The XX Factor

India may be the world's largest democracy, but it’s also one of the most dangerous countries for women.

As if the Haryana rape spree earlier this year, and the religious and political leadership’s indifference to it, weren’t awful enough, this week brought news of a horrific gang-rape of a 23-year-old med student on a moving Delhi bus, knocking India's entrenched blame-the-victim mentality off its footing. How to demonize a girl who dared watch a film with a male friend before boarding a private bus in a relatively affluent neighborhood around 9 p.m., before most Indians even sit down for dinner? What did she do to invite the next 90-minutes of torture, as six drunk men on board (including the driver, who passed the wheel to a friend so as not to miss his shot) raped her in turn before beating her so badly with an iron rod that medical staff described the site of her naked body, which had been dumped with her friend's alongside the highway, as horrifying? Could this possibly mean that India's pervasive rape culture can't be blamed on women after all?

On Wednesday, angry protests broke out around Delhi, overwhelming police as irate crowds called for police accountability, better protection and even some for public castration. Meanwhile, parliamentarians called for a proper investigation and stricter penalties for law-breakers; some even proposed the death penalty, a far cry from the usual mild finger-wagging. Following suit, the Delhi High Court agreed that the five men apprehended so far should be tried in the fast-track courts, thus saving this case from joining the thousands of other rape cases held up in a system so backlogged that lawsuits often linger 10 to 15 years before going to trial.

Hundreds gathered outside of India Gate to stage a candlelight vigil on Wednesday evening, but not everyone is convinced that the latest attack will change anything. “People are appalled. And they want instant justice. Chemical castration. Public hanging. Stoned to death. Anything will do. But what has happened is sheer reflection of the way India has evolved. Women being raped day in and day out is a story of Indian evolution,” writes journalist Vivek Kaul. Kaul is describing a country where, almost exactly two years ago, a 13-year old girl was gang-raped by four boys. After they left her by the side of the road to die, she crawled into a brick kiln, where she was found and raped by two other men. Later, she was found and raped by a rickshaw driver, only to be abducted and raped for another nine days by a truck driver and his accomplice. The sad fact that still more gang-rapes have been reported since Sunday's bus attack seems to further confirm that Indian women will continue to stock up on pepper spray and suffer this undeserved short straw in life. India, according to Kaul, is a lost cause.

The thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets this week suggest not everyone is willing to just give up. Similarly, the latest news coming out of New Delhi that the accused have been charged with, among other crimes, kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder, could signal that violence towards women won't be tolerated as it has been in the past. Meanwhile, the young victim remains in critical condition after suffering five surgeries and such massive internal injury that her intestines had to be removed.

A brief summary of the current war waging between the Good Men Project and various feminist blogs, most prominently Feministe: GMP, which markets itself as a progressive website exploring masculinity, recently published two articles giving rapists a chance to tell "their side" of the story. The first rapist's story was written by his female friend and titled "Nice Guys Commit Rape Too." The second, penned by the rapist himself, was titled "I'd Rather Risk Rape Than Quit Partying." GMP did not obtain or publish the victims' accounts.

Both articles tout a very old, repeatedly disproven rape myth, which is that rapists rape because they're confused about whether they have consent. Research shows that rapists actually do know what they're doing and target drunk victims in part because they know victims will not be believed if they report. From David Lisak's work, we also know that rapists love to brag about their conquests, though obviously they tend to tell their stories in such a way as to limit the social and legal consequences of their behavior.

So rapists love to brag about getting one over on their victims. But rapists also spin the truth when faced with potential consequences for their actions by leaning heavily on rape myths about how women send "mixed signals." Reading the stories at GMP with these facts in mind makes for a disturbing experience. A sampling of quotes from Alyssa Royse's attempt to bring nuance to her friend's choice to penetrate a sleeping woman: 

In this particular case, I had watched the woman in question flirt aggressively with my friend for weeks. I had watched her sit on his lap, dance with him, twirl his hair in her fingers. I had seen her at parties discussing the various kinds of sex work she had done, and the pleasure with which she explored her own very fluid sexuality, all while looking my friend straight in the eye.

Only she knows what signals she intended to send out. But many of us can guess the signals he received.....

