The Pitsburgh Steelers' star quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, has been accused of sexual assault. Again.

Very few details are yet known about the case. We just know that Roethlisberger and some buddies were partying at a club outside of Atlanta Thursday night, and were seen "mingling" with a particular group of women, and the next day, a woman from that group told local police that Roethlisberger had sexually assaulted her.

This column isn't about whether or not he "did it." (Though I tend to believe people who claim they're victims of sexual assault as a default position, both because so much of the culture doesn't, and because rates of false reporting are around 5-7%, which means, statistically speaking, it's at least 93% likely that an accuser is telling the truth.)

This column is about the illogical and dangerous defense his camp is already mounting against the allegations. Quoth his agent, Ryan Tollner, "Obviously, given the prior accusation against Ben, we are skeptical of motive, but we will continue to cooperate with everyone involved.”

Wha?

Let's break this stunning leap of logic down. What Tollner seems to be saying is that this new allegation was inspired by the previous one? That somehow, the woman accusing Roethlisberger in Georgia looked at the awesome time the woman from Lake Tahoe (who previously accused Roethlisberger) is having, and thought, wow. This is a golden opportunity to make some cash and have fun doing it?

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I've been avoiding writing about Tiger Woods, in part because so many other people are already writing about him, and in part because I think his so-called scandal is really a tempest in a teakettle. As this cheeky chart so ably demonstrates, Tiger Woods never promised us anything, and so he also owes us nothing. His wife? Sure. He owes her big time, probably more than he can ever repay. But us, the viewing public? Why should we care about whether or not a great golfer has broken his wedding vows?

Still, the story has reared its ugly head (sorry!) yet again, this time due to Woods' recent carefully-crafted public apology. And all the chatter that's followed has reminded me that, if we're going to keep talking about it and talking about it, there are at least a few important points to be made about this marginally meaningful case:

We need to have a serious, for reals talk about marriage and monogamy. Once and for all: there's nothing wrong with sleeping with lots of women (or men, for that matter). What's wrong is lying about it, and doing it without practicing safe sex. If Tiger wanted to sleep around, he just need to a) use condoms and b) not enter into a monogamous marriage. But if he didn't have the perfect wife and kids, would he have been such a marketable hero? Would he have had all those endorsements? Our culture equates monogamy and marriage with being a respectable citizen. Isn't it time we, well, divorced our moral judgments from whether or not a person has a life partner to whom they've promised sexual exclusivity? What matters is not what promises a person makes, but whether or not ze keeps them.

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I'll be honest: I'm not really a sports fan. There isn't a single sport I follow on a regular basis. (Back before the Red Sox won the World Series, I'd get invested whenever they made the playoffs, because I can't resist an underdog narrative, but that's about it.)

But between the Super Bowl brouhaha and the relentlessly addictive Olympics broadcasts, I've been watching a lot of sports and sports commentary in 2010. And as hard as it is to resist getting sucked into one of those soft-focus tinkly-piano Olympic athlete backstories, it's equally difficult to avoid noticing how retro our gender and sex politics get when it comes to sports.

It goes almost without saying that the Super Bowl has has a messed up relationship with women and sex. But men's figure skating? Women's snowboarding? Ski jumping? Downhill skiing? In 2010? Sadly, yes. To wit, just a few of the nearly infinite offenses from the past week of the Olympics:

-When introducing a profile of the top three female U.S. snowboarders - who happen to be three of the top women's snowboarders in the world, and were favorites to sweep the medals in halfpipe - NBC Olympics anchor Bob Costas didn't praise their incredible strength, crazy hard work over so many years, or the daredevil bravery it takes to get to the top of a sport like halfpipe snowboarding. No. Instead, Costas turned them into modern-day Charlie's Angels:

They are of course rivals, but they're also friends. Each with a defining aspect to their character. Kelly Clark's spirit, Hannah Teter's generosity, and the winning glamor of Gretchen Bleiler.

-At least the female snowboarders get to compete. Women's ski jumping is still not an Olympic sport, because officials are too concerned that it will hurt our fragile ladyparts! (They claim it's also because the sport isn't big enough worldwide, but it's bigger than ski cross, which got added to the Olympics this year. A sport that looks a LOT more dangerous than ski jumping, but actually allows delicate, fragile ladies to compete. Imagine!)

-The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition for 2010 features four (white, U.S., and no, I'm not linking to it) female Olympic athletes, including aforementioned snowboard champion Hannah Teter (posing in a bikini for S.I. is evidently still not enough to get you called the glamorous one?), and skiing phenom Lindsey Vonn, who overcame a painful injury to win gold in downhill. But that's evidently not the most compelling thing about her. Google "Lindsey Vonn skiier," you get 4,560,000 hits. Lindsey Vonn pictures? 5,960,000.

