Miss Nevada and Self-Defense

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by Julie Baldwin and Katie Robison
The Corner with a View
Laughter is Love

Trigger warning: rape discussion

Miss Nevada, Nia Sanchez, is the the new Miss USA. Sanchez made headlines when she advocated women learning self-defense as a way to defend one's self against sexual attack. Miss Nevada is a fourth degree black belt in taekwondo, and her response is being construed as "victim blaming". Let's discuss why this is not a "win" for rape culture, but a practical measure for all women.

The Washington Post reported,

Miss Nevada, the ultimate winner, was asked about the epidemic of sexual assault on campuses. Rumer Willis inquired why colleges have “swept it under the rug.” 

This is actually a serious question. 

“I believe that some colleges may potentially be afraid of having a bad reputation and that would be a reason it could be swept under the rug, because they don’t want that to come out into the public,” Nia  Sanchez said. “But I think more awareness is very important so women can learn how to protect themselves. Myself, as a fourth-degree black belt, I learned from a young age that you need to be confident and be able to defend yourself. And I think that’s something that we should start to really implement for a lot of women.”

The comment the writer of the aforementioned article followed up by saying,

This is not a bad answer, although the problem of prevention isn’t a simple question of confident women learning self-defense techniques against Stranger Danger (Sanchez’s professed specialty). For one, it usually isn’t a stranger. For another, the onus shouldn’t have to be on women to become self-defense experts. It’s on everyone to establish a baseline of consent.

But the general backlash is clear: Sanchez is victim blaming.

Combating forced abortion and gendercide in China

By Mary C. Tillotson

Reggie Littlejohn, Women's Rights Without Frontiers

Today is the 33rd anniversary of China's one-child policy, which has been devastating for Chinese women and girls. I just got off the phone with Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, an organization dedicated to stopping forced abortions and gendercide in China. Reggie has testified with governments around the world, and her organization is running the Save a Girl Campaign, helping families on the grassroots level.

I'm going to let Reggie take it from here.

Tell me about the one-child policy in China.

Reggie: Some in the Chinese Communist Party want you to believe it's entirely voluntary. That is not true. Women are forcibly aborted up to the ninth month of pregnancy, and also forcibly sterilized. Some of these forced abortions are so violent that the women themselves die with their full-term babies.

The coercion gives rise to gendercide. Because of the coercive low birth limit, most families want to make sure they have a boy. Sex selective abortion is practiced, and up to 200 million women are missing in the world today due to sex-selective abortion. There are 37 million more men than women living in China.

What that gender imbalance is doing is it's driving human trafficking and sexual slavery, not only in China but in the surrounding countries as well.

Why do they have a preference for boys?

Reggie: Preference for boys is something that's centuries or possibly millennia old. It's prominent in Asia, but especially in China and India.

In both Indian culture and Chinese culture, when a couple gets married, the girl goes over to the boy's family, and the young woman and young man together support the young man's parents in their old age. If you give birth to a son, you know that when he marries, you will be gaining a daughter-in-law, so you're getting an addition to your family, whereas if you give birth to a daughter, you're not getting a son-in-law, you're losing your daughter also.

If you can only have one kid and it's a girl, you don't have anybody to support you in your old age. [Parents often have to choose between] sex-selective abortion or facing poverty in old age.

What is Women's Rights Without Frontiers doing about it?

Reggie met Pope Francis last week.

Reggie: We are doing two things. Number one, we've been called the leading voice in the world to expose and oppose forced abortions in China - forced abortion, gendercide, and sexual slavery in China. We gather documentation and go around and sound the alarm all over the world about what's going on in China.

Most people understand China has a one-child policy. They don't understand the brutality of the way it's enforced.

We gather documentation from China about forced abortion, forced sterilization, human trafficking, murder, all these things that are committed in connection with the one-child policy, and we testify.

We have credibility and a voice in informing government bodies about the truth about what's going on in China, concerning the one-child policy.

