is unwise or unduly motivated by social pressure, but we must recognize that it is in any event a consensual sexual act (barring extreme youth or mental incapacity). By contrast, the person who distributes the image to other individuals acts not only without consent but most often with the full knowledge and intent that the creator will be humiliated by the distribution. Thus, the distributor engages in a non-consensual sexual act. There is nothing equivalent about consensual and non-consensual sexual acts - the person who sends an image of herself to another person is not equally or more responsible than the person who takes that image and forwards it to hundreds of others. To hold otherwise is to engage in victim-blaming, whether the act in question is sexting or sexual assault. A civilized society recognizes that a person subjected to non-consensual sexual activity should not be scrutinized for what she wore, how much she drank, whom she flirted with, or whether she sent someone a sexual image of herself. The only proper and relevant question is whether she consented to the act in question. Read the rest of this post »
March 31, 2011 at 7:41 pm
Posted in: Current Events, Feminism and Gender, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)
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Wal-Mart and the Future of Antidiscrimination Law
posted by Solangel Maldonado
Today the Supreme Court will hear argument in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, potentially the largest employment class action case in U.S. history. The plaintiffs allege that Wal-Mart paid male employees more and promoted them over women with more seniority and that it maintained a culture of gender stereotyping where women were called “Janie Q’s,” told to wear make-up and “doll-up,” and meetings were held at Hooters. They also rely on statistical data to establish discrimination. They claim that women comprise 80% of hourly supervisors, but only one-third of store managers. The percentage of women in higher positions is even lower.
Unfortunately, we won’t learn for a while whether Wal-Mart actually discriminated against its female employees. The issue before the Court is one that civil procedure, specifically class action, junkies should find titillating—whether the six plaintiffs should have been certified to bring a class-action that could potentially include 1.5 million employees in thousands of stores across the country. Wal-Mart claims that there is no commonality among the plaintiffs’ claims and that the “named plaintiffs’ claims cannot conceivably be typical of the claims of the strangers they seek to represent.” If the term “class-action certification” is making you yawn, you might be missing the potential impact of this issue for employment discrimination plaintiffs going forward. If the Supreme Court adopts the view of the dissenters in the Ninth Circuit opinion and requires plaintiffs seeking class certification to show “significant proof that an employer operated under a general policy of discrimination,” plaintiffs (including the EEOC) are also likely to find it much more difficult to prove that the entity should be held liable when the case is heard on its merits. I didn’t understand these implications until I read Professor Tristin Green’s article exposing the impact of Dukes for the future of systemic disparate treatment law. She also argues that the current individualistic model of disparate treatment (one bad actor or as one Wal-Mart executive put it, “some bosses may have gone astray”) has made it difficult for scholars to think critically about entity responsibility for systemic disparate treatment in the workplace. You can read the abstract and article here.
March 29, 2011 at 12:42 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Employment Law, Feminism and Gender
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Making Sure Women Have a Seat at the Table in Transitional Societies
posted by David Gray
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used her speech at the International Women of Courage Awards to call for women to be included in the processes of transition underway in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East. According to Secretary Clinton, despite the fact that women played a prominent role in recent popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, no women were invited to “join in drafting constitutional amendments for the transition to democracy [in Egypt].” Clinton rightly expressed her concerns with this state of affairs, pointing out both that “women . . . deserve to be at that table making those choices that will affect their lives and the lives of their daughters and theirs sons” and that “[n]o government can succeed if it excludes half of its people from important decisions.”
The experiences of women in abusive societies and the roles and rights of women in times of transition are topics of considerable interest for transitional justice scholars. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Ruth Rubio Marin, Christine Bell, and Catherine O’Rourke deserve particular credit for pressing these issues in recent articles and collected editions. The central messages of their important scholarship are: 1) that women’s experiences as victims are unique both because women are more frequently subjected to sexual violence and because women often bear much of the economic and social burdens of family survival; 2) that women are uniquely vulnerable during and after transition and are at risk of remaining victims of oppression and targeted violence even as the rest of society is liberalized; 3) that democratic commitments core to most transitional movements entitle women to a “seat at the table” during transition; and 4) that by including women in transitional and transitional justice processes, transitioning societies will be in a better position to achieve lasting peace while making good on their core commitments to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. While hard to argue, these claims on justice have yet to gain much traction in actual transitions. Secretary Clinton’s comments are therefore welcome and well-timed.