-Lest you think the Olympic men get a free pass, consider men's figure skating, where bitter silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko has been essentially (and very publicly) questioning the manhood of gold medalist Evan Lysacek, all because he managed to win by focusing on footwork and other less "butch" technical skills, at the expense of landing the uber-masculine (I guess?) quad jump. Is it any wonder that even the most flamboyant skater men's skating has ever seen - the incomparable Johnny Weir - refuses to discuss his sexuality in any way?

In Slate this week, Hannah Rosin argued that at least Vonn's bikini-clad romp features an adult woman actively owning her sexuality, as opposed to the more traditional Olympic eye-candy featuring 16-year-old glitter pixies on ice. There's some truth to that, though I'm not sure that posing doe-eyed for SI is exactly the highest bar for empowered sexuality.

Still, it's not surprising that sexuality, gender and sports are all tangled up. It's not even necessarily a bad thing - would we want a culture in which we collectively and intently focus our attention to an activity involving tight clothes, strong, fluid bodies, emotional passion and physical exertion, but we're not allowed to think about gender and sex? I wouldn't. But I do want a culture where more than four of the over 5,000 athletes competing at the Olympics this year feel comfortable being out as queer. (And one where any male athletes could be out would also be an improvement.) Where there are more choices than princess or vixen, stud or fag. Where female athletes get more attention for their accomplishments than for their looks, and aren't prevented from competing in the sport of their choice because we'd rather think of them as delicate sex objects than as world-class athletes.

It would be easy to let the Olympics off the hook, to argue that they just reflect the sexual culture we're living in. But, according to their own propaganda, the Olympics are supposed to be an aspirational event. A time for the world to come together to transcend our differences and limitations and embody a vision of how we could be. My vision is this: it's well past time to hold them to that when it comes to sex and gender.

Want to hear something funny? When I sat down to watch the game on Sunday I thought, maybe this year the ads won't be so bad for women. Maybe this year will mark a sea change.

[insert hysterical laughter here]

I've said plenty already about the Super Bowl's sexual culture in general, and about the Focus on the Family/Tim Tebow ad in specific, so I won't be ranting about either here (though I have to say: WTF? Tim Tebow tackles his mom? That's... somehow funny?)  Instead, let's take a look at what last night's ads taught us:

Megan Fox is so hot it's a public health hazard.

Seriously. Her much-hyped Motorola ad is a retread of every tired trope about unchecked female sexuality. It will cause destruction and injury! Even gay men can't resist it! Men are helpless to do anything to control themselves in the face of it. If she doesn't keep it under wraps people will get hurt!



A hot babe is almost as awesome as a cold beer.

Sometimes, possibly awesomer! In these ads, we learn that women are valuable because they're reward-objects for men (or in a few cases, boys, your children's toys, and what I think was a violin-playing beaver), much like beer and chips and really good tires are.

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By now, you've probably heard that there's going to be a controversial ad aired during the Super Bowl. It's an ad produced by the extreme right-wingers at Focus on the Family, and it features Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, discouraging women from having abortions. What makes the ad particularly controversial is that it represents a stark departure from CBS and the Super Bowl's previous policy of refusing all "issue advocacy" ads, notably, in recent years, several ads with politically progressive messages.

There are so many problems with this situation, it's hard to know where to start. For one, CBS only claimed they'd changed their longstanding policy on "issue ads" last week, after they started taking heat for having approved the Focus on the Family ad - far too late for any progressive group to take advantage of this stunning reversal by a) producing a spot worthy of the Super Bowl and b) raising the nearly $3 million it costs to air one.

More than that, though, it's still unclear how changed CBS's policy really is. News broke late this week that the following sweet and goofy ad for gay dating site ManCrunch had been rejected:



CBS is claiming that the ad was submitted too late and they've run out of ad space, but that's pretty unlikely given the current economic climate and the constant reports of sluggish ad sales that were plaguing the Super Bowl until the very moment this story broke. So what gives?

Well, let's take a closer look at CBS's statement on their policy change. A spokesman says that the network "will continue to consider responsibly produced ads from all groups. [emphasis mine]" But who decides what's "responsibly produced"? And on what planet is two dudes kissing "irresponsible" but the propaganda of an anti-choice hate group "responsible"?

And what about that propaganda? The ad has yet to be viewed publicly, but we know it features Tebow's mother recounting how she was encouraged by her doctors to have an abortion (she had taken some medication before she knew she was pregnant that was likely to have caused serious harm to her fetus), but decided not to, instead giving birth to Tim. So, this ad features a woman who was free to choose for herself what she wanted to do with her body, but concludes that you shouldn't be. And it also features a woman who is celebrating going against her doctor's advice because it happens to have worked out well for her, and encouraging you to do the same if it involves carrying a fetus to term, nevermind how statistically unlikely her happy ending was and how many women may suffer if they take her advice. That's certainly not my definition of responsible.

Even if CBS were applying their new policy fairly, it sets a troubling precedent. In these rough economic times, do we really want to encourage a system which sells the most influence on an issue to the highest bidder? The Supreme Court may think so, but in my book, that's antithetical to the very principles of democracy and equality. 

