Trump is evil. Let's smash the MAGA movement to smithereens at the polls this November.
But what will keep me up is the following factoid given in today's post:
"A report published today in JAMA Internal Medicine estimates that in the 14 states that outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organ…
Trump is evil. Let's smash the MAGA movement to smithereens at the polls this November.
But what will keep me up is the following factoid given in today's post:
"A report published today in JAMA Internal Medicine estimates that in the 14 states that outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, 64,565 women became pregnant after being raped."
That number is not the total number of rapes in just 14 of the 50 states. It's the subset of the total that resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. That limited number is shocking. Even after Trump is defeated, our country will not be safe for women. WTF? Who the f** are we? Is Trump just the smelliest symptom of a deeper rot?
Those statistics aren't shocking at all. That's reality. I write an FBI series about crimes against women and children and am constantly doing research and talking to law enforcement about rape statistics and I don't even believe that the much more realistic 'one out of four women' comes close. I don't know ANY woman who hasn't suffered significant sexual harassment and/or assault. Zero. But rape is a serial crime, and it's 10-30% of men who are responsible for over 90% of rapes. Good men need to be condemning and coming down hard on the rapists so we can start taking this soul-crushing crime against humanity seriously.
And as I always point out, given the surge of Christofascism - there's no Commandment against rape. That is an enormous moral and legal problem.
The Christian-fascist drumbeat is that women and people of color are less-created to serve the men in charge. Women and poc are to be submissive. Therefore crimes like rape aren’t actually crimes, because the guys are entitled to take what they want-other peoples’ feelings/wants/needs be damned. I see it here in Florida where it is preached in churches that men are the head of the household and women are to submit.
Alexandra Sokoloff, I’m sure many of us... I’d say all but who knows?...thank you for your work.
For me, this count of rape is a shock. However, as I thought about that, I recalled how I was violently attacked in my own family home by a date; and managed to fend him off, just, without my Father’s help, who had heard noise and called down from the floor above.
Next morning my face: black and blue.
As the guy exited our home he pushed the front door open again saying: “this is what you need!”
Oh my God, Samm. That is horrifying. I'm so, so glad your father was there and YOU were strong enough to get rid of that monster.
I've heard hundreds and hundreds of stories like yours. And, like you had to think for a moment to even remember this horrific experience, I find it often takes women a while to even start remembering the many incidences of near escapes and frightening situations. I have a good friend who for years swore up and down she'd never experienced anything like sexual assault. And then she was talking about her family one night and it was clear she'd been molested by her older brother. I asked her some gentle questions and it finally came out that he'd raped her for years. We all have a self-preserving tendency toward compartmentalization. That's why MeToo was so, so important and continues to be.
Thank you for your courage, back then and now, for telling your story.
Thank you Alexandra Sokoloff. Initially I thought how ‘small’ my experience was compared with ie your friend and a friend of mine, whose Father raped her and her youngest sister for years. Of course huge trauma resulted to both of them with the younger sister committing suicide. This in an upper middle class family. Rape does not care about nation, class, race, anything. No. It knows no boundaries.
It’s wonderful people like you and many of Heather’s followers, who continue to fight this horror that make me hope some day, someway this will ebb and even end.
Agreed Alexandra....I don't know a single woman who has escaped rape, sexual assault or significant sexual harassment. Many have experienced it all. It's why we are constantly looking over our shoulders, are leary of stepping onto an elevator with only one or two men, regret that it is hard to trust men, but still try with all our might.
Having said that, I do believe there are some men who don't harass, assault, or abuse women. But even many of those are in disbelief (as in not believing) of all of the bad male behavior I've experienced and shared in an effort to explain the Me Too movement. Which leads me to agree that society has underplayed, cloaked, and ignored the role men play in unwanted pregnancies and sexual abuse of women (why else are women, not men, who have unwanted pregnancies and seeking abortion or medically need an abortion now the focus of societies wrath?)
This is huge! And the very fact that Roe could be reversed reveals how covert misogyny is in US society...and how no one, who ignores (does not actively address) this problem, is innocent.
