What was he wearing?

Or, Questions nobody ever asks when a man is raped

She’s telling him he will spend his life in prison. (Chicago PD season 10)

What’s the worst thing that can happen – to a man?

Like – what’s a fate worse than death – for a man?

Apparently, it’s rape.

Let me back up.

Turns out that after Omar Qaddafi was captured, he might have been sodomized. (Which is a nice way of saying rape that happens to men.)

Amid mounting questions about just how and when Muammar Qaddafi died, a GlobalPost analysis of video footage suggests a Libyan fighter sodomized the former dictator after he was captured near Sirte.

As GlobalPost reports:

A frame by frame analysis of this exclusive GlobalPost video clearly shows the rebel trying to insert some kind of stick or knife into Gaddafi’s rear end….

CBS News

According to Vincent Bevins, who wrote If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, other dictators cracked down on protests and protestors after what happened to Qaddafi because they didn’t want what happened to Qaddafi to happen to them. Rape was the worst thing. For them.

And Qaddafi thought so, as well: According to Annick Cojean, a French journalist who wrote Gaddafi’s Harem, he used rape as a weapon.

Annick Cojean: Gaddafi had a harem of women kept in the basement of his residence, in little rooms or apartments. These women, obligated to appear before him in their underwear, could be called at any time of day or night. They were raped, beaten, subjected to the worst kinds of sexual humiliation. For Gaddafi, rape was a weapon … a way of dominating others — women, obviously, because it was easy, but also men, by possessing their wives and daughters.

Similarly, he forced some of his ministers to have sex with him. (Ed. AKA “rape.”) He did the same with certain tribal chiefs, diplomats and military officials over whom he wanted to get the upper hand.

Have you noticed that when rape is threatened in art, it’s men who are being threatened with it?

I can’t think of instances where women are threatened with rape.

But I can think of many instances where women actually are raped.

Rape is so common for women that it’s just part of the scenery.

A lot of the time, we don’t even call it rape.

Remember in 8th grade, when we studied Greek mythology, and there were all the stories about virgins getting pregnant by the gods? “Zeus came to her in the form of gold coins/a bull/a swan.”

Not, “Zeus raped her.”

Imagine if we actually used the word “rape” to talk about what happens to women.

If we didn’t normalize men having their way, even in stories.

What if we used the word “rape” when we taught mythology to 8th graders? And taught girls that it’s not OK for men to have sex with them against their will? And taught boys it is not OK for rape women, even if you turn yourself into a swan?

Seriously – how many of us – female and male – internalized this crap when we were kids?

How come the easiest way for a cop – in art – to strike fear into the heart of a male suspect is to warn him that he will be raped?

Why is it so bad if it happens to men? But often dismissed if it happens to women?

When it happens to women, men (and some women) ask what the woman was doing to deserve such a thing. They ask what she had been drinking. They scold her for having gone to his dorm room.

There are thousands of unprocessed rape kits. Judges worry about ruining the lives of promising young men.

There’s no worry about the victims.

Again, trying to get a suspect to talk by telling him what life in prison will be like. (Chicago PD, season 10)

Do you remember Clayton Williams’ rape joke when he was running against Ann Richards?

That joke helped him lose the race.

Today, it would probably help him win.

Clayton was an obsessive talker. He began a patter about the weather and the fog as he filled a blue tin cup with beans. He sat down on a metal folding chair and rocked back on the hind legs as he spooned beans into his mouth, chattering between each bite. The roundup had to be delayed, he said, because of the fog. The calves would get down in ravines and low areas and be missed, forcing a repeat of the roundup. Nope. Nothing to do but wait until the fog lifts. Get another cup of coffee, another cup of beans.

Bad weather is like rape, he said; “if it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”

By that evening, Clayton Williams’s remark had spread all across the nation via the Associated Press, and he begrudgingly apologized without fully understanding why he was doing so. “If anyone was offended, I apologize deeply,” Williams said with the news media huddled around him in an Alpine steakhouse. It was “just a joke” made at a campfire in a man’s world. “That’s not a Republican women’s club that we were at this morning,” he said. “It’s a working cow camp, a tough world where you can get kicked in the testicles if you’re not careful.”
Texas Monthly

Women who know things are dangerous

And we must burn them

Witches are a thing in Galicia in Spain. There are shops all over with witches for sale.