March 16, 2011 at 1:17 pm
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Reparations, Uncategorized
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A Little Joie de Vivre for an Almost-Spring Day
posted by David Gray
I’ll post something a more serious in a bit, but for the moment I am feeling spring, Zaz, and Ani Difranco.
March 4, 2011 at 10:41 am
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Humor, Just for Fun
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From Tailhook to Tahrir Square
posted by Mary Anne Franks
A woman is suddenly set upon by a mob of aggressive, excited men who tear at her clothes, groping and fondling her as they pass her through the crowd. When the incident comes to light, the woman is blamed for being somewhere she shouldn’t have been and for bringing the assault upon herself.
This is not 2011, it is not Tahrir Square, and the victim is not a female CBS reporter. It’s 1991, it’s the Las Vegas Hilton, and the victim is a female Navy lieutenant. Perhaps most importantly, the crowd of men is not made up of Egyptian protesters, but of U.S. naval aviators and sailors.
In September 1991, the Tailhook Association, a nonprofit group of retired and active naval officers, held its annual convention in Las Vegas. As Lieutenant Paula Coughlin stepped off the elevator of the third floor, she was met by a crowd of more than 200 drunken officers. “I got attacked by a bunch of men that tried to pull my clothes off,” she said. “I fell down to the floor and tried to get out of the hallway, and they wouldn’t let me out. They were trying to pull my underwear off from between my legs.” Lt. Coughlin implored one of the aviators to help her; he responded by grabbing her breasts. When she reported the incident to her superior officer, he replied, “That’s what you get for going down a hallway of a bunch of drunken aviators.” After Lt. Coughlin went public with her story, more than 80 other women came forward with similar stories of being sexually assaulted by the crowd that night. Lt. Coughlin reported being harassed by her Navy colleagues for speaking out, and the media response was similarly harsh. Pundits and late-night comedians trivialized the incident as little more than fraternity antics, and Lt. Coughlin and other women who came forward were criticized for unfairly tarnishing the Navy’s reputation. The response of conservative figures was particularly extreme, denouncing attempts to reform the Navy in the wake of the Tailhook allegations as attempts to “feminize” the military. David Horowitz, in an article for the National Review titled “The Feminist Assault on the Military,” complained that “a drunken party at which crotches were grabbed in a gauntlet ritual ha[s] fueled a national hysteria about ‘sexual harassment’ that is threatening to deconstruct the military.”
February 28, 2011 at 3:15 am
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law and Inequality, Politics
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That Obscure Object of Concern: Selective Feminism and the Rise of Anti-Sharia Laws
posted by Mary Anne Franks
“Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze which perceives Evil all around.”
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is worried about women. Specifically, he is worried about their equal rights under U.S. law, and is baffled that women are not up in arms about the sinister force that poses the greatest threat to them in our time. Is it the distressingly high rates of sexual violence in this country? Domestic abuse? Unequal working conditions? Recurring waves of legislation aimed at undermining women’s bodily integrity? None of these, according to Rep. Gohmert: the true threat is “creeping sharia law.”
Rep. Gohmert recently added his voice to the call for Congressional hearings on sharia’s supposed infiltration of U.S. society. During an interview on Frank Gaffney’s radio show, Gohmert said, “The biggest shock out of all of this is that the women’s liberation groups have not just gone berserk over this creep into our society that diminishes women as it does. … it does diminish the Constitution when you bring any law in that doesn’t allow women to be full equal citizens of the United States.” Gohmert’s rhetorical move here is perversely clever: he highlights a legitimate harm (here, the unequal treatment of women), attributes it exclusively to a foreign source (sharia law), and insinuates that those who fail to do the same are complacent and/or hypocritical (why aren’t “women’s liberation groups” more upset about this horrible threat?). This is a not a new tactic (anti-feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers have been doing it for years), but it is falling on particularly receptive ears.