Susan, I don't just -believe- there are some men who don't harass, assault, or abuse women — I KNOW it. If the statistics I quoted (and have found across multiple studies) are correct, then 30 percent of men are responsible for almost all sexual violence. The other 70 percent of men need to know that, stop letting those sociopaths tar them with the same sociopathic brush, and say NO - this is not how men act. NO, we're to going to let you freaks get away with it any more. ENOUGH.
Then we have to ask Alexandra, if only 30% are responsible then how is it that nothing is being done? Complicity is not an innocent act. Believing that women (knowingly or unknowingly) are culpable in violence against them, is not an innocent act.
Police officers are 2 to 4 times more likely to have been involved in sexual abuse than the average citizen. Their District Attorney offices would be complicit, because they can't do business without the police. So the whole judicial system becomes complicit.
I ask myself that all the time, Susan. I've written six books trying to lay out the complexity of issues. It's so many factors. Obvious ones - like centuries of laws (and church teaching) that said women were men's property, and no commandment against rape in the Bible. Men controlling the laws, the media, art, etc. and framing things from their own perspective without fully depicting women as human, and keeping women largely out of the top levels of all of those offices and professions. A whole history of law enforcement that skews patriarchal and conservative. The fact that women are vilified and re-victimized in the process of reporting rape and in the courts.
And less obvious but crucial ones, like the fact that rape is a serial crime. A proportionately small number of predators are committing the vast majority of rapes. And for some ungodly reason, we are not calling out sociopaths and making it a priority to identify them, early, and contain the damage they're likely to do.
And the fact that there are systemic, appalling holes in law enforcement. Like the rape kit backlog. Like the abject failure of police departments to log violent sexual crimes into databases like VICAP - rendering a system that should have been a game changer in rape arrests and convictions essentially useless. (Canada's version is a smashing success compared to the US's VICAP.
I could go on and on. I do! But I do it in fiction to get these statistics across emotionally, through readers' investment in my characters.
Thank you for the work you do. When I first started in law enforcement, I somewhat resented getting assigned every rape case that came to patrol to handle. As I gained experience, I lost the resentment. It is, however, the reason that I never went into detectives. Our patrol division was relatively small (2-4 main office deputies on duty at a time, and anywhere from 0-10, depending on the time of day, other uniformed deputies serving other patrol functions as resident deputies, contract deputies, or forestland deputies; we had at various times 4-6 deputies assigned to detectives.) Four of my closest friends ended up with detective assignments at various times. One of them, who was outstanding, said "I knew I had to get out of detectives when I started praying for a homicide so I could focus on something other that p's and v's and a's." Sex crimes were about 90% of the caseload.
Ally, thank YOU for stepping up to do that painful and vital job. It really is infuriating that women detectives get boxed into rape investigations, but I have no doubt that survivors would almost always rather have a woman on the case.
You should never have told me you're in/were in law enforcement. I will try not to plague you with technical questions.
Rape is a weapon of war, as you definitely know. What does that say about the state of our republic with MAGA looming large in our legislatures and courts?
Alexandra, I believe your observations. What I was going to accomplish with my post is to build an impetus to study rape as a public health issue. You state that every woman experiences sexual harassment or rape in her life (in only our society?). The study implies that in broad numbers and extrapolating from the 14 states (without getting into the weeds of actual population numbers in those states vs. total US population), over 1 million rapes occur in the US each year. Is that separate from "just" harassment or is that part of a continuum? Are environmental or cultural factors that affect this? Could this topic be out in the open, so that people squirm as they face the reality within the society they support? To change ourselves, we have to know ourselves better.
Jerry, I'm not quite sure if this is the answer to the question you're asking, but most studies will separate harassment and rape into separate categories, if you look at the full study. Sometimes the media will quote these two categories as one number, though. Numbers vary in different countries. (South Africa has the highest incidence of rape in the world.)
I would hope those two categories are separate. I am sure there are different classes within each. Just as critical race theory provides tools to perceive and hopefully change behaviors rooted in our slavery - enriched society, I'd like to see a "critical relations" theory that helps us recognize and hopefully change abusive and dangerous sexual behaviors. In not taking about personal preferences, but about unwanted harassment, abuse, and physical assault. The Me Too movement tried to shine light on this, but more is needed. If we are going to achieve the ideal this country's founders endeavored to emulate, we need the knowledge and tools to do it, and the prevalent sexual violence shows that our society has much work to do.
