"Practice runs for Ben Franklin Middle School's cross-country team are getting scary. Less than a month ago, a 17-year-old Valparaiso boy was arrested for allegedly shooting at the runners with paintballs. On Monday, a 16-year-old Valparaiso High School student was arrested for allegedly yelling a threat at a girl running with the team. According to police, a red older-model Buick slowed behind the pack as the girls ran south on Campbell, near Northview, around 3:45 p.m. on Sept. 5. A teen in the back seat leaned out the passenger-side window and allegedly yelled, "Keep going or I'll rape you," at a sixth-grader."
"Much has been written on the many sinister ways that the adult entertainment industry and the fashion industry work to objectify and exploit women. But social critics have the tendency to lump these two different creatures together, along with the snarling behemoth that is the rest of Pop Culture. The Media, so goes the feminist refrain, compensates for America’s deep-rooted cultural anxiety over female independence by portraying starving stick-figures/beauty queens of impossible perfection/Barbie doll fuck toys and insisting that real women be Just Like Them, or else suffer a life of lonely, flabby s
"Girls and women suffer the most harm from a culture awash in misogynist pornography, but boys and men are hurt, too. It is important to discuss this hurt both for pragmatic reasons, and out of genuine concern for these boys and men. In order to stem the tide of cruelty, callousness and brutality toward girls and women that is now mainstream fare from the porn industry, men and boys in sufficient numbers will need to make the decision to stop paying for porn magazines, videos, and Internet porn sites. Some men will be motivated to give up their porn habits as they develop a greater sensitivity to the damage that eroticized cruelty does to girls and women – inside and outside the porn industry. But altruistic concern for harm done to women can not motivate anywhere near as many men and boys as enlightened self-interest. In other words, if they can be shown that porn hinders rather than facilitates a healthy sex life for men, there is at least a chance that enough men will reject it to truly make a difference. But unless heterosexual men perceive that they have a personal stake in a sexual culture that is not dominated by the cartoonish version of sexual fulfillment created by middle-aged businessmen in window-less studios in the San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles, it is hard to see how the current trend toward greater acceptance of sexualized brutality will be reversed in coming generations."
"And while blaming the music industry for the downfall of feministkind's Billboard sales has a certain catharsis, let's skip the red herring and aim for the mothership. Far away from Chick Music-ville in said consumer-driven universe, feminist music faces enormous hostility from anyone who buys into the analogy of boy:girl [four dots above] cool:sissy [four dots above] universal:esoteric. Thanks to feminist movements of yore, women have infiltrated certain previously male-dominated fields with increasing success, yet femininity itself (whatever that means) has miles to go before people quit using the word "girly" as an insult. Artists and bands who refuse to hide their feminist politics find themselves shuffled into the Chick Music pile, never to be heard from again. This predicament has thwarted feminism's reach in mainstream music that desperately needs a healthy dose of political activism from musicians other than Eminem.And what a long road ahead of us. We are a culture that now cherishes our adventurous, aggressive tomboys but balks at boys who cry, nurture, and listen to chick flick soundtracks. People will gender anything from cars (Forbes snidely dubbed Vin Deisel's car in the film 2 Fast 2 Furious as "way too cute and girly to be a male protagonist's choice" ) to alcoholic beverages (Sex on the Beach wears pink, Guinness wears blue). Far from mere neutral assessments of which sex prefers which car or cocktail-though statistically, men do buy Dodge Rams at a much higher frequency than women-gender labels provide covert ways to rank masculine objects over feminine ones in an age when people can no longer openly rank men over women."