What do you think? Want to let CBS know? It's not too late.

(Before we get into this week's column, a note: I've been having fun playing around with formspring.me, a site where you can ask users anonymous questions. So, if there's anything you'd like to ask me anonymously, from the silly to the severe, personal to policy, just click here to have at it, and I'll be happy to answer.)

This week marked the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decison that made abortion legal in the U.S. (for at least some people. More on that later.). And television marked that anniversary by blowing my mind with awesomeness, and then breaking my heart.

First, the good. Because it's really, really good. Remember last fall, when I wrote that pissed-off column about how films and TV shows unilaterally refuse to use the word "abortion," even when they're discussing, y'know, abortion? Well, this week, two totally different shows went and did it. In episodes about characters considering abortion, both Friday Night Lights and Private Practice allowed one or more of their actors to utter the word "abortion" on network television. (And the shows didn't even sink under the weight of it. Imagine!) And one of the characters then goes ahead and actually has an abortion.

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I am not a sex worker. But if I were in DC or NYC or San Francisco, I could be arrested on suspicion of being one. (And yes, I do wear some... provocative outfits sometimes, but that's not why.)

My longtime boyfriend and I broke up this summer. Once the dust had settled, and I began to brace myself for going back out into the dating scene, I bought myself a little present to help - a cute red vinyl condom case.

As soon as that case came, I filled it with the three condoms it's designed to hold, zipped it up, and slipped it in my purse. It goes with me everywhere - the grocery store, the office, the post office, the mechanic - not because I expect to get laid in the produce aisle, but because that way I know I'll always have 'em when I need 'em. It's a small reminder that the world is full of possibility, and I'm prepared to make the best of it. (And if something should happen to happen over the ripe melons, well, more's the better.)

But that's not how the city of Washington, D.C. sees it. In their eyes, I'm not a woman prepared for safe pleasure. I'm a woman who poses a public danger. That's right: my cherry-red condom case makes me a walking red-light district, because in some areas of D.C., carrying three or more condoms is grounds for arrest on prostitution charges.

Three. Three condoms. If you think there's a chance you're getting laid, and you're sleeping with someone who has a penis, why would you ever pack fewer than three condoms? What if one rips when you take it out of the package? What if you want to do it (*GASP*) twice? Three condoms is not a lot of condoms, people. IMHO, it's the bare minimum. I once used over a dozen in a particularly memorable weekend. And I still wasn't a sex worker.

And what if I was? As has been pointed out elsewhere, all this law (and laws like it in NYC and San Francisco) are doing is encouraging sex workers to not carry condoms. You know what that's going to do? It's not going to reduce sex trafficking. It's not going to improve the lives or working conditions of sex workers. It's not going to lock up abusers or pimps. It's going to spread disease. It's going to increase the spread of STIs (including HIV) among sex workers and their clients. And those clients will spread it even further out into the general population. And those of us who aren't sex workers but don't feel like risking arrest en route to a hot date? Some of us are going to carry fewer condoms and catch and spread more disease, too. And those of us who carry lots of condoms so we can distribute them and help other people stay safe? Well, we're obviously a criminal element, aren't we?

This law isn't helping sex workers or their clients or the general population (who are somehow harmed by sex workers... working?). The only people it's helping are the governments of the cities in which it's being implemented. It's helping them look Tough On Crime. Meanwhile people are getting fatal or incurable or even just painful diseases, people are getting pregnant when they'd rather not be, women are being trafficked against their will, and sex workers struggle with some of the worst working conditions of any profession.

But you know what all the people who will suffer and die because of this asinine law have in common? They're all people who are likely deliberately having sex outside of marriage. And the people who'll get arrested because of this asinine law? They're women having sex outside of marriage. (You think any cop's gonna arrest a dude for carrying three condoms?) And in the U.S., in 2010, people who have sex in ways the abstinence-only crowd and the Catholic Bishops don't approve of are obviously disposable. So sure. Criminalize condoms. You're not hurting anyone but the sluts, anyhow, and they're just getting what they already deserve.

I'm going to sound old for a moment. I promise it's in service of something good, so bear with me, OK? Here goes:

I am so thankful that I grew up before the widespread use of the internet, blogs and online social networking. (Heck, I didn't even have email until college. Yes, I'm really that old.) You know why? Because when I grew up and started trying to be taken seriously as a professional, there was no digital trail of my youth to hold me back. And I assure you - there would have been a trail.

Would I have sexted my high school boyfriend, Andy? Would I have sent him explicit emails and NSFW pictures of myself? You bet I would have. I wanted to have sex with Andy all the time, every day, but between parental supervision and the hour drive that separated us, we got to be together in private a lot less than that. We would have been thrilled to have digital means to get it on with each other. (As it was, I was only allowed to talk with him for 10 minutes every day. This was before cell phones, too, and there was only one line in my house. I told you I was old.)