My grandmother didn’t get to go to school after she finished 8th grade. She wanted to, but her family was poor and she needed to work.

But she knew that you need to let the strudel dough rest for a few hours before you pull it.

I argued with her, telling her that Joy of Cooking said it needed to rest only 20 minutes.

No, she answered. A few hours.

After several batches of strudel with torn dough, I finally heeded her words and did it her way.

It worked. My dough stretched without tearing.

Years later, I read about the science behind letting dough sit. Letting it sit lets the glutens relax, etc, etc, etc.

My grandmother didn’t know the why but she did know the how. She had the knowledge that her own mother had given to her and of her experience.

Women know things.

Edward Jenner has always gotten the credit for discovering/inventing vaccination. His is the name I learned in school.

But Mary Montagu inoculated her daughter against smallpox almost 75 years before Jenner’s first experiments. And Mary Montagu learned about inoculation in Turkey from “illiterate old Greek and Armenian women.”

[Mary] Wortley Montagu, a smallpox survivor with a disfigured face, took the risky decision to inoculate her daughter by making tiny cuts on her daughter’s skin and rubbing in a small amount of pus from a live smallpox sore.

“If [Wortley Montagu] hadn’t inoculated her daughter, we may never have gone on to find a cure for smallpox,” writes Jo Willett….

This gave the child, known as “young Mary”, a very mild dose of the disease, Willett said.

“Normally, with smallpox, you might have several thousand spots on your body. An inoculated child would probably have about 30 spots and then a few days later they’d be absolutely fine again, running around and having fun.”

Wortley Montagu had learned about the practice of inoculation in Turkey, where her husband had worked as the British ambassador. “When she got there, she went to Turkish baths and saw women without any smallpox marks on their skin. That was a wake-up call.”

In 18th-century Turkey, inoculation was a common “folk practice”, typically carried out by “illiterate old Greek and Armenian women”, Willett said. “She asked them about it and analysed it, and decided it was worth the risk.”
How Mary Wortley Montagu’s bold experiment led to smallpox vaccine – 75 years before Jenner

Women know things.

I asked a Spanish woman in Galicia about all the witches.

“They were women who knew how to heal,” she said with exasperation. “They knew things. But the men didn’t like that. So the men decided that they would call the women ‘witches’ and tell everyone that being a witch was a bad thing.”

Women know things.

When I was a little girl and learned about the Salem witch trials and other the other witch hunts, why didn’t I ask, “Who thought it was a good idea to burn women alive?”

Why didn’t I ask, “How come they burned mostly women?”

Why didn’t I ask, “Who were the women accused of witchcraft and why were they targeted, especially as we know that witchcraft doesn’t even exist?”

Why did I accept the premise that

Witches (who can actually cause bad things to happen) exist
So of course we have to set them on fire?

Women’s health versus limp dicks

“We haven’t been able to study [hyperemesis gravidarum] because it only happens to women.”

@netflixisajoke
pills are scawy #amyschumer #birthcontrol #standup
♬ original sound – Netflix Is A Joke

So anyway they have chewable Viagra now.

God forbid a man not be able to get a hard-on when he wants.

Researchers believe that endometriosis — a disease where the tissue forming the inner lining of the uterus is found outside of the uterus such as within the fallopian tubes, ovaries, bladder and intestines — affects more than 6 million women in the U.S. and as many as 200 million women worldwide….

On average, women wait as long as seven to 10 years for a diagnosis…
Good Morning America

While women wait for a diagnosis, they’re in pain.

And once they’re diagnosed, there’s still not a cure.

But we have chewable Viagra.

Erectile Dysfunction Market Size to Reach Revenues of USD 4.7 Billion by 2026

Vendors are focusing on technological advancements and improvements to develop advanced treatment options for impotence/erectile dysfunction. The main aim of vendors is to develop a treatment that is faster, more effective with fewer side effects. These advancements in the treatment of ED were observed to expand in the market, and more options are likely to be available in the upcoming years.