Separately from my call to publicly study our cultural tendency to sweep sexual harassment and rape under the rug, I'm curious about the title of your FBI book series. You are prolific enough for me to get lost in all the Amazon book descriptions, so I'm hoping to save a bit of time. You answer will contribute to my physical and mental health, because when I don't feel like walking, I will still head out and listen to a good audio book.
(I can't drive while listening because my reality is rhe story, and so I don't perceive details like red lights or squirrels on the road as diligently as I should..)
Jerry, thanks for your interest and your ability to get so lost in a story. The first book in the series is Huntress Moon, and my audiobook narrator is superb. All books in the series free with an Audible account or trial. Here's the link -
That figure stunned me, too. And I didn't even calculate, as you so brilliantly did, that that number is "only" a subset of all the women who've been raped during that time in those few states. Why are so many men forcing themselves on women? What is going on with men?
At the same time you ask your good Q, Jude, another site online answers it.
This other site examines the epidemic of men in the U.S. with no friends, no personal ties to any peers, mentors, or colleagues.
Just another side effect, Jude, from what happens to a country when its billionaire, corporate commercial, and dark money forces organize to dehumanize the schools (as the Powell memo did beginning 1971 through its new Heritage Foundation, its new ALEC, and its expanded Hoover Institution).
"What is going on with men?" might expand to ask what's going on with much of social media, too (its hate algorithms also replacing what humanities used to do) -- no, Jude?
Phil, how do you explain thousands of Catholic priests who rape and molest? They live in communities or have access to colleagues, friends, etc, and have been protected from justice by those same communities.
It isn't about sex, it is about power. Who is more easily dominated, adult women, or young boys? I have read (and sadly, it was a time ago, and I do not recall the source) of how many nuns either aborted or gave birth. In that article, it was posited that it was how there became Catholic "orphanages"...
That is not how Catholic Orphanages came about. In the pre antibiotic ages there were many deaths that left children orphaned. The early monastic orders took them in and established orphanages and hospitals.
I don’t know what you read or where but every nun I’ve known has been a fine upstanding individual, faithful to her vows.
When I was a boy, and going to Catholic services every Sunday morning, I heard the chants, refrains, and prayers in Latin, so I knew those using it mediated heaven and its ways.
I learned Latin at about the time I was going into puberty, which was just about the time all the girls around me had already gotten breasts -- as if I could equate these things in biology, nature, also with Latin, which had names for all that.
Intelligent of me? No, of course not. I was stupid, entirely naive, stupid, over-trusting of authority, the schools, the church.
About the same time came Vietnam, civil rights, the women's movement, rock-&-roll.
And now, Catherine, you think I can explain the "thousands of Catholic priests who rape and molest"?
Not at all. I’m just not certain loneliness is part of the equation. BTW, I grew up in the same environment as you and protested Vietnam, even though my dad served two tours there. I thought priests had all the answers and then, we learned more.
Misogyny is a socially accepted norm. That is what is going on with men. It's like institutional racism....it is so pervasive, many don't see it or understand it or recognize it.
Years ago, when the media was full of the Lorena Bobbitt case, I asked male family members to choose between castration and death and without exception, they all said, “I’d rather be dead.” Interesting.
Not exactly the same, but perhaps indicative. In Roots when an escaped slave (i forget his name at the moment) is offered a choice of castration or the loss of a foot (when the ability to work productively was the only thing close to a guarantee of survival) he chose to lose the foot.
What about a series based on the “Equalizer” concept, where justice is dispensed outside of the law? Maybe an incognito squad of women (and/or men) who show up and castrate rapists. I thought about Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, hiding because one never knows when justice will be delivered. Perhaps, just the fear of that occurring would be a deterrent. Who could write that screenplay?
We’re having constant ads on radio, TV, online for Viagra and it’s generics. But then, let’s ban birth control! And they wonder why women are furious and working so hard to take them down.
My orthopod stopped prescribing Celebrex for arthritis because it could cause heart issues. Then he laughed and said but anyone can get Viagra and that too can cause heart issues. It’s all about priorities.