Would Andy have deliberately shared my private messages with anyone? I doubt it. He was a pretty good guy. But he miiiight have shown a little sample to his BFF Tom, just to brag a little. And Tom miiiiiight have decided to play a practical joke on Andy by stealing the photo or message and posting it to his Facebook wall. You see where I'm going with this.

But let's say that didn't happen. Let's say Tom couldn't figure out how to steal the photo, or Andy never showed it to him, or I never sent it. Let's say I got through high school with nary a pixel's indication that I'm anything but sexually pure. But then, at college, I decide to start keeping a blog of my life on campus - including my dating exploits. Or maybe I decide to write for the school paper, and I put together a first-person expose of an underground sexual culture on campus. I write about sexuality all the time now - it's not hard to imagine I would have done it then. And that's exactly what one Harvard student did - he wrote a very popular piece for the Crimson about his "use of Craigslist to look for sex with closeted Harvard jocks." Now, according to this story about him that aired on On The Media in December, he's legally changing his name so that he can become a teacher without that article haunting him. Here's what he had to say about the decision:

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When 39 Democratic members of the House of Representatives - many of them theoretically "pro-choice" - voted in favor of Bart Stupak's now-infamous amendment that makes it illegal for any federal dollars to be spent on insurance plans that cover abortion, we were told it was OK. Those of us that care about women having access to one of the most common medical procedures in America were assured it was just some political calculus, and that it would be undone in the Senate. We were also told it was in the service of the greater good - preserving a public health insurance option.

Right.

That must be why the Senate just passed a bill with almost exactly the same ban. Plus, it restores previously removed funding for the morally bankrupt failure that is abstinence-only education. Oh, and no public option.

Let's do some math ourselves. Our government - our overwhelmingly Democrat-majority-run government - doesn't want you to know about how to prevent pregnancy. But if you do get pregnant, they're refusing to help you choose abortion. So basically, in the middle of the worst recession in recent memory, if you can't afford to fund your own abortion, or buy your own separate abortion insurance with your own money, you have no right to choose what happens to your body if you get pregnant. Even simpler: if you're female-bodied, unless you're rich, one of the risks of sex will now be forced birth.

It's time for drastic action. And considering we won't have the chance to vote these fools out of office for nearly a year, we're going to have to get creative. Possibly, a little Greek. And so I humbly submit to you the question: WWLD? What Would Lysistrata Do?

The thing is, I like sex too much to suggest a full-on sex strike. And honestly, I don't want to perpetuate the idea that sex denial hurts men more than it hurts women, because I don't believe that's true. But it's half-past time for drastic action, so here's what I propose:

Stop having sex with partners who think your reproductive health is negotiable.

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Finally.

A study out of University of Minnesota this week reveals the truth that neither Hollywood nor the Religious Right want you to know: casual sex won't damage you emotionally. Not even if you're a girl!

The researchers interviewed over 1300 sexually active young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 about their last sexual encounter, and then assessed their emotional wellbeing. Guess what? The 20% who last got it on with a casual partner were no more emotionally damaged than the 80% who had most recently played with a committed partner. They weren't more depressed, and they had just as much self-esteem.

The researchers were shocked. "We were so surprised," said study author Marla Eisenberg, "The conventional wisdom is that casual sex, 'friends with benefits,' and hooking up is hurtful."

You can say that again. From abstinence-only education in schools to the anti-hooking-up book-boom of the '00s, from Salt-N-Pepa (vid above) to Taylor Swift, girls especially are taught every day that having sex outside of marriage or a committed relationship will leave us emotionally broken in ways that can't be repaired. (It's easy to pick on Taylor Swift, I know, but come on: "And Abigail gave everything she had/To a boy who changed his mind. And we cried." Really? Can she never have sex again? Did he rob her of all of her possessions? Otherwise, I fail to see how she "gave" anything more than he did, just because they had Teh Sex.)

Not shockingly, this study has received precious little media attention. But if these results are replicable, and if they could be followed-up by a longitudinal study showing that those friends-with-benefits are just as happy as their more monogamous counterparts even later in their lives, it would go a long way to revealing the anti-casual-sex argument for what it is: a way to keep women's sexuality taboo and mysterious, so it can be used to control our behavior and sell us things we don't need.

Moreover, if we could all collectively stop wringing our hands about the mythical psychological risks of "hooking up," we could get down to the actually important work of educating each other about how to prevent the real risks that come with sex - STDs and pregnancy - risks that abstinence-only education has failed utterly to deal with. And we could start having frank conversations about how each of us can decide in any given situation what we personally want and are ready for, without having some one-size-fits-none pronouncement from the culture at large to contend with. 

In her essay for Yes Means Yes, Latoya Peterson wrote powerfully about "The Not-Rape Epidemic" - the thousand ways men sexually violate women every day that don't rise to the legal definition of "rape." This week, one young woman took a stand against "not rape" that just might work.

