How many more times does this have to happen before people realize that women can also be sexual predators? Maybe I’m insane but over the last few years there seems to be an epidemic of teachers fucking their students. The response from most people seems to be to laugh it off (and many men mention that they wish they had a teacher like that.) Would anyone think this was funny if it were happening to 12 and 13-year-old girls?

Recently, Debra LaFave’s case was dropped by the prosecutor even though she admits her guilt. The article is full of maudlin bullshit about her faith in God and this being a bump on her Christian path. The most interesting thing about that link is that on the right side of the page is a CNN poll asking this question:

“Did Debra Lafave benefit from a double standard on sex crimes?”

90 percent of people say yes. This isn’t a political issue. This isn’t about feminism or mysogyny. This is about our standards of sexual misconduct and expectations of men and boys to be always already sexualized.

I grappled this week with a difficult to stomach passage in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, those who are familiar with it will remember the “curdled milk” story, I’ll post the paragraph for the benefit of the others:

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simpleminded, employed here then there, depending on teh season, living hand to mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned into authorities. At the border of the field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins around him; for at the very edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicholas, they would play the familiar game called “curdled milk.” So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intoleracne but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. The thing to note is that they went so far as to measure the brainspan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect for possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life; that they made him talk; that they questioned him concerning his thoughts, inclinations, habits, sensations, and opinions. And then, acquitting him of any crime, they decided finally to make him into a pure object of medicine and knowledge – an object to be shut away till the end of his life in the hospital at Mareville, but also to be made known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis. One can be fairly certain that during this time period the Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to mind their language and not talk about all these things aloud. But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions of enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society – and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures – assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating.

I know that at first reading, this seems like a contradiction. Here I am concerned about the exploitation of children and I am quoting an author that comes off as irresponsibly cavalier on the issue. The point here, though, is not whether Foucault rhetorically trivializes child abuse (he does) and whether or not that is a cheap shot (it is in many ways). The purpose of this passage for me is to question our deepest assumptions about sex in society. The assumption that Foucault questions is about the sexuality of children and how we pathologize deviants like the village dimwit. Reading this passage isn’t easy, it makes you angry, and then that anger makes you realize just how much you’re steeped in the ideologies of sexuality that our society proscribes.

The particular one that is upsetting me lately is that men cannot be victimized and if they are it is certainly not by other women. Do you think for a moment that these cases are an anomoly? Certainly, they must be symptoms of a much larger problem. I don’t want to use hysterical language or point to an epidemic that probably doesn’t exist but I also don’t see the point of burying our heads in the sand. Women can be child molestors and sexual agressors and violent criminals just like any other human being. We are so used to thinking of women as victims that that is difficult to remember and regard that fact at its full weight.

This oversight is, in my opinion, the single biggest mistake of modern feminism. My feminism is about challenging gender roles and recognizing patriarchy as an ideology that every human operates within and is affected by. Feminisms have done a terrible job of incorporating men because of this shortcoming and everyone is still playing the same gender roles whether they want to or not.

Are librarians prudes?

The popular stereotype (pornographic at least) would tell you that librarians are repressed nymphomaniacs desperately trying to maintain decorum. Its a nice thought. . .

I’ve been wanting to write about sex in libraries for ages and something happened this week that drove it to the forefront. Little do you know but this week witnessed an annual cultural moment that *concerns* many librarians. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.

I’ve never thought much of the Swimsuit Edition one way or another. There are certainly more revealing photographs in various popular magazines all the time. Granted, I live in the South where the grocery store puts modesty guards over Allure, Cosmopolitan, and even Shape magazines as well. I was surprised this week to notice about 15 other library students most of whom currently work in libraries grappling with the question of the Swimsuit Edition.

The first shocker is that it is a question at all. The original poster asked about it with disdain and some assumption that certainly librarians needed to lock away these shocking, disgusting images of . . . the female body! The responses varied but most gave a level-headed reply that it was handled like any other issue of Sports Illustrated (put on the browsing shelves and almost immediately stolen.) Other librarians pointed out that young adults are savvy and know exactly where to find the sex books in libraries already and that hiding these things away just makes something natural an issue to snicker over.

The thing that bothers me about this exchange isn’t the conclusions that the future librarians came to. No one advocated banning the Swimsuit Edition or was even particularly offended by it (except perhaps the person who originally asked the question.) But librarians are particularly susceptible to societal pressures and many have convinced themselves that the risk of someone seeing something pornographic at a library is absolutely terrifying. I’ve seen dozens of intelligent conversations on offering digital information to patrons devolve into “how do we stop them from looking at porn?!” hysteria.

Of course there are several practical reasons why openly viewing pornography in a library should be prevented. And unfortunately, common sense and social etiquette of patrons does not necessarily pick up the slack. However, I’m not sure that I’m convinced that sex is the most pressing issue facing libraries today and I wonder if it is a waste of resources worry about it so extensively.

This issue touches on the development of library collections (what books and periodicals appear in the library), the training of reference staff (which questions are appropriate to answer), and access to electronic resources (requirements to use an internet terminal and whether or not that internet access is filtered.)

So, I propose an experiment! I intend to visit the public library in my medium-sized Southern city and attempt access at several websites. I suspect that the filtering software will stop me from viewing many informative sites and blogs that are not pornographic but are about sex or pornography. Conversely, I suspect that it will allow me access to sites that perhaps should be filtered but are smaller. How do I know this? A preliminary experience with the filtering software allows my site (maybe it shouldn’t, I post filthy stories and pictures – it is almost certainly pornographic) but does not allow access to Sugarbank (that site has always intentionally been non-pornographic and is a source of business information.)

I have a list of sites that I want to test this theory with but I’d like more suggestions. Post links as a comment and I’ll include them in the “study”.