This is a frighteningly sad reality that we have so much bad and evil to contend with ... and it’s not all related to ignorance and stupidity! In life we really have to encounter the good, the bad and the ugly as well as those among us who are just plain despicably. evil!!!
Even as a women’s health nurse of many years I found that number shocking too. It’s gut-wrenching to realize that it’s a lowball number since not all will have been counted.
Yes he is just a symptom of a National pathology and he is taking tens of millions exactly where they want to go. The rest of us have to figure out how to stop this. So far, the timid DOJ has not been helping as much as it could.
One thing we have become, Hoyt, is being ruled by dark money billionaires.
Another thing we have become is being ruled by those who support an American former president who has asked the Supreme Court to declare him above the law.
Also being ruled by genocidal Russian oligarchs and their genocidal priests in long skirts and jewelry. Being ruled, too, by royal Saudi murderers. Israeli far-right settlers busy stealing land. U.S. university administrators who speak wonk, have zero humanities, and profit by having students crippled by debts to banks. K-12 administrators all in service to standardized testers. Legally free manufacturers of AR-15s happy for their 11 million civilian customers. By nationalists such as Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, an idiot woman Congress person from northwest Georgia and another idiot Congress woman from Colorado. Social media billionaires and their algorithms for hate and divisiveness.
Tens of thousands of Ivy League grads in finance who floated the most corrupt of the former Soviet Union's nomenklatura and by overseeing the off-shoring of millions of U.S. working class jobs to profit the Chinese cadres and other dictators abroad.
Trump is evil. Let's smash the MAGA movement to smithereens at the polls this November.
But what will keep me up is the following factoid given in today's post:
"A report published today in JAMA Internal Medicine estimates that in the 14 states that outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, 64,565 women became pregnant after being raped."
That number is not the total number of rapes in just 14 of the 50 states. It's the subset of the total that resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. That limited number is shocking. Even after Trump is defeated, our country will not be safe for women. WTF? Who the f** are we? Is Trump just the smelliest symptom of a deeper rot?
Those statistics aren't shocking at all. That's reality. I write an FBI series about crimes against women and children and am constantly doing research and talking to law enforcement about rape statistics and I don't even believe that the much more realistic 'one out of four women' comes close. I don't know ANY woman who hasn't suffered significant sexual harassment and/or assault. Zero. But rape is a serial crime, and it's 10-30% of men who are responsible for over 90% of rapes. Good men need to be condemning and coming down hard on the rapists so we can start taking this soul-crushing crime against humanity seriously.
And as I always point out, given the surge of Christofascism - there's no Commandment against rape. That is an enormous moral and legal problem.
The Christian-fascist drumbeat is that women and people of color are less-created to serve the men in charge. Women and poc are to be submissive. Therefore crimes like rape aren’t actually crimes, because the guys are entitled to take what they want-other peoples’ feelings/wants/needs be damned. I see it here in Florida where it is preached in churches that men are the head of the household and women are to submit.
100% Jen. And it's not just in Florida that churches preach female submission. Not by a long shot.
Our former president endorses the practice.
Exactly. And it's one reason a lot of people support him.
Alexandra Sokoloff, I’m sure many of us... I’d say all but who knows?...thank you for your work.
For me, this count of rape is a shock. However, as I thought about that, I recalled how I was violently attacked in my own family home by a date; and managed to fend him off, just, without my Father’s help, who had heard noise and called down from the floor above.
Next morning my face: black and blue.
As the guy exited our home he pushed the front door open again saying: “this is what you need!”
Oh my God, Samm. That is horrifying. I'm so, so glad your father was there and YOU were strong enough to get rid of that monster.
I've heard hundreds and hundreds of stories like yours. And, like you had to think for a moment to even remember this horrific experience, I find it often takes women a while to even start remembering the many incidences of near escapes and frightening situations. I have a good friend who for years swore up and down she'd never experienced anything like sexual assault. And then she was talking about her family one night and it was clear she'd been molested by her older brother. I asked her some gentle questions and it finally came out that he'd raped her for years. We all have a self-preserving tendency toward compartmentalization. That's why MeToo was so, so important and continues to be.
Thank you for your courage, back then and now, for telling your story.