This past Tuesday, news broke that three lacrosse players at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut had been accused of conspiracy to sexually assault the girlfriend of one of the accused players. As details emerged, it became clear that the boyfriend of the accuser had invited his buddies to "secretly" come watch while he was having sex with his girlfriend - without her knowledge or consent.

The boys lawyered up, as you do when you're charged with a felony. And then their lawyer came out with this gem:

I can appreciate that this young woman was put in an embarrassing set of circumstances through some sophomoric, college-boy antics, but there's no indication from what I can see or discern so far that there was any sexual assault there.
 

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It's that time of year, and I, for one, am glad. It's easy, when you do this kind of work, to get mired in all the horrible things that need to change, like, two decades ago, and to miss out on the fact that we've actually got a lot to celebrate. Here, in no particular order are a few of the things that are making my gratitude list this year:

-I'm thankful that Emma Thompson responded to the petitions of feminists and withdrew her name from the list of famous Roman Polanski apologists. And I'm even more thankful that Caitlin Hayward-Tapp and everyone at Shakesville had the vision and optimism to inspire her to do it.

-I'm thankful for Glee, despite its flaws, for continuing to be such an unabashedly sex-positive show. And for being so freaking fun to watch. And I'm thankful for Precious, despite its flaws, for presenting the story of an abused young black woman who manages to transcend her brutal circumstances without a makeover or a man. And for introducing us to the fantastic Gabby Sidibe, whom I hope to be seeing a lot more of on my movie screens in the near future.

-I'm thankful that Tucker Max's movie bombed at the box office. For a ton of reasons, but primarily because that means we probably won't get a sequel, or a bunch of copycats.

-I'm thankful that Amanda Hess started writing her The Sexist column for the Washington City Paper, because she makes me laugh and makes me think and makes me feel so much more sane and generally cuts through epic amounts of BS on the regular. The only part of me that's not thankful for her is the part that's jealous of how good she is.

-I'm thankful that congress passed The Matthew Shepard Act, which expands the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability, and that Obama signed it.

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So. The day has finally come. And gone. Levi Johnston, infamous babydaddy to Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol, posed for his much-hyped Playgirl shoot last Thursday. And I have some questions. And none of them are about size.

1) What if the roles were reversed? What if Palin had a son who impregnated his girlfriend? And what if, after the election and the birth, she decided to pose for Playboy. What would we be saying about her? Would she be getting puff pieces in Vanity Fair? Would she be considered a credible source by the Associated Press?

2) If Johnston were a girl, would posing nude be seen as a smart strategic move that would help launch her career as an actor and/or country singer?

3) What if the gender switch happened instead at the candidate level - what if Palin had herself been a man? Would we expect Palin to go on Oprah and lovingly invite Johnston home for Thanksgiving? Our would we expect him to vow revenge against the guy who dared sully his precious daughter?

4) What does it mean that someone who got famous solely because he had unprotected sex is now being sold to us as a sex symbol?

5) Why do so few famous dudes pose nude, and yet so many famous women do? Especially when there's so much less shame put on men for being sexual. Is it just because men don't have to be sexual to succeed in the entertainment business, but women do?

6) Since posing nude is obviously a "girl" thing to do, why does it seem to be working out so well for Levi? Is it because he isn't really quite famous yet, so has little to lose and everything to gain?

7) If Levi had knocked up the daughter of a sex-positive candidate, instead of the queen of abstinence-only education, would the scandal have been greater or lesser? Would we still be talking about him? Would we be seeing him in Playgirl?

8) When the pictures come out in January, are you going to look?

Ever since that hideous day in February when we learned that Chris Brown had beaten Rihanna, I've had serious misgivings about expecting Rihanna to represent anything other than herself - one young woman struggling, under extraordinary circumstances, to deal with the all-too-ordinary experience of being a woman who's been beaten by a man she loved.

After all, while Rihanna may have signed up to be a celebrity, she certainly never signed up to be the poster child for survivors of dating violence. Nor was it her actions that led the public to expect her to be one. So every time she did something that raised the "What kind of role model is she being?!?" question - whether it was getting back with Brown after the attack, posing in bondage gear in Italian Vogue, or releasing an ambiguous song about an abusive relationship as her first single, I tried to remember that she was just one young woman, doing what seemed best for her in a situation she never asked for or deserved.

That's why I initially avoided RiRi's sit-down with Diane Sawyer on Friday night. Obviously, with the new album out and the need to do publicity for it, Rihanna was going to have to talk about the elephant in the room eventually - it was a canny move on her part to get it over with in a high-profile interview on her terms. But I mostly felt sad for her that she had to do it - she hadn't seemed to have any inclination to talk about the incident to the press previously, and it seemed likely that she was doing it now out of necessity and not out of her own desire to speak out.