Several new device technologies for ED treatment are introduced in the market. One of the technologies is the low-intensity shock wave extracorporeal therapy (LI-ESWT), which is a quite promising method in treating erectile dysfunction. This therapy is already proven to be effective in cardiology, in the case of kidney stones, and observed recent success in reversible ischemic tissues of the heart and fractures. The LI-ESWT is a wand-like device placed near different areas of the penis, and it releases acoustic waves, which interact with the tissues and release angiogenic factors leading to improvement of blood circulation.
PR Newswire 2021

“more options are likely to be available in the upcoming years.”

Thank God men won’t be limited to the dozens of ED solutions available to them now.

Thank God.

Pee-pee emergency

When the world is still a Männerclub and our pee-pee emergencies are true emergencies

Peeing is my life.

I feel like half my life is spent looking for someplace to pee and the other half is spent in the line waiting for that place to pee.

I spend another half worrying about not being able to pee if I need to.

If you’re any good at math, you will notice that I spend more than my entire life on peeing and you are correct.

But – don’t we all worry about not being able to pee if we need to?

And don’t we all plan our day accordingly?

My friend’s 8th grade daughter was passing out at school. (Was that it? Some kind of serious symptom, anyhow.)

They finally figured out that she was super dehydrated.

Because she wouldn’t drink anything during the school day.

Because the school restrooms were problematic.

Not having a place to pee is actually a thing. It’s a way women have been and are controlled.

It’s called the urinary leash.

In the olden days, they didn’t have public restrooms for women. Because women weren’t supposed to stray that far from the house.

Women weren’t supposed to pee. Or at least to be known to pee. It was unladylike.

(Upper-class women, that is. Working-class women were a whole other thing, as they are now. Some things never change.)

When the suffragettes started getting together, one of the things they had to find was a place to meet where they could pee.

One of the reasons there were no public toilets for women in London in 1878 is because the city councils in London, which consisted of all men, wouldn’t vote for them.

One of the reasons the city councils consisted of men who wouldn’t vote in favor of women’s issues was because women couldn’t vote.

One of the reasons women couldn’t vote is because it was hard for them to find places to meet where they could pee. If you can’t meet for an extended period of time, you can’t plan and organize.

Notice that technological changes, most notably the London Underground Railway, led to socioeconomic changes — “increasing number[s] of women (working)” outside the home — which, in turn, raised issues related to women’s “health and social morality,” which could be resolved if each district in London were to support a pay toilet for women with one free stall — and an attendant to ensure “social morality.” The all-male local councils of London were unresponsive to this request, but their debates over the proposed use of public funds brought the issue of women’s bodily needs out of the closet and into the pages of the Times.
Of Moral Reform and Equal Rights to Respectable Peeing, The MIT Press Reader

I toured an old hotel that was built and operated in the 1850s in Wisconsin. There was no indoor plumbing. At night, guests used the chamber pot under the bed. If you were sleeping on the floor in the big communal room on the third floor – that is, the cheap place, which of course you wouldn’t do if you were a woman because what woman would sleep in a room with total strangers (unless you didn’t have the 30 cents it cost for a private room versus the one penny it cost for the communal room, which could have been some women so yeah – there you are – women on the floor with strangers, not sleeping very well), you used the chamber pot in the corner of the room.

The chamber pot. The one chamber pot.

In the morning, the 12 year old hired girl, who lived in and who slept in the larder, had to empty all the chamber pots. Which meant she had to climb down from the third floor to the first floor carrying a pot of pee and poop, over and over. Including in the winter.

In the book Stasiland, Anna Funder describes her tour of the museum of the former Stasi headquarters.

We pass a toilet with “H” for “Herren” on it. “They only needed a men’s bathroom,” she says. “Women couldn’t get past colonel rank and there were just three of them anyway. This was a Männerclub.”

I was in the front yard. My neighbor’s four year old came racing up the sidewalk.

“Hi N!” I called. “What’s goin—“

“PEE-PEE EMERGENCY!” she yelled at me as she ran past me to her front door. “PEE-PEE EMERGENCY!”

Oh honey. Get used to it.