But if something walks like a fuck and talks like fuck, at what point are we supposed to understand that it’s not a fuck?

Notice she did not say "sleeps like a fuck," because someone can't actually do that.

From the anonymous rapist's story, explaining how he just gets a little overexcited when drunk and concerns about consent fly out the window:

With what I’ve learned as an adult, I’m pretty sure I’m technically a rapist. Technically nothing. One woman told me herself. Our encounter was years before—I’d been in a drinking contest and she’d been drinking and flirting with me (yes, actually flirting) all evening. As blurry and fucked-up as I was, I read her kiss of congratulation to me as a stronger signal than it was, and with friends hooting and cheering us on, I pressed her up against a wall and… well.....

The ones that bother me are the ones where I got loaded, had some fun with a lady, and then she never wanted to contact me again. Messages go unanswered, social contact is dropped.

Roundly attacked, GMP rationalized publishing these pieces by claiming an educational motive—that airing these stories can help us all better understand rape—with a whiff of accusing their critics of living in a fantasy world: "But the real world is a harsh, cold place full of mixed messages, drunken desire, Ecstasy-fueled touching, and the rush of cocaine. The real world is a place where 'no means no' simply isn’t enough," wrote GMP senior editor Joanna Schroeder. Education is a great thing, of course! But it can't really be accomplished by giving unchallenged voice to known violent criminals who have a good reason to lie about their motives. People such as rapists.

It's hard to believe the people at GMP could be naive enough to think that rapists are a good source for the unvarnished truth about rape. Which leaves us with the other explanation: That far from being a progressive website, GMP is now in the business of defending rape.

"Guys tell us all the time they are confused by the signals that society sends them," GMP publisher Lisa Hickey told me when I reached out for further explanation. "Not just about rape, not just about sexuality, but even about what it means to be a man, about what it means to be good." Let me clear it up for all the supposedly confused guys out there: If you want to be "good," don't insert your penis into a sleeping woman. That's rape.

NPR reports that France is adopting a new regulation making contraception and contraception counseling free to girls 15 to 18, with an added provision that doctors must offer this care without notifying parents. Unlike here in the United States, the free contraception is covered by the state and not a girl's insurance, giving her a further layer of privacy protections. The government hopes that by protecting young girls' privacy, it can increase contraception use and reduce the teen pregnancy rate.

So: Straightforward, almost boring health care policy story about a government taking sensible, cost-effective measures to curb a public health problem. But the story isn't really about health care policy—the underlying narrative here is that the French are yet again making American politicians look like a bunch of out of touch prudes. (Americans don't need the French to point this out: Just wander into an American abstinence-only classroom to hear sexually active kids being told that anything short of waiting the 15-plus years between puberty and the average age of first marriage to have sex is a ruinous choice that will end with the fornicator unable to feel love or dead from AIDS.)

Needless to say, the measure sailed through the French legislature without any kind of political battle. Boring! How does that nation survive without its share of powerful right wingers claiming that giving girls access to contraception will lead to "sex-based cults" or that making it free means that girls who access the service are now obliged to give talk show radio hosts homemade pornography?

NPR, as is their custom, did manage to dredge up some opposition, a single Catholic organization called CLER. Their leader, Jean Eude Tisson, gave a half-hearted denunciation of the measure, because the Catholic Church opposes all forms of contraception on the grounds that it interfere with marriage bringing "the body and spirit together." But again, no squawking about how the private choices of others interferes with his "religious freedom," no disingenuous arguments conflating rape with consensual relationships between teenagers, no assertions that contraception is the same thing as abortion. Just an honest presentation of a religious claim that everyone knows will be rejected out of hand. Love these conservatives! I'm so jealous. 

To celebrate its 110th anniversary, the magazine Popular Mechanics has published a fascinating list of 110 predictions for the next 110 years, divided up by the decades in which they will occur. For instance, within the next 10 years, PM believes that translation technology will become so sophisticated and cheap that smart phones will turn into universal translators so "people will be fluent in every language." The whole list is worth a read, but here are some of our favorites that could have a real impact on women's lives:

Nanoparticles will make chemotherapy far more effective. By delivering tiny doses of cisplatin and docetaxel right to cancerous cells, the mini messengers will significantly reduce the pain and side effects of today's treatments.