At least thirteen states have recently introduced bills aimed at keeping sharia law out of U.S. courts. Oklahoma’s dramatically-named “Save Our State Amendment,” which explicitly listed sharia law as a forbidden source of authority, was recently held by a federal judge to violate the Establishment clause. The sponsors of many of the newer bills have learned to be less specific in their language, but most are quite comfortable admitting that sharia is their real target. Georgia Rep. Mike Jacobs (R-Atlanta), who introduced “The American Laws for Georgia Courts Act” (House Bill 45, which states that “it will be the public policy of this state to protect its citizens from the application of foreign laws when the application … will result in the violation of a right guaranteed by the Constitution of this state or of the United States”), told the Fulton County Daily Report that the bill would “ban the use of Sharia law in Georgia courts.” Admitting that he did not know of a single instance of any Georgia court ever being asked to apply sharia law, Rep. Jacobs expressed the belief that it had happened elsewhere: “We’re seeing more of a feeling that Sharia law should be applied in domestic cases.”
February 16, 2011 at 4:05 am
Posted in: Criminal Law, Current Events, Feminism and Gender, Politics
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Victims to the left of me, accusers to the right: Does Bobby Franklin know something we don’t about rape?
posted by Mary Anne Franks
Georgia state representative Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) has recently proposed a bill that would require the word “victim” to be replaced with “accuser” in the state’s criminal codes. If this were the whole story, the bill might pose a moderately interesting metaphysical question: aren’t all crime victims merely accusers unless and until a court delivers a conviction? While the answer to that question is perhaps rather obviously no, that is not the question the bill actually raises: Rep. Franklin doesn’t think that people who claim to have been robbed, assaulted, or defrauded are merely “accusers.” No, those people are still “victims” even before a conviction is handed down, and indeed even if no conviction ever materializes. The bill only applies to certain crimes – namely, rape, stalking, and family violence. That is, the only crimes affected by this bill are those crimes disproportionately committed against women and committed disproportionately by men.
What accounts for this exceptional treatment? Neither the bill nor Rep. Franklin himself offers insight into the bill’s logic, and so we are left to speculate. Perhaps Rep. Franklin has fallen victim (or do I mean accuser?) to the unfounded yet persistent belief that false accusations of rape are significantly more common than those of other crimes. The bill provides yet another opportunity for misogynists to rehash hysterical statistics on false rape reports (one site,”Fathers for Life,” goes so far as to claim that there are 520,000 false rape allegations per year, a number that the site claims to work out to a whopping 98.1% of all reported cases – interesting numbers, because according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, there are closer to 250,000 sexual assaults per year, which would mean that 520,000 false reports would actually work out to an impressive false allegation rate of about 200%…) as well as a host of other anti-feminist canards, such as the claim that feminists don’t believe women ever lie about rape. How wearying it is to have to cover the same ground, over and over: of course people sometimes lie about rape. They also sometimes lie about robbery, and fraud, and assault. No reliable study – that is, any study that does not simply categorize as false all reports not resulting in convictions (an unconscionable conflation even without considering the documented, widespread manipulation and miscategorization of rape claims by police departments) – has ever shown that false reports of rape are significantly more common than false reports of other crimes. Yet false rape reports receive far more media attention than false reports of other crimes; rape claims are subject to more skepticism and invasive investigation than other claims; and rape is, for these and many other reasons, a vastly underreported crime.
And yet Rep. Franklin has proposed a bill that actually manages to make the status quo worse – one that actually increases the skepticism and prejudice that victims (yes, victims) of sexual assault, stalking, and domestic violence already endure. Even if there might be some merit in a general prohibition on the term “victim” prior to a court determination that a crime has been committed (although whatever merit this prohibition would have is meager indeed, as it defies logic to claim that a person has only been victimized if some perpetrator is proven guilty of the crime in a court of law. This would mean that all unsolved murders have no victim; all unreported crimes have no victim; all crimes not resulting in convictions due to bad lawyering or jury error have no victim), to apply this prohibition only to crimes committed primarily against women is simply unjustifiable.