Boy was I wrong. Rihanna is ferocious in this interview - ferociously honest, ferociously vulnerable in parts, but at all times ferociously sure of what she thinks and feels about all of it, and ferociously aware of how many young girls are looking to her to show them how to think and feel about violence against women. But why am I paraphrasing when you can watch it for yourself?



As moving as it is to see her transform in front of us from a hurt girl who watched her father repeatedly beat her mother (and who feels humiliated that she found herself in a parallel situation) into a Mama Bear choosing to be strong on behalf of all the young girls watching her, what comes next is even more powerful. She has some very clear things to say to those girls, and to all of us, about whether or not being a "strong woman" can protect you from violence (sadly, no), whether being a victim of violence means you weren't strong (also: no), and whose fault the violence is at all times (the perpetrator the perpetrator the perpetrator). And then she says the most important thing of all, because it so rarely gets said:

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It pains me that I have to say this. That it's not so obvious it can remain unspoken.

By now, a lot had been written about the gang rape of of a 15 year-old girl outside a high school dance in California. And a lot of people seem to want to write off the fact that as many as 20 people watched or participated in the brutal, 2-hour assault as just the latest example of the bystander effect.

Now, the bystander effect is real. What it means is that the more people are witness to a crime, the less likely anyone is to do anything about it, because everyone thinks someone else will do something. (BTW, if you ever witness a crime as part of a group - please don't make this same assumption. Do something!)

But the bystander effect wasn't the primary force at play here. How do I know? Because people weren't just standing by, horrified. They came to the scene when they found out what was going on, called there by texts and emails. They came because they wanted to watch or participate. They weren't passively paralyzed. They were actively involved.

It's also been said that "street culture" is to blame. That local gang violence had inured these kids against the horror of what they were doing/watching. And it's true that when an entire community is poor, violence increases. When kids don't think they have any better options, gangs are more likely to seem appealing.

But let's dismount our class-privilege high-horse for a minute and consider: what if this had happened at a frat house at an elite university? It's pretty easy to imagine, because rape isn't an act that's linked to poverty. And if this hideous assault had happened in that elite setting, we'd all be saying it was allowed to happen because these are the children of the wealthy and they believe they can get away with anything.

It's understandable to want to find meaning behind such an unthinkable act. It's human to want to figure out why it happened, so that maybe we can prevent it the next time. And the sad truth is, the answer's just not that complicated.

It happened because, in the absence of comprehensive, pleasure-based sex ed from an early age, kids are learning about sex by watching gonzo porn that fetishizes violence against women.

It happened because rape is literally treated as a game by the powerful video game industry.

It happened because Whoopi Goldberg and scores of other Hollywood heavyweights made it perfectly clear that if you're talented and powerful, it's no big deal if you drug and rape a 13 year-old girl. And who doesn't want to think of themselves as talented and powerful?

It happened because when women accuse men of rape, we automatically question her motives, which leaves rapists free to rape again and again.

It happens because movies treat rape like a punchline, and pop music treats women's bodies like trophies or dolls.

It happened because we live in a rape culture. And if you're not actively working to undo that, you're supporting it. And we're all reaping what you sow. Including that 15 year-old girl who's going to have to live with this unspeakably brutal violation for the rest of her life.

I know this is supposed to be a pop-culture column, but I've got to talk about a story from real life instead this week.

I've been traveling a lot recently, talking with college students across the country about Yes Means Yes and how to create a sexual culture that's genuinely pro-pleasure and anti-rape. I love doing this - I learn so much everywhere I go, and I get to experience first-hand something I want all of you to know: we're not alone. If the schools I visit are any indication, there are thousands of students across the country and beyond that are fed up with the lies our culture tells us about rape and sex and are ready to do what it takes to make a different world - many more than even read and write on this most excellent website.

But I want to tell you about some very specific students at a very specific school. I'm not going to name the school, because I don't want to expose the students there to more risk than they've already chosen for themselves. What you need to know is that it's a Catholic university. The students there don't get sex education - they don't even get abstinence education. They certainly don't get condoms on campus, but they told me that every time a female student goes to the health center for any reason - a cold, a headache, whatever - they are given a pregnancy test. The only information they've been given about rape was a skit the RA's put together and an offhand comment made by an orientation speaker who said, "If a girl's really drunk and you have sex with her and she regrets it in the morning, that's rape, so don't do it."

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An affluent man does a big favor for the au pair employed by one of his neighbors - he replaces a ruined dress for her, a favor big enough to save her from being fired. As she's expressing her gratitude, he suggests they celebrate together - alone. She politely declines his advance, being sure to mention her boyfriend. He leaves, but returns a couple of hours later, drunk. He insists that, in return for all his trouble in getting the replacement, she "owes" him at least to try it on for him. Reluctantly, she lets him in. Once he's in her bedroom, she attempts to go get the dress, but he physically blocks her from leaving. Instead, he announces his desire to kiss her. She does not respond at all, staring at him, frozen. He kisses her passionately, and then proceeds to have intercourse with her.

Was it rape? Not if you're a character on a popular television show, evidently.