In recent years, guidelines on breast cancer treatment have changed so that fewer women have courses of chemotherapy after surgery, in part because the side effects are so traumatic, and because of findings that suggest chemotherapy is helpful to only 15 percent of patients who receive it as a follow-up. But if chemotherapy could be more targeted and less toxic, it could help make breast cancer treatment a less intimidating prospect. PM predicts this could be reality by 2022.

Your genome will be sequenced before you are born. Researchers led by Jay Shendure of the University of Washington recently reconstructed the genome of a fetus using saliva from the father and a blood sample from the mother (which yielded free-floating DNA from the child). Blood from the umbilical cord later confirmed that the sequencing was 98 percent accurate. Once the price declines, this procedure will allow us to do noninvasive prenatal testing. 

Right now, adults can send in saliva samples and have their own DNA sequenced by genetic testing services like 23 And Me. But the new tests will allow parents to know the actual DNA profile of the fetus they just created. This is not without its downsides: As Harriet A. Washington wrote in Slate earlier this fall, the availability of such testing could also move up unnerving conversations about whether to terminate a pregnancy, or how to care for a potentially disabled child, even as they don't provide absolute certainty about the outcome of a pregnancy. PM forecasts that these tests will be normal procedure in the next ten years.

Your clothes will clean themselves too. Engineers in China have developed a titanium dioxide coating that helps cotton shed stains and eliminate odor-producing bacteria. To revive your lucky shirt after a night of poker, you need only step into the sun. 

Now if only this technology could be extended to the kitchen sink as well as the laundry room. The housework gap between women and men continues to close, but it hasn't been eliminated yet—the Bureau of Labor Statistics found earlier this year that American women do 2.6 hours of housework per day while men do 2.1 hours. If technology could cut down on the minutes we need to spend on household tasks period, it might be easier to split them equitably, and for partners to spend more time on each other, or on other pursuits. The self-cleaning clothes part, at least, could be a reality by 2022.

Nurse Jackie will be a robot. By 2045, when seniors (60-plus) outnumber the planet's youth (15 and under) for the first time in history, hospitals will use robots to solve chronic staffing issues. Expect to find the new Nightingales lifting patients and pushing food carts. Engineers at Purdue University are thinking even bolder—designing mechanical scrub nurses that respond to hand gestures during surgery.

Though the number of men in nursing professions is increasing, it remains a field dominated by women, as is also the case with home health aides. Just as mechanization (as well as outsourcing) hurt male employment in manufacturing, the rise of robotic nurses could push down employment in a sector where women have long been dominant. It's always fun to think that the future will open up new and exciting employment fields. But it'll make other kinds of jobs obsolete, and women should learn from the decimation of some male-dominated fields as we make our career plans for the future. PM thinks Nurse Jackie will be delivering your post-op meal by 2062.

When some companies are called out for being small-minded or bigoted, they get even more small-minded and stupid. Others do the right thing. This week, Hasbro did the right thing. Earlier this month, McKenna Pope, a 13-year-old from New Jersey, started a petition against Hasbro for making the Easy Bake Oven only in girlish colors, as I wrote in a story about gender neutral toys last week. She wanted to buy her little brother the oven for Christmas but discovered that it only came in purple and pink, which she knew would turn him off. McKenna started a petition, which 30,000 people signed, and made this video for Change.org. Celebrity chef Bobby Flay joined the campaign, making the obvious point that baking is definitely not just for little girls anymore.

Last week Hasbro executives invited Pope and her family to the Easy Bake headquarters in New Jersey, where they unveiled a new prototype of a black, silver, and blue oven. The company is also doing everything Pope asked for in the video, including putting boys in the ads. "I think that they really met most or even all of what I wanted them to do, and they really amazed me," Pope said, and added that her brother thought the new design was "awesome." Apparently the toy has come in dozens of colors since 1963 (yellow, teal, brown) but lately the company has only been offering the pink and purple model.

Hasbro isn’t exactly going out on a limb here with that bachelor-pad color scheme. All they are doing is catching up to a reality, where women use power tools and men saute. (Anyone watched Top Chef lately?) In fact, if Pope’s household is anything like mine, she’ll be resentful of her little brother for taking over the kitchen by New Year’s.

