@Ohands thanks for checking in, and for providing great resources for false statistics. We always collude with the abuser, whether he/she be a bully, stalker or a rapist. Are you “abyss2hope”? Bc I met you at WAM!2009 briefly and follow you on twitter, I’m @thelinecampaign.

@Emma, I completely agree – this dialogue needs to continue harder, fiercer and stronger than ever before. Not only are we reminded of this “man’s world” (sad and funny that it went from a James Brown song to a LensCrafters commercial) but the whole notion of sisterhood is trashed in pretty much every show marketed to tweens and young women.

However, Lenscrafters is clinging to nostalgic vestiges of the past – according to the NYTimes recent (ridiculous) article “The New Math” women are far surpassing their male peers in higher education, etc. NYT misses the boat and decides to focus on how sad and sorry it is that women are fighting over men in college, and my intern Carmen wrote a great counter post here, check it out:
http://whereisyourline.org/2010/02/calling-bullshit-on-the-new-math/

Charm, sure, brains, hard work and achievement, you’re damn sure. The more I can get my film out, the more those potential jury members sitting in the audience get a better education about consent and survivor experience. The more we choose to watch and create media that while entertaining, sexy, compelling is also egalitarian and respectful – the more we can continue to change the tide.

Please do visit the site, sign up for our RSS feed and contribute your thoughts. We discuss consent, boundaries and corporate media bullsh*t alot!

i would find the request for consent at each move, tedious and uninspiring and i would hope that women would have other ways of establishing their boundaries (starting with doors or at least curtains on shower stalls!!!)

i do think the dialogue on gender, the rights of women, the autonomy of our bodies has declined tremendously and that we have to revive the dialogue on women’s rights all over again.

the displays in lenscrafters for men reads: it’s a man’s world. for women: “a woman’s charm”

in a world where we are expected to charm to make our way in a man’s world, how can we expected to also adequately have the social capital to even begin to consent? in what context? with what power?

we also have to reestablish the sisterhood, so that women have each others’ back. undermining consent and dismissing rape should be unthinkable and should come with social consequences of their own.

Less than 1% of reported rapes are false accusations. Usually statistics used that have the percentage higher than 2% ignore that

- that “false” can be based on the cops’ opinions of the situation/who the victim was and what she was doing at the time of the rape
- withdrawals of a reported rape (because of fear, shame, coercion, scare tactics, etc) can count as a “false accusation”
- the methodology used to collect the data is usually way off (from not counting all the reported rapes that are turned aside immediately to what is being used to decide if it is false to using polygraphs to using a certain subset of victims to…well, etc for sure)
- that certain rapes are still treated as if they are not rape
- that society treats rape victims as inherently suspect and rapists as good, moral, probably innocent people
- if you’re interested abyss2hope has a lot of information about this

I think we get the idea that there are so many false accusations of rape because on TV shows and movies there are a lot of false accusations at a much higher statistic than in reality.

Added to that, news media report almost every instance of false accusations but do not come even close to talking about the amount of rapes that happen. If we just listened to the news media, a lot of men are being falsely accused and every once in awhile a person in authority (Church, doctors, etc) commits rape, which is a totally isolated case each time.

The media presentation of false rapes is so much higher than the reality of false rapes. The media perpetrates myths about rape, and this is one facet of that.

Anyway, I can see that this conversation is becoming unnecessarily argumentative. My impression is that we’re talking in circles, perhaps saying the same thing in different ways, due to my own miscommunication or mutual misunderstanding, so I’m going to step away so as not to further derail this post. Thanks.

You’re correct, the lower court did (impermissibly) look to common law to interpret/apply Md’s rape statute.

At the end of the day, though, Maryland’s highest court overturned the lower court and remanded for a new trial with the jury instruction that consent could be withdrawn during intercourse. So, that’s what the law in Md is. I think it’s a good idea to draw attention not just to the outrages, but to when those outrages have been fixed.