Thank you Alexandra Sokoloff. Initially I thought how ‘small’ my experience was compared with ie your friend and a friend of mine, whose Father raped her and her youngest sister for years. Of course huge trauma resulted to both of them with the younger sister committing suicide. This in an upper middle class family. Rape does not care about nation, class, race, anything. No. It knows no boundaries.
It’s wonderful people like you and many of Heather’s followers, who continue to fight this horror that make me hope some day, someway this will ebb and even end.
Agreed Alexandra....I don't know a single woman who has escaped rape, sexual assault or significant sexual harassment. Many have experienced it all. It's why we are constantly looking over our shoulders, are leary of stepping onto an elevator with only one or two men, regret that it is hard to trust men, but still try with all our might.
Having said that, I do believe there are some men who don't harass, assault, or abuse women. But even many of those are in disbelief (as in not believing) of all of the bad male behavior I've experienced and shared in an effort to explain the Me Too movement. Which leads me to agree that society has underplayed, cloaked, and ignored the role men play in unwanted pregnancies and sexual abuse of women (why else are women, not men, who have unwanted pregnancies and seeking abortion or medically need an abortion now the focus of societies wrath?)
This is huge! And the very fact that Roe could be reversed reveals how covert misogyny is in US society...and how no one, who ignores (does not actively address) this problem, is innocent.
Susan, I don't just -believe- there are some men who don't harass, assault, or abuse women — I KNOW it. If the statistics I quoted (and have found across multiple studies) are correct, then 30 percent of men are responsible for almost all sexual violence. The other 70 percent of men need to know that, stop letting those sociopaths tar them with the same sociopathic brush, and say NO - this is not how men act. NO, we're to going to let you freaks get away with it any more. ENOUGH.
Then we have to ask Alexandra, if only 30% are responsible then how is it that nothing is being done? Complicity is not an innocent act. Believing that women (knowingly or unknowingly) are culpable in violence against them, is not an innocent act.
Police officers are 2 to 4 times more likely to have been involved in sexual abuse than the average citizen. Their District Attorney offices would be complicit, because they can't do business without the police. So the whole judicial system becomes complicit.
Jeff, yes, it's horrific.
I ask myself that all the time, Susan. I've written six books trying to lay out the complexity of issues. It's so many factors. Obvious ones - like centuries of laws (and church teaching) that said women were men's property, and no commandment against rape in the Bible. Men controlling the laws, the media, art, etc. and framing things from their own perspective without fully depicting women as human, and keeping women largely out of the top levels of all of those offices and professions. A whole history of law enforcement that skews patriarchal and conservative. The fact that women are vilified and re-victimized in the process of reporting rape and in the courts.
And less obvious but crucial ones, like the fact that rape is a serial crime. A proportionately small number of predators are committing the vast majority of rapes. And for some ungodly reason, we are not calling out sociopaths and making it a priority to identify them, early, and contain the damage they're likely to do.
And the fact that there are systemic, appalling holes in law enforcement. Like the rape kit backlog. Like the abject failure of police departments to log violent sexual crimes into databases like VICAP - rendering a system that should have been a game changer in rape arrests and convictions essentially useless. (Canada's version is a smashing success compared to the US's VICAP.
I could go on and on. I do! But I do it in fiction to get these statistics across emotionally, through readers' investment in my characters.
Thank you. So well said.
Thank you for the work you do. When I first started in law enforcement, I somewhat resented getting assigned every rape case that came to patrol to handle. As I gained experience, I lost the resentment. It is, however, the reason that I never went into detectives. Our patrol division was relatively small (2-4 main office deputies on duty at a time, and anywhere from 0-10, depending on the time of day, other uniformed deputies serving other patrol functions as resident deputies, contract deputies, or forestland deputies; we had at various times 4-6 deputies assigned to detectives.) Four of my closest friends ended up with detective assignments at various times. One of them, who was outstanding, said "I knew I had to get out of detectives when I started praying for a homicide so I could focus on something other that p's and v's and a's." Sex crimes were about 90% of the caseload.
Ally, thank YOU for stepping up to do that painful and vital job. It really is infuriating that women detectives get boxed into rape investigations, but I have no doubt that survivors would almost always rather have a woman on the case.