The school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut is unimaginable on any number of levels: the slaughter of very young children in a school where they were supposed to be protected and nurtured, the murder of a mother by her son. Some of the shock will be dispelled by news reporting in the days and weeks to come as we learn more about the killer's motivations even as we'll never find them justifiable.

But given how little we know, and how much the reporting on Newtown got wrong in the first days, there are two books worth reading—or re-reading—for what they tell us about how to be skeptical, and how to be empathetic in the wake of this sort of tragedy.

The first is Dave Cullen's Columbine, a deeply reported examination of what lead to that school shooting, examining everything from the killers' personalities, which were dramatically different than the public images of them that solidified in the wake of the tragedy, to the community response and law enforcement investigation. Cullen, who has written about the lessons of Columbine for Slate, dismantles many of the accepted narratives about the event—that there was a bullying culture at Columbine High School that motivated the attack, or that a martyr was killed for her faith. And in debunking those specific stories, Cullen also offers up case studies for how myths become accepted as truth, and how outside observers of (and even people directly affected by) mass killings seize on convenient and comforting explanations for tragic events.

While Cullen's reporting cautions us to keep using our heads, fiction can provide instruction for our emotions and moral imaginations. Lionel Shriver's novel We Need To Talk About Kevin is written in the form of letters from the mother of a school shooter to her husband, who we find out later in the book was his son's second victim before he set off to kill his classmates. In one of the most shattering sequences in the book, Eva, the main character, imagines what her husband must have felt in the moment before he realized his son intended to murder him. "It is possible your cerebrum even managed to reconfigure the image, to remix the sound track...The waving? He's waving for you to bring the camera. He's changed his mind, and with another five minutes left before he has to catch the bus, he wants you to take some photographs after all."

In other words, there is no possibility of understanding what's about to happen, there's no way to truly comprehend it. And that inability to comprehend the kind of tragedy that overtook Newtown, our inability to simply understand—it's not a sign of our failure to gather and process all the information available to us. It's a reminder of our common decency.

As the bodies are buried and the victims of the Newtown, Conn. massacre are memorialized, I beg of people to spare a moment to include Nancy Lanza in the list of innocent victims. Already, a tendency to treat her death as an asterisk has set in. Joan Walsh at Salon describes the way that Lanza is being quietly bracketed aside, as if grouping her with the women and children who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School somehow contaminates them all: 

Isolated in life, Lanza seems equally so in death. An anonymous benefactor donated 26 Christmas trees to a Sandy Hook memorial, even though 27 people died.

There seem to be two major reasons people are hesitating to embrace Nancy Lanza as an innocent victim, aside from her shared last name and home with her murderer. Part of it is in the inevitable victim-blaming that occurs whenever a woman suffers violence at the hands of a man in her life: She should have known, she missed the signs, she didn't get him the vaguely defined "help" we all assume we'd be excellent at getting for our children. 

The other part of it is the dawning realization that Lanza was a gun nut, perhaps even a member of the very same aggrieved tribe currently trampling over the bodies of dead children to defend their guns. The knowledge that Lanza bought the guns that her son used to destroy so many lives and families only makes it that much harder to sympathize. Though intellectually, we know that she almost surely had nothing to do with her son's choice to kill so many people, emotionally, for some of us, she feels like an accomplice. Indeed, Salon's headline used just this word: "Is she a victim, or do her guns make her an accomplice?"

But I beg of people not to give in to the urge to quietly shun Nancy Lanza from the official list of innocent victims, or blame her for Newtown's terrible tragedy. Her acquisition of an arsenal of guns doesn't mean she was an anti-social weirdo who invited violence into her home. As someone who hails from Texas—rural West Texas, originally—I can testify that I've known, dated, and am related to plenty of people who have arsenals of their own. They are, like the rest of us, complex individuals—there are many good spouses, friends, and parents in the bunch. (Some are even lifelong, avid Democrats, not that sane party affiliation makes you a good person.) Sure, gun nuttery is connected to a certain fascination with power fantasies, but so are video game and punk rock obsessions.

