3 The fact that the email specified ‘freshman skeezas’ is consistent with David Lisak’s work on ‘undetected rapists’. As he explained on NPR (3 April, 2010), rapists target the most vulnerable women on campus – freshmen. “The predators on campus know the women who are new to campus,” he said, “they are younger, they’re less experienced” (see Shapiro, 2010; see also Lisak and Miller, 2002).
4 ‘Student Footage of Frat Pledges on Old Campus’ YouTube (13 October, 2010), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLh0RMpit1k (accessed 7 May, 2011).
5 Similar stories emerge from Australia. In 2009, the highly prestigious St Paul’s College of the University of Sydney came under fire after it was exposed that a group of male college students had created and participated in a Facebook group titled ‘Define statutory’ described as being ‘pro-rape, anti-consent’. The same college had previously come under fire for a slogan in their bar reading ‘they can’t say no with a cock in their mouth’ and for awarding an ‘animal act of the year’ trophy to a male student accused of committing rape. See http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/11/13/2742684.htm and http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/bachelors-who-major-in-abhorrent-behaviour-20091109-i58t.html.
6 There are many variations on this theme, such as ‘CEO’s and Office Hos’, ‘Golf Pros and Tennis Hos’. In each, women are designated as the ‘ho’. ‘Ho’ is slang for ‘whore’.
7 The new guidelines clarify schools’ responsibilities to prevent and address sexual harassment on campus as well as articulate the importance of the civil rights to equality in education. Dear Colleague Letter, Assistant Secretary’s Office for Civil Rights, Department of Education (2011), http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201104.html (last accessed 19 May, 2011).
8 A common pattern presented in 4 recent cases I have worked on involved a young woman partying with friends who is either left in a room with 1 male friend who calls another to join him, or finds herself with 2 or more men who were friends of hers, who then rape her. Later, the men inevitably claim she consented, while she was caught completely off-guard, having been with people she’d considered her friends. See, e.g. Laura Dunn, featured on Headline News http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/04/08/exp.jvm.rape.victims.courage.hln; Beckett Brennan, featured on 60 Minutes, 11 April, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7363066n&tag=related;photovideo (accessed 7 May, 2011).
9 In a popular Nelly song called ‘Tipdrill’ the lyrics include the lines: “Now baby girl bring it over let me spit my pimpjuice, I need a tipdrill… I said it ain’t no fun less we all get some,” http://www.lyrics007.com/Nelly%20Lyrics/Tip%20Drill%20Lyrics.html (accessed 7 May, 2011). A ‘tipdrill’ is a term for basketball players lining up and taking turns scoring. In this context, it refers to ‘running train’ on a woman – men lining up to take turns having sex with the same woman.
10 In response to the Yale chanting, the Yale Women’s Center objected, and then was derided in the Yale Daily News editorial entitled ‘The Right Kind of Feminism’, http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/oct/18/the-womens-center-must-continue-to-break-the/. Following that criticism, however, hundreds of Yale students, alumni, and others signed a petition objecting to the editorial and addressing the seriousness of the rape chants.
11 I am using a pseudonym for Anne, who wishes to remain anonymous.
12 Vice President Biden spoke at the University of New Hampshire on 4 April, 2011 to address sexual violence on campus. National Public Radio covered the press conference at http://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135135544/federal-effort-targets-sexual-assaults-at-colleges (accessed 7 May, 2011).
13 The guidelines are contained in a ‘Dear Colleague Letter’ at http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-20100420.pdf (accessed 7 May, 2011).
14 See, e.g. ‘At Yale: Sharper Look at Treatment of Women’, New York Times, 7 April, 2011 found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/nyregion/08yale.html (accessed 8 May, 2011); ‘Hostile Sexual Environment at Yale?’ CBS Early Show, 4 April, 2011, found at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/04/earlyshow/living/parenting/main20050348.shtml.
Introduction
Justified as a source of gay male liberation, self pride and a valued source of much needed sex education, some (indeed, far too many) gay male academics and activists have gone to great lengths to promote and sell gay male pornography as ‘harm-free’ and ‘different from’ heterosexual pornography.
This paper rejects this trend, arguing that when we examine what gay male pornography presents and what it actually says about being gay and male today, what we find is a model of behaviour more concerned with self-gratification and the right to dominate and control than with self-respect and respect for others. Indeed, the identity politics on offer sexualises a role play that rejects compassion, affection and equality between gay men and instead promotes (through sex) homophobia and sexism, self-hate, hate for others and harm to others. As such, it must be rejected and any rights strategy that depends on it re-thought.
Gay Male Pornography: The Reality
In early 2000, I was part of the legal team for the human rights lobby group Equality Now in litigation before the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium.[37] In that case, Canada’s highest court accepted Equality Now’s argument that the production and distribution of same-sex pornography causes the same harms to equality that the Court had previously recognised within the context of heterosexual pornography in the case of R v Butler.[38]
The pornographic materials at issue in Little Sisters, and others like them, have been defended and promoted as gay male identity and a source of equality and liberation by pro-pornography and pro-gay advocates alike. An analysis of what these materials actually say about gay male identity, however, reveals that this commitment to pornography is short-sighted, anti-equality and anti-liberation.
In answering this question, it is worth noting the quotation below, found in an article in Manscape Magazine, not an issue in Little Sisters, but available nonetheless from the Plaintiff’s bookstore prior to the case being heard. It, like many of the materials defended in Little Sisters, reminds the reader that to be ‘male’ is to be empowered, but that to be male requires conformity to a clearly defined, gendered norm – a gender role according to which some are entitled to sexually abuse and control, while others, because they are descriptively less ‘male’, are socially less relevant, less equal, and not entitled to the respect, compassion, and human dignity that only true equality can provide:
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1 BA(Hons), LLB (Queen’s); LLM, SJD (Michigan); Barrister, John Toohey Chambers: Perth, Western Australia. The writing that appears in this paper first appeared in an expanded version in the author’s book on the harms of gay male pornography. See Christopher N. Kendall (2004)
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