As some of you have no doubt recognized, that exact scenario played out on Mad Men last week. And while I have no doubt that show creator Matthew Weiner wrote that interaction as a rape scene, TV critics and commentators seem disturbingly reluctant to name it as such. Here's what Television Without Pity had to say:

And while I don't think he physically intimidated her (I mean, look at him, how could he?), he obviously took advantage of the situation. I think he did feel bad for her when he offered to help her out, and if she'd invited him in willingly when he first turned up maybe there wouldn't have been a problem, but she made it clear earlier that she didn't want to do this, and taking advantage of her fear of being sent home, even if he didn't explicitly say anything about that, is at the very least horribly awful and gross.

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It started two weeks ago.

Don't get me wrong - I was sold on Glee from the moment I first heard those acapella strains of Don't Stop Believin' in the promo spots for the premiere this Spring. Musical theater + camp aesthetic + high school + Journey = The Key to Jaclyn's Heart. There was never any doubt that I would love this show.

But I had no idea how much I would love the show's sexual politics. This is a show - a hit show, no less, picked up for a full season in record time - in which the villain (Quinn) is president of the Chastity Club (motto: "It's all about the teasing, and not about the pleasing"), and it's one of the things that makes her lame and annoying. Where the teen heartthrob male lead (Finn), rather than being smooth and sexually in control at all times, has an ongoing problem with premature ejaculation. And in which our awkward, try-hard adolescent heroine (Rachel) announces to the aforementioned Chastity Club, in one of the best moments of network television in the history of ever, "You want to know a dirty little secret that none of them want you to know? Girls want sex just as much as guys do." I had to pause my Tivo so I could cheer out loud.

And that was all just the second episode. It would have been thrilling enough if it were just a one-off theme, but last week we started exploring the impact of abstinence-only ed, when Quinn discovers she's pregnant, even though she & her boyfriend Finn are both theoretically virgins. When Finn asks how this could be possible, she tells him that a teacher told her that it must have happened when they were making out (clothed) in a hot tub and he accidentally came. And he buys it, because he has no actual sex education to fall back on. (For the record, it's nearly if not entirely impossible to impregnate a woman by ejaculating into your own bathing suit while you're both in a hot tub, as chlorine and heat are not friends to sperm).

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You've probably heard that a woman at Hofstra University accused a group of men of raping her, and then, a few days later, recanted her accusation. I'm not going to repeat the things people are saying about this young woman. Suffice it to say they're not kind.

For my part, my heart sank when I heard she'd recanted. I felt worry for everyone involved, and I also knew that anytime someone appears to have lied about a rape accusation, it's used forever to discredit any woman who dares to speak up about being raped. This case has already proved no different.

I hardly want to draw more attention to the story, but so much bile has been spilled and there are a few things that need to be said. Four, to be precise:

1) Anything that exists gets lied about sometimes. The fact that someone may have lied about being raped proves nothing except that human beings occasionally lie. What we know about rape reporting is that, of rapes that are reported to the police, somewhere between 2-8% turn out to be false or are recanted. And that's to say nothing of the vast majority of rapes, which are never reported to the police at all.

2) Did you notice how I just said "turn out to be false or are recanted"? Let's not confuse the two.

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Sometimes, something happens that's so messed up even a professional talker like myself doesn't know where to start. This is one of those times (via Jezebel):

Nine women were rescued Monday from a villa in Istanbul where they had been held captive for two months under the pretense that they were participating in a "Big Brother-style" reality show.

The women were filmed at all hours of the day, in various states of undress. They were encouraged to wear bathing suits and dance provocatively for the cameras. Although they were told that they were part of a reality show to be aired on Turkish television, competing for a cash prize, the company instead sold naked pictures of the women on their website and asked users to vote for their favorites. For a subscription fee, viewers could watch videos of the women online, but despite what they told the girls, the footage was never intended for television.

Where to even start? I may need bullet points to help get me through:

• The women were told that if they left they'd have to pay a $33,000 fine, yet the "production company" is claiming they weren't ever held against their will
• The nine women were all models looking for their big break.
• One of the girls was a teenager, possibly as young as 15.
• A very similar thing happened in the US earlier this year, with an added sexual assault twist! (Warning: the linked article is awful, but all the info is there.)

OK, forget it. Bullet points aren't cutting it. Commence rant:

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In 1981, when I was just 9 years old, I went on a diet.

I know this because I mentioned it in my diary. I don't know what the diet involved - probably no sweets and no seconds, at the very least. I suspect it must have been my mother's idea, but I also vaguely remember how adult it seemed, to be on a diet. It was something a grown woman would do, to make herself more appealing. Even the act of complaining about my diet felt cool and worldly.