And that, really, is the problem. Gun manufacturers have successfully exploited a current of paranoia, anxious masculinity, and aggrieved privilege to sell their marks lots and lots of guns that don't actually do anything to fix their problems. In fact, Nancy Lanza is far from the only person who will die this year at the end of a gun she presumably bought to make herself feel powerful. It's time, as Drew Magary at Gawker argued, to shift focus from gun owners and toward the people who are making a fortune selling products that have no other purpose but to kill. We should see gun owners like we've come around to seeing smokers: people who were successfully ensnared by clever marketing into a lifestyle that does them, and others, way more harm than good. By making gun owners the enemy—something I've done myself, and now regret—and not gun manufacturers, we will remain locked in this go-nowhere debate. Shifting focus is the only hope we have of change.

We can start by not demonizing or ignoring Nancy Lanza, a woman who had her flaws as do we all, but who, from reports, sounds like she was well-liked by her friends and under a great deal of stress. Her final moments of being shot in the head by a boy she dedicated much of her life to raising should evoke the same deep well of empathy we have for anyone else who dies in needless violence.

On Dec. 12, Maria Mejia, 24, along with 39 other members and associates of the Bronx Trinitarios Gang, was charged by the NYPD, the DEA, and other law enforcement agencies with offenses including murder and attempted murder. Specifically Mejia was charged with, among other crimes, the 2005 murder of Miguel Perez, 20, as revenge for the killing of another Trinitarios gang member. According to the New York Post, whose headline shouted "Girl Gang Called the 'Bad Barbies' on the Loose in the Bronx," Mejia wore knee-high brown boots to court. And, oh yes, Mejia is the alleged leader of a Trinitarios offshoot girl gang called the Bad Barbies.

Girls + violence + Barbie = a very excited press! But who are these Bad Barbies? And do they tease their hair, retro Barbie style? Or do they have more of a steampunk Barbie look?

The Trinitarios are a Latin gang formed in the U.S. prison system in the early 1990s and active in major cities including New York. There are a number of smaller factions within it, though most don’t have catchy post-riot-grrl-friendly names. (For instance, one group under the Trinitarios umbrella calls itself, “Violating All Bitches.”) The Trinitarios are not known for their sensitivity toward “genders-and-sexualities”—the U.S. Attorney’s office reports that former Trinitarios leader Leonides Sierra ordered Trinitarios members “to kill an unnamed Victim (‘Victim-17’) because he was believed to be a homosexual, which violated the gang’s rules.”

Anyway, back to the Bad Barbies. From the breathless coverage, one might think that girl gangs are fast becoming a big thing. They’re not. Their members comprise only an estimated two percent of the U.S. gang population. But some primarily male gangs include a few women so estimates for general female gang membership across the country is as high as 10 percent; my guess is no one really knows. The presence of girls in gangs has been getting attention since the 1980s, but what gangs mainly are is male. Gangs are comprised largely of men between the ages of 12 and 24, and largely of men of color. In the U.S., unemployment, deep poverty, racism, terrible education, and almost complete lack of other life opportunities are the causal context.

So despite the sex appeal of knee high boots, gender is a smokescreen in this story. Poverty and unequal opportunity in the U.S., and murders by one gang member of another gang member—that’s what’s known, and is all too normal.

Maud Lavin is the author of Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggressive Women (MIT), published in paperback in fall 2012.

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Almost as soon as we learn the name of a twisted killer, we start to wonder about the women who knew and loved him: his girlfriend, his wife, or more often his mother. Susan Klebold, mother of Columbine shooter Dylan, wrote a wrenching essay in O about her experience knowing that everyone who saw her was thinking about “who had raised this monster.” She writes with tortured tenderness about her son and how much she missed him—because he is, after all, her son. In the Newtown tragedy we will never hear from Adam Lanza’s mother, of course, because he shot her too. We will never know whether she felt anguished that she had taken him to shooting ranges, or that she’d missed the signs.

Instead of the real mother, this time we have an imposter, Liza Long, blogger and single mother of four who wrote the incredible post “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” which was reprinted by Gawker and Huffington Post this weekend and viewed by millions. Long is of course not Adam Lanza’s mother. She is the mother of 13-year-old "Michael" (whose name she changed but so what, since her own name is public), who she describes as belligerent and mentally ill, so much so that “he terrifies me.” The pure sympathy phase for Long after her essay went viral lasted about 24 hours before another blogger, Sarah Kendzior, pointed out that Long had written a series of “vindictive and cruel posts about her children” and was not to be trusted. This morning, Long and Kendzior made up and issued a joint statement about “the need for a respectful national conversation on mental health” and declared that they were not interested in perpetuating a “mommy war.”