February 6, 2011 at 11:54 pm
Posted in: Criminal Law, Current Events, Feminism and Gender, Law and Inequality
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There are no children in Afghanistan
posted by Mary Anne Franks
“she laughed his joy she cried his grief”
A Wikileaks cable involving the U.S. contracting firm DynCorp (a company that is no stranger to scandal) has received relatively little attention so far. DynCorp employees apparently hired bacha bazi, also called “dancing boys,” to perform at a party for Afghan police officers. While the details of the party are not yet clear, the practice of bacha bazi, which literally means “boy for play,” is a 300-year old Central Asian tradition that the State Department has called a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.” The practice was banned under the Taliban but has re-emerged in recent years. The dancers, who are often abused children disowned by their families, wear makeup, women’s clothing, and bells on their feet when they perform for audiences of older men. According to the New York Times, “boys as young as 9 are dressed as girls and trained to dance for male audiences, then prostituted in an auction to the highest bidder.” When bachas turn 19, they are released and allowed to “reclaim their status as ‘male,’ though the stigma of having lived as a bacha is hard to overcome.” Some social scientists posit that the popularity of bacha bazi stems from the strict gender segregation that characterizes Afghan society even after the fall of the Taliban. There are few opportunities for men to interact with women, or boys with girls. While women are no longer required to wear the burqa since the Taliban were taken out of power, many still do out of local custom or fear for their safety. As one Afghani man put it, “How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face? We can see the boys, and we can tell which are beautiful.”
A short time ago, the New York Times ran a story about girls in Afghanistan who dress as boys until they reach puberty. The practice of bacha posh, which means “dressed as a boy,” allows families to avoid the perceived stigma of having no sons. It has the added benefit of granting girls freedom of movement and education that they would not otherwise have. A bacha posh can go to school, work outside the home, or be seen in public without a male chaperone much more easily than if she were visibly female. The freedom is temporary, however. When the girls approach marrying age or reach puberty, they are usually forced by their families to change back. Many of these girls resist this reversion. Sexual harassment and sexual assault of girls and women remains common in Afghanistan, and the restrictions on their movement and education make for difficult adjustments. “People use bad words for girls,” said one fifteen-year-old. “They scream at them on the streets. When I see that, I don’t want to be a girl. When I am a boy, they don’t speak to me like that.” Changing back into a girl also presents other challenges; women speak of the difficulties of having to learn how to interact with other women, how to speak like a woman, and how to walk in a floor-length covering after years of wearing loose trousers.
The twinned drag practices of bacha bazi and bacha posh reveal how much the consequences of feminization differ from those of masculinization. In bacha bazi, boys are feminized and consequently experience sexual exploitation and a lowering of social status. In bacha posh, girls are masculinized and experience the benefit of increased physical security and social freedom. To be feminized is to be punished; to be masculinized is to be liberated. It is tempting to locate the harm of these practices in the transposition: boys should not be forced to be girls, and girls should not be forced to be boys (this is how the harms of male prisoner sexual abuse is often characterized, i.e., men should not be treated as women). But to do so implies that there is some natural essence of “boyness” or “girlness” that childhood drag perverts. It would imply that the harm could be cured by simply ensuring that boys were allowed to be boys, and girls to be girls. That is, when these boys and girls reach adulthood and “switch back” (if they can do so successfully), the world is righted on its axis. But the fact that childhood drag is possible – that boys can meaningfully be thought of as girls, and vice versa - supports Judith Butler’s insight that drag has the potential to “enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire.” If so, it would be exactly wrong to draw from bacha bazi/bacha posh the lesson that we should not force boys and girls to be something they are not; rather, the lesson is that “girlhood” and “boyhood” can be put on or taken off. As constructs, they can be evaluated for their relative harms or benefits, and doing so exposes a significant asymmetry. To be considered male in Afghanistan means physical security and social freedom, whereas being considered female means abuse and oppression. Perhaps what the practices of bacha bazi/bacha posh illuminate most starkly, then, is how the construct of femininity can rob both boys and girls of childhood.
February 4, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Posted in: Current Events, Feminism and Gender
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Gender Justice and Indian Sovereignty
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
It is my pleasure to invite you to Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s upcoming 10th Anniversary Women and the Law Conference, “Gender Justice and Indian Sovereignty: Native American Women and the Law,” on Friday, February 18, 2011.
This one-day conference will be held at TJSL’s brand-new state-of-the-art building in downtown San Diego, and will feature the annual Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lecture (founded in 2003 with generous support from Justice Ginsburg), by our Keynote Speaker, Interim Associate Dean Stacy Leeds, University of Kansas School of Law, former Justice of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court and currently chief judge of three Indian Nation tribal courts. Her Lecture will be titled: “Resistance, Resilience, and Reconciliation: Reflections on Native American Women and the Law.” Read the rest of this post »
January 30, 2011 at 3:31 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Conferences, Feminism and Gender, Indian Law, Race
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