Repeat after me

Rape is not sex
Rape is not sex
Rape is not sex.

Rape is the opposite of sex.

Rape is not a consequence of too much alcohol or too little clothing. No Kevin Spacey, rape is not a predictable end result of any sexual orientation. Rape is not epidemic because we have somehow lost genteel society. Rape is a felony. Rapists are criminals and they should go to prison just like bank robbers or murderers. Rapists do not have a lack of gentlemanly training. This isn't 1805 and it's not about failing to offer a lady a handkerchief at the formal ball.

Rape is an act of violence, not sex. Rapist feel powerful when they attack someone because they tend to feel powerless in their everyday life.

If the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore are true, and the evidence is preponderous, neither of them needs counseling or a forceful chat with the HR department. They need to go to prison.

Sorry, Bill Maher, Harvey Weinstein doesn't need to "take better care of himself", lose weight or shave more often so he can "get laid." This is not about getting laid because rape is not about sex.

Rape. Is. Not. Sex.

Rapists are not sexually frustrated. On the contrary, rapists often are married and/or already have partners they are sexually intimate with. Some even have families with children. And, as the research in the eye-opening 2012 documentary The Invisible War showed, the majority of rapists are serial rapists. In criminal psychology, serial rapists have a lot in common with serial murderers. Serial murderers often begin their criminal careers as rapists. Rapists, exactly like serial murderers, look for opportunity, they look for victims who presumably will be easily overcome and subdued; someone small, someone drunk or impaired, someone young and inexperienced in self defense, someone disabled or unable to run or fight, someone alone, probably someone female.

Rape victims do not get raped because they a) went to the wrong party, b) walked down the wrong street, c) got in the wrong car with the wrong friend or d) left their handgun at home. Victims get raped because a rapist rapes them. Period.

Lumping Senator Al Franken or Louis CK in the same box with Weinstein or Moore is idiotic. Neither Franken or CK are felons. They are stupid, they abused their power but they are likely not rapists. The two women who had the unsavory misfortune to witness Louis CK masturbating in front of them were not raped. They were shocked, scared (because women are conditioned to anticipate odd behavior as a prelude to violence) and later, probably furious. But they are not thankfully rape victims.

Again, Weinstein and Moore are criminals. The former has millions, an entertainment empire, power and people to find and arrange rape victims for him. The latter was so pernicious a pedophile and stalker of teenage girls he was permanently banned from an Alabama strip mall by security guards.

Where it gets confusing -- the conjunction between assaulting a 14-year-old girl behind a restaurant and flashing a coworker your penis -- is called Rape Culture. It's a term that often runs in the same sentence as the War on Women. If you think, like most on the political right, that the War on Women is fictitious then you've never heard of the Congo. Or Yugoslavia. Or the Pink Taxis of Puebla. Or ISIS. Or Jyoti Singh. And on and on the list just keeps getting longer.

Men like Louis CK make the mistake of assuming women are just here for their sexual entertainment because Rape Culture has told them over and over for decades that they are. Every time a hot blonde is strewn across the hood of car in a commercial, every time a video game player has the opportunity to "rape" a character in Grand Theft Auto and every single time there's a televised beauty contest, women are objectified. Objects are things, not people. The first step in suppressing any group of people (African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, etc.) is to make them into stereotypes or caricatures and then objects. Then it's okay to rape and kill them because, Rape Culture tells us, they're not really people.

Our current sitting president attempted to dismiss claims he is a rapist by suggesting one of his victims wasn't hot enough. In the past, he's emceed and produced beauty contests. He is currently married to a former model who's primary resume point is her ability to look fuckable, to fit a stereotype, a pornographic caricature, to be a thing. I suspect, in his narcissism and selfishness, our president sees nearly everyone around him as just a thing.

We cannot stop rape until we learn to discern the difference between men behaving badly (Franken and CK) and rapists (Weinstein and Moore). We cannot dismantle Rape Culture until we dismantle the toxic patriarchy which has been telling us for ages that women are not people but simply things to be: won, earned, bought, possessed, impregnated, discarded, stereotyped and scorned (dumb virgin, slut, conniving whore, gold-digging bitch, etc.).

We cannot stop rape until we see women (and alternately LGBT, brown people, immigrants, etc.) as people. We cannot stop rape until we stop dehumanizing people.

Object of Desire (a short story)

One of my short stories is going to be offered FREE on Amazon Kindle starting on Tuesday Sept. 15.

Forget the racist yellow face makeup for a second

(I tried to get this essay op/ed piece published with a number of online sites back in November 2012 and everybody blew me off. Sooo, since I do have a blog ...)