You should never have told me you're in/were in law enforcement. I will try not to plague you with technical questions.
Fire away. One of the topics I comment on frequently are police use of force issues, and sometimes hostage negotiations issues. Two of my side duties.
Horrifying
Rape is a weapon of war, as you definitely know. What does that say about the state of our republic with MAGA looming large in our legislatures and courts?
Forced birth is the MAGA weapon of war. But they're decriminalizing rape, too.
Alexandra, I believe your observations. What I was going to accomplish with my post is to build an impetus to study rape as a public health issue. You state that every woman experiences sexual harassment or rape in her life (in only our society?). The study implies that in broad numbers and extrapolating from the 14 states (without getting into the weeds of actual population numbers in those states vs. total US population), over 1 million rapes occur in the US each year. Is that separate from "just" harassment or is that part of a continuum? Are environmental or cultural factors that affect this? Could this topic be out in the open, so that people squirm as they face the reality within the society they support? To change ourselves, we have to know ourselves better.
Jerry, I'm not quite sure if this is the answer to the question you're asking, but most studies will separate harassment and rape into separate categories, if you look at the full study. Sometimes the media will quote these two categories as one number, though. Numbers vary in different countries. (South Africa has the highest incidence of rape in the world.)
I would hope those two categories are separate. I am sure there are different classes within each. Just as critical race theory provides tools to perceive and hopefully change behaviors rooted in our slavery - enriched society, I'd like to see a "critical relations" theory that helps us recognize and hopefully change abusive and dangerous sexual behaviors. In not taking about personal preferences, but about unwanted harassment, abuse, and physical assault. The Me Too movement tried to shine light on this, but more is needed. If we are going to achieve the ideal this country's founders endeavored to emulate, we need the knowledge and tools to do it, and the prevalent sexual violence shows that our society has much work to do.
Separately from my call to publicly study our cultural tendency to sweep sexual harassment and rape under the rug, I'm curious about the title of your FBI book series. You are prolific enough for me to get lost in all the Amazon book descriptions, so I'm hoping to save a bit of time. You answer will contribute to my physical and mental health, because when I don't feel like walking, I will still head out and listen to a good audio book.
(I can't drive while listening because my reality is rhe story, and so I don't perceive details like red lights or squirrels on the road as diligently as I should..)
Jerry, thanks for your interest and your ability to get so lost in a story. The first book in the series is Huntress Moon, and my audiobook narrator is superb. All books in the series free with an Audible account or trial. Here's the link -
Audio: https://amzn.to/47U2x4K
ebook: https://amzn.to/3SwAC6w
Happy walking!!
Reading the first book starting tomorrow! Thanks for the links.
Thanks. I didn't know if that was part of the series you mentioned, but I had already just downloaded it using an Audible credit.
That figure stunned me, too. And I didn't even calculate, as you so brilliantly did, that that number is "only" a subset of all the women who've been raped during that time in those few states. Why are so many men forcing themselves on women? What is going on with men?
At the same time you ask your good Q, Jude, another site online answers it.
This other site examines the epidemic of men in the U.S. with no friends, no personal ties to any peers, mentors, or colleagues.
Just another side effect, Jude, from what happens to a country when its billionaire, corporate commercial, and dark money forces organize to dehumanize the schools (as the Powell memo did beginning 1971 through its new Heritage Foundation, its new ALEC, and its expanded Hoover Institution).
"What is going on with men?" might expand to ask what's going on with much of social media, too (its hate algorithms also replacing what humanities used to do) -- no, Jude?
Phil, how do you explain thousands of Catholic priests who rape and molest? They live in communities or have access to colleagues, friends, etc, and have been protected from justice by those same communities.
It isn't about sex, it is about power. Who is more easily dominated, adult women, or young boys? I have read (and sadly, it was a time ago, and I do not recall the source) of how many nuns either aborted or gave birth. In that article, it was posited that it was how there became Catholic "orphanages"...
Agreed. It is about power and domination. Men are raped also.
Yes they are. I have a friend whose son is a victim of male on male MST.
That is not how Catholic Orphanages came about. In the pre antibiotic ages there were many deaths that left children orphaned. The early monastic orders took them in and established orphanages and hospitals.