Good for them. “Michael,” meanwhile, has a long life to live, during which his neighbors and teachers and future employers will know that his mother regularly called the police on him, committed him to a mental institution, and considered seriously accusing him of a crime so she could send him to jail. (She didn’t because jail would exacerbate his “sensitivity to sensory stimuli,” she writes, a cold clinical rationale that in her piece passes for maternal sympathy.) People who meet "Michael" in the future have a good shot at finding out that his mother thinks he is the equivalent of a man who just shot 20 schoolchildren point blank, and that she once listed her son’s name in the pantheon of greats. (“I am Adam Lanza's mother. I am Dylan Klebold's and Eric Harris's mother. I am Jason Holmes's mother. I am Jared Loughner's mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho's mother.”)

We have of course gotten used to mommy bloggers embarrassing their children, saying which child they like best or how much they drink while stuck at home doing art projects. Louis C.K. regularly embarrasses his kids and surely one day they will get their revenge. These are humiliations that might require a kid to get therapy later, but they are not on the same order as what Long did. They are unlikely, for example, to prevent the kids from getting a job. So far the children’s rights movement has focused on protecting children from neglect and abuse, but maybe it’s time to add a subcategory protecting them from libel, by their own parents. 

Long’s situation sounds genuinely terrifying. If she’s telling the truth, her son is prone to scary explosions. He calls her a “stupid bitch” and pulls a knife on her, and she and her other children have a kind of emergency evacuation plan when he goes into his rages. He sounds in fact very much like the children described in a recent New York Times magazine story, “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?”

There are some critical differences, though, between the parents quoted in that story and Long: Those parents stayed anonymous, and did not publish photos of their children. They did not sentence their children but kept their minds open. (Note the question mark in the title.) These were kids who did much more disturbing things than Long describes her son doing; one, for example, slowly sliced the tail off the family cat. Still, the point of the story is to encourage parents NOT to condemn their children, because “psychopath” is not a certain fate. Also, the parents in that story seemed to have a reasonable parenting plan in place, a way of talking to their children that most parents can relate to, even if it isn’t always effective. (“Remember the brainstorming we did yesterday?” one mom asked her son.) Long, meanwhile, plays chicken with her son, threatening to take him to the mental hospital if he says “I’m going to kill myself" one more time. Maybe because doing a sudden U-turn in the car and heading for the mental ward is more dramatic than talking about “brainstorming.”

I might trust Long more if she doled out the drama a little more carefully. Is she actually going to call a parole officer if her 11-year-old doesn’t stop poking his brother, as she writes in one old post, or is that just something moms say when they’re frazzled? Does she really think it’s crazy for a 5-year-old to cry if he drops his lollipop, or for an 11-year-old to shoot rubberbands at his brother? Or was she just in a bad mood that day? Surely it was just a bad mood, right? But then she claims that her ex-husband actually did have their 11-year-old incarcerated for failing to do his chores, and their 14-year-old committed to a mental hospital, so these things are in the realm of possibility in their family, I guess.

One reasonable conclusion is that Long is in the middle of one of those lunatic divorces where the kids get sacrificed to the altar of parental hatred. Another is that she has some kind of mommy blogger Munchhausen syndrome, where she creates narcissistic fantasies in which she stars as the long-suffering mother. (Note the high tragic cadence of “I am Adam Lanza’s mother.")

Or a more disturbing conclusion: In this era, when we worry about whether we need to keep a closer eye on the dangerous and mentally ill, “Michael” is not the one in that family we should be monitoring. Because this, from one of her older posts, is not the musing of a sane person:

Safety is never anything more than a pretty illusion for any of us, at any time. We are all just one car accident, one cancer diagnosis, one unimagined catastrophe away from death. But what makes this situation bad—no, intolerable—is that someone, somewhere, for some reason, is actively seeking to destroy me.

A boy wielding a knife perhaps?

Correction, December 17, 2012: This post originally mispelled Liza Long's last name.