Asian film critics have been in a furor over the use of yellow face in the Wachowski/Tykwer epic CloudAtlas since it premiered in the US in October 2012. They rightly argue that it’s so hard for Asian actors to get work in Hollywood, having the likes of Brits Jim Sturgess and James D’Arcy don prosthetic epicanthic folds to play Asian characters is salt on an old wound. Several critics have pointed out that no Caucasian actor was put in black face to play the part of Autua, the runaway slave. Instead, the Wachowskis used David Gyasi. Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have argued creative license, they were trying to show a myth arc and idea of reincarnation that ‘transcends race’, which is fine. But it’s still salt and the way Asians are portrayed in Hollywood is still an old wound.

One thing a lot of critics and fans alike missed is the overt sexist stereotype in the film. I’ve never read the book and am only dissecting the film but I know author David Mitchell is English, definitely white and male. And it’s worth noting: his wife is Japanese.

Before there was a Male Gaze, there was a White Male Gaze. Especially in the Victorian Era, whether they admitted it or not, European white males stood at the top of the social ladder. Even if they were dirt poor, uneducated, they were raised for centuries to believe they were at least better than Those People or Those (equally poor and uneducated) Women Over There. The white male embodied colonialism and empire. Foreign lands (India, Japan, South Africa) were viewed only in terms of exploitation. And the women who lived in these far off places were only valued for their potential sexual exploitation. The fuckability of foreign women was probably mulled over by many European sailors and explorers from Captain James Cook onward. Even today, sex tours to southeast Asia cater almost exclusively to white men.

That’s the thing about sexism. It always goes hand in hand with racism kind of like peanut butter and jelly. 

 How do we solve a problem like Sonmi?

And Asian women have been perceived by the dominant paradigm (white male heterosexual) for hundreds of years as sexually exploitable because of the stereotype of their passivity and subservience. Asian women are seen by white men as non-complaining, non-judgmental, sexually available, undiscriminating, eternally youthful and eager to please; essentially everything the Caucasian female stereotype is not. The stereotype of Asian women has more in common with blow-up dolls than any real racial demographic. Asian women are stereotyped as perpetual teenage girls: always nubile, always hyper-eroticized, always a sexual possibility if you are white, male and heterosexual.

I liked Cloud Atlas, the overall film was a fun ride. The Wachowkis were aiming for a flowing dream-like feel to the film and they achieve it. But anyone who’s ever picked up a book on Carl Jung knows that dreams are about symbolism, sometimes in its crudest form.

One of the key characters in Cloud Atlas is a young, nubile genetic clone named Sonmi-451. She is a genetically fabricated human living in a dystopian Seoul, Korea in 2144 AD. Sonmi lives only to serve futuristic junk food to rude customers in a nightmare version of McDonalds. In the Wachowski’s vision of Cloud Atlas, Sonmi and her fellow clone slaves are dressed in strip club frocks that stop one inch below their asses. And what is up with her name? 451 makes me think of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Was the author subconsciously saying Sonmi was hot? That’s unsettling, but so is the other imagery.

Somni is an Asian clone and she and all her sister clone slaves look nearly identical. Or maybe the film’s creepy message is: all Asian women look alike to white males. Again, the weaving together of racism and sexism by the dominant paradigm is obvious. But it gets weirder.

In the climax of the film, Sonmi is rescued (you didn’t think she’d rescue herself did you?) by an Asian male character played by a white British actor in yellow face. The character, Hae-Joo Chang educates naïve-bordering-on-stupid Sonmi about her oppression, how wrong it is to enslave people and so ultimately Sonmi will hop into bed with him. Around this time, Hae-Joo Chang also fills Sonmi in on the uglier side of her oppression. When clones like her reach their expiration date, they’re killed and slaughtered like cows in an abattoir. Their flesh is converted to futuristic food and fed to the next crop of clones, a blunt reference to Soylent Green. In other words, not only do all Asian women look alike in the film’s viewpoint, they’re recyclable. They are literally all the same. That’s a lot of shitty sexist icing on a giant racist cake.

Sonmi isn’t the only female character who flounders under the white male gaze. Halle Berry’s Meronym in the 2321 AD plot line is forever being rescued by Tom Hanks’ creepy Zachry, a mumbling post-apocalyptic hero who keeps forgetting to kill the bad guys. Berry’s other characters fare about the same. Whether she’s in white face or not, Berry’s usually just window dressing such as a beautiful Jewish wife for a withered, ugly Jim Broadbent.

While Cloud Atlas certainly takes the prize for most ambitious makeup and swashbuckling plot, the female characters still plod through the scenes caught up in the same net of sexism that has plagued film and literary characters for a lot longer than Hollywood has been outraging Asian Americans with white actors in yellow face.

Finally, it’s interesting that the overall theme in the film (and I’m assuming the book) is freedom. No matter how grandiose or well-produced sci-fi dreams like Cloud Atlas are, when they originate from a position that won’t acknowledge its own racism and sexism, they’re shackled. These dreams never truly fly.