I don’t know what you read or where but every nun I’ve known has been a fine upstanding individual, faithful to her vows.
Latin, Catherine.
When I was a boy, and going to Catholic services every Sunday morning, I heard the chants, refrains, and prayers in Latin, so I knew those using it mediated heaven and its ways.
I learned Latin at about the time I was going into puberty, which was just about the time all the girls around me had already gotten breasts -- as if I could equate these things in biology, nature, also with Latin, which had names for all that.
Intelligent of me? No, of course not. I was stupid, entirely naive, stupid, over-trusting of authority, the schools, the church.
About the same time came Vietnam, civil rights, the women's movement, rock-&-roll.
And now, Catherine, you think I can explain the "thousands of Catholic priests who rape and molest"?
Not at all. I’m just not certain loneliness is part of the equation. BTW, I grew up in the same environment as you and protested Vietnam, even though my dad served two tours there. I thought priests had all the answers and then, we learned more.
Misogyny is a socially accepted norm. That is what is going on with men. It's like institutional racism....it is so pervasive, many don't see it or understand it or recognize it.
That stood out to me, too. What are we doing, as a country, to stop men from raping women?
Can’t believe I’m going to write this but it has been a personal wish that men who rape or molest children should be castrated.
Years ago, when the media was full of the Lorena Bobbitt case, I asked male family members to choose between castration and death and without exception, they all said, “I’d rather be dead.” Interesting.
Not exactly the same, but perhaps indicative. In Roots when an escaped slave (i forget his name at the moment) is offered a choice of castration or the loss of a foot (when the ability to work productively was the only thing close to a guarantee of survival) he chose to lose the foot.
I remember that. Roots was must see tv.
That would be the cure.
My crude thought: Diesel fuel soaked log. The member firmly affixed to the log. A dull knife. Light the log on fire. There are two choices...
What about a series based on the “Equalizer” concept, where justice is dispensed outside of the law? Maybe an incognito squad of women (and/or men) who show up and castrate rapists. I thought about Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, hiding because one never knows when justice will be delivered. Perhaps, just the fear of that occurring would be a deterrent. Who could write that screenplay?
Good question!
We’re having constant ads on radio, TV, online for Viagra and it’s generics. But then, let’s ban birth control! And they wonder why women are furious and working so hard to take them down.
My orthopod stopped prescribing Celebrex for arthritis because it could cause heart issues. Then he laughed and said but anyone can get Viagra and that too can cause heart issues. It’s all about priorities.
Excellent point
This is a frighteningly sad reality that we have so much bad and evil to contend with ... and it’s not all related to ignorance and stupidity! In life we really have to encounter the good, the bad and the ugly as well as those among us who are just plain despicably. evil!!!
Even as a women’s health nurse of many years I found that number shocking too. It’s gut-wrenching to realize that it’s a lowball number since not all will have been counted.
Would love to know the increase in unwed mothers since Dobbs, especially in underaged girls.
Yes he is just a symptom of a National pathology and he is taking tens of millions exactly where they want to go. The rest of us have to figure out how to stop this. So far, the timid DOJ has not been helping as much as it could.
Jack, one of the problems is that most of these enforcement agencies are run by, and predominantly composed of men.
One thing we have become, Hoyt, is being ruled by dark money billionaires.
Another thing we have become is being ruled by those who support an American former president who has asked the Supreme Court to declare him above the law.
Also being ruled by genocidal Russian oligarchs and their genocidal priests in long skirts and jewelry. Being ruled, too, by royal Saudi murderers. Israeli far-right settlers busy stealing land. U.S. university administrators who speak wonk, have zero humanities, and profit by having students crippled by debts to banks. K-12 administrators all in service to standardized testers. Legally free manufacturers of AR-15s happy for their 11 million civilian customers. By nationalists such as Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, an idiot woman Congress person from northwest Georgia and another idiot Congress woman from Colorado. Social media billionaires and their algorithms for hate and divisiveness.
Tens of thousands of Ivy League grads in finance who floated the most corrupt of the former Soviet Union's nomenklatura and by overseeing the off-shoring of millions of U.S. working class jobs to profit the Chinese cadres and other dictators abroad.
Thanks for asking, Hoyt.