Reggie has testified six times at the United States Congress and three times at the European Parliament; she's also testified to the British, Irish, and Canadian Parliaments. She's briefed White House officials, the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, and the Vatican. She's also spoken multiple times at the United Nations Commission on the Status of women, an annual convention in New York; the commission made a statement condemning forced abortion, forced sterilization, and forced contraception.

The other thing we do, we have a Save a Girl campaign.

Tell me about the Save a Girl Campaign.

Reggie: We've got workers on the ground in China who identify women who are pregnant with girls who are planning to have an abortion, or who have just given birth to a girl and are planning to abandon her. They say, 'Please don't abort or abandon your baby because she's a girl. We'll give you a monthly stipend for a year to help support this girl.'

I understand, from my network, we have a 95 percent success rate. We're saving lives in China.

We also help women who are fleeing forced abortion. We are stopping gendercide in China one baby girl at a time.

The Save a Girl Campaign was launched last year on October 11, the International Day of the Girl Child.

What can regular people do to help?

Reggie: If people want to do something to help these girls, we have petitions to stop forced abortion, and they can also donate toward the Save a Girl Campaign. It's amazing how little it takes to save a life in China.

So much of our effort has to do with getting the word out, and people help get the word out by liking the article you write, posting it on Facebook, tweeting it - that's huge for us. It's the only way we can turn political opinion to understand what's going on and oppose the violence against women.

People are listening to us, listening to our message.

Lovelace (the movie)

I hadn't heard of the move Lovelace till I ran across a review in Verily, but based on the IMDb parent guide, I'm not sure I'll go see it. (Maybe I'll get the book.) My college media law textbook was quick to note that, while some people think the sex/porn industry is demeaning to women, it's actually great! because it's the only industry in which women consistently make more money than men.

That may be true - female bodies seem to be in greater demand than male ones; anyone glancing at the grocery store's checkout line magazines or watching any movie or TV show can attest to this. But no human being's body should be demanded. Whether or not Linda Marciano's experience was typical, I don't think we should be surprised to find this kind of abuse in an industry that sells images of women's bodies for sex and nothing else.

I'm not saying sex is bad. As a Catholic, I believe sex is good, when it is an expression of love, commitment, and self-gift between married couples, when it is freely given in that relationship of trust. But sex-to-the-exclusion-of-everything-else, sex-sans-relationship - that kind of sex is very bad.

Here's Mary Rose Somarriba's move review at Verily:

Lovelace isn’t the movie you expect. 

It’s the story of how Linda Marciano got her fame in America. It was 1972 and her name was in lights on the cinema marquees. She was the star of the X-rated movie Deep Throat. 

Cinema marquees, you ask—really? Yes, really. One could say it was a transitional cultural moment. Porn was crossing from the private sphere into the mainstream, and Linda was the center of attention. She was that mysterious woman with the surprising sense of humor and that secret talent. She had a prime spot in the limelight and on Hugh Hefner’s guest list. It was the time of free love, free expression, and free speech. She was America’s first porn star.
Except she wasn’t free. 

The film Lovelace (starring Amanda Seyfried and Peter Sarsgaard) expertly tells the two stories of Linda—the story you’ve heard and the story as it happened. Linda, whose real name isn’t Lovelace, was in fact coerced by her pimp and husband Chuck Traynor into performing in prostitution and pornography. Often forced to perform sexual acts at gunpoint, Linda sustained years of mental and physical abuse and lived in constant fear of his next violent beating or threat to her family. 

Perhaps most tragic of all is that when she finally escaped, no one believed her. Linda published her biography Ordeal in 1980, bringing her story to the public. But, with the rare exception of praise from such anti-porn feminists as Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, the book was largely unread and forgotten. Lovelace struggled to make ends meet for the rest of her life until 2002 when she died in a car accident at the age of 53.

Read the rest of her review here!