I mention this because when I found those diaries as an adult, I was shocked to discover how young I'd been when I first tangled with voluntary food restriction. I assumed I was an outlier, a grotesque anomaly, that the fact of my childhood dieting said something about my family dynamic, not the culture at large. Turns out I was wrong. Researchers found, in 1986, that 80% of 9-year-old girls surveyed were dieting. And I'd still be wrong if it happened today, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal last week, which discussed the 1986 study and revealed, among other things, that fully 60% of today's fourth grade girls believe they have to be thin to be popular.

In the summer between fifth and sixth grade, the same summer I spent dreaming of making a living selling friendship bracelets, little more than a year after I started that diet, I made a list. Perhaps this list, too, was more ordinary than it sounds in my grown-up memory. It was a list - a written to-do list - for becoming popular.  

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A lot has already been written about Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old track wunderkind from South Africa who smashed records in her bolt to victory in the 800 meters at the IAAF World Championships two weeks ago. Unfortunately, precious little of it has been about her athletic prowess, and far too much of it has been about the accusations that she's "not really a woman" - accusations that have culminated in the IAAF forcing her to subject herself to profoundly invasive "gender testing."

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Quick: what do Kourtney Kardashian and President Obama have in common? It's not just their questionable fashion sense. No, both of them have recently been pressured out of choosing abortion before they could even properly consider it.

You may have heard that the young reality star is unexpectedly pregnant. But did you know why she's decided to have the baby? "My doctor told me there is nothing you will ever regret about having the baby, but he was like, 'You may regret not having the baby.'" reported Kardashian to People magazine. Because who ever regrets becoming responsible for an entire person when a) they had in no way been planning on it and b) they could have had a routine surgical procedure instead? And while Kourtney's doc may have been working overtime on the Guilt Train, her boyfriend had already laid enough groundwork ahead of time that he didn't have to lift a finger. Says Kourtney: "I think if I had said I'm not going to keep it, I really think he would have pushed me into keeping it." What every girl wants -- a partner who so obviously doesn't respect her bodily autonomy, he doesn't even have to bother saying so.

At least Kardashian's rich. She can afford the best care for her kid even if her babydaddy bails, and, if she had actually been allowed to choose an decided to have an abortion, she certainly could have afforded one. Not so for many, many American women, for whom abortion is literally not an option if their insurance doesn't cover it - or if they don't have insurance at all. That's why the Kardashian family doctor isn't winning my Enemy of Autonomy award this week. That honor, sadly, goes to President Obama, who last week told Katie Couric, "I think we also have a tradition of, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded health care. Rather than wade into that issue at this point, I think that it's appropriate for us to figure out how to just deliver on the cost savings, and not get distracted by the abortion debate at this station."

In other words, forcing women to give birth because they're poor and have no other options is a tradition in this country (too true), and trying to change that tradition would be a distraction. Didn't we also have, until recently, a tradition of having only white men as President?

Which brings me to another American tradition - the tradition of erasing abortion from our TV and movies.  

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Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes!

I'm honored to be writing a weekly column for Amplify starting today. Just like I did in my anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, I'll be using this space to connect the dots between the diseased attitudes we have toward female sexuality, and the ways rape is allowed to function and flourish. The title is inspired by the idea that "no means no" is not enough - until women are equally free to say "no" and "yes" to sexual expression, we're still being treated like sexual objects instead of whole human beings. And that makes it a lot easier to rape us.

Case in point: have y'all been watching More To Love, the new "plus-size" version of The Bachelor? (It's OK if you have - we all have guilty pleasures. Heck, I watch American Idol and Gossip Girl. But more on that in another column.) A lot has been written about whether it's helping or hurting the fat acceptance movement, and that's an important conversation to have. But what's making me see red is the toxic combination of the women on the show believing that the shape of their bodies make them unworthy of love or sex, and the way these very same women are made to compete for the affection of one guy on national TV.

We know very little about Luke, the guy in question, except that he favors double entendres about "juicy meat" and calls women's bodies "bangin'". Oh, and there's one other thing - he is attracted to "larger" women. And that's enough to make nearly every woman on the show fall instantly in love. 

What makes this dynamic more dangerous than the normal Bachelor dysfunction is the level of desperation the women express. In interview after interview, we hear from women who've never been on a date before, who've been cheated on and verbally abused by the dates they did have, and who clearly believe that, because of their size, this guy being paid by Fox to date them all simultaneously is their only shot at love. Say what you will about what I'm now calling The Skinny Bachelor, but the women on that show certainly know that if they don't wind up marrying the guy on offer by the show, they will probably date again.

The truth is that there are plenty of people in the world who are attracted to sexual partners who are fat, or, more generally, whose bodies don't fit the young-white-skinny-busty-ablebodied ideal that dominates our pop culture. But the media does such a good job of shoving that ideal down our throats that these women are ready to do anything - anything - to win the affections of this exceptionally-average-seeming dude, just because he doesn't find their bodies gross. And if you don't already know what a perfect recipe that is for sexual coercion or date rape, check out this clip from the premiere, where Luke tells a girl that she has to kiss him if she wants to make the first cut: 

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