Three a day

In the United States, more than three women are murdered every day by their boyfriends and husbands.

The Justice Department reported more than 560,000 intimate partner victimizations in the US in 2005. Domestic homicides against women rose from 2004 to 2005.

The leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is murder.

Endabuse.org provides a fact sheet with extensive citation and documentation.

Olivia Young and Linda Lovelace

In 1980, Olivia Young was a young black home nursing administrator in Janna Medical Systems, a large medical center in St. Louis, Missouri. She was invited to a meeting with the CEO of St. Louis University Medical Center and four top administrators, all men, to discuss using the hospital as a training site for nurses. As she was presenting an overview of her proposed course of training, the men interrupted to ask if she would review “one of the films we use to educate our nurses.” She agreed and the five men proceeded to run the film “Deep Throat,” which Ms. Young had never heard of. As the men giggled, the pornographic nature of the film became clear, and they began to hoot things like “We could make you feel that way, Olivia,” “Look at that dick,” and “I’ll bet you’ve never seen one this big before, have you?”

When Ms. Young began sobbing, the CEO Richard Strensrude declared “This film represents the price of doing business with Dick Stensrude!” As Linda Lovelace was gang-raped on the screen, a secretary walked in and said “Oh, you’re at it again” and Ms. Young took the opportunity to escape the room and the hospital.

At first she was sure she should not tell her husband, but after weeks in a stupor after the incident she finally told him what had happened. Her initial instinct to not tell him was understandable, as he blamed her for the incident and claimed the men wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t asked for it somehow. She withdrew from physical intimacy with him. Every time they tried to make love, movie scenes of anal intercourse and group rape intruded in her head. After several years of his rage and marriage counseling, their 16-year marriage ended. Following that, she was fired from the job she had held for 13 years because she would not drop the tort action for emotional distress she had brought against St. Louis University, the St. Louis University Medical Center, and Ricard Strensrude.

Ms. Young spent 10 years in the court systems. The court found the men not liable, and on appeal she lost at the appellate level and was rejected for consideration by the Missouri State Supreme Court and the U. S. Supreme Court. After the trial in which the jury denied her any damages, she and her lawyer found that over half of the jurors had already seen “Deep Throat” as entertainment. They were not going to acknowledge that the pornographic scenes of rape and sexual torture were used to shock, intimidate and humiliate Ms. Young.

Also in 1980, the “star” of the pornographic film that Ms. Young was ambushed with published an autobiography, “Ordeal.”

In it, Linda Lovelace described her relationship with her manager, pimp, and husband, Chuck Traynor:

When in response to his suggestions I let him know I would not become involved in prostitution in any way and told him I intended to leave, [Traynor] beat me up physically and the constant mental abuse began. I literally became a prisoner, I was not allowed out his sight, not even to use the bathroom, where he watched me through a hole in the door. He slept on top of me at night, he listened to my telephone calls with a .45 automatic eight shot pointed at me. I was beaten physically and suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter. He undermined my ties with other people and forced me to marry him on advice from his lawyer. My initiation into prostitution was a gang rape by five men, arranged by Mr. Traynor. It was the turning point in my life. He threatened to shoot me with the pistol if I didn’t go through with it. I had never experienced anal sex before and it ripped me apart. They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like garbage. I engaged in sex acts for pornography against my will to avoid being killed…The lives of my family were threatened.

In 1986, she testified before Congress, “When you see the movie Deep Throat, you are watching me being raped. It is a crime that movie is still showing; there was a gun to my head the entire time.”

Nobody was ever prosecuted for the actions against Ms. Young or Ms. Lovelace. The movie has the reputation of “bringing pornography to the middle class.” It grossed at least $100 million since its release in 1972, none of which went to Ms. Lovelace. It is considered hopelessly quaint by today’s pornographic standards.

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For more information on Olivia Young, see Chapter One of The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography, 1995, Laura Lederer, Pub. Farrar Straus & Giroux

For more information on Linda Lovelace see Ordeal and Out of Bondage

Jim Crow Museum: Hateful Things

Ferris State University in Michigan hosts a “Jim Crow Museum” of racist memorabilia.

There are samples from a traveling portion of the museum here and here and there is a YouTube video here.

There is also a companion traveling collection called “Them: Images of Separation,” which

… explores the subjugation of women, poor Whites, gays, Jewish Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans — and others. As Dr. King stated, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

You can view samples from “Them” here.

Although we would like to dream of a day where pornographic and racist images exist only as curiosities in museums, as remnants and reminders of the “bad old days,” as you can see from these exhibitions and the other items in this blog, that day is not yet with us.

Dr. David Pilgrim is the Curator of the Jim Crow museum and the traveling exhibits. You can read some of his articles and a collection of questions to which he and other scholars have written responses.

Reef Beach Shop

The “Reef Beach Shop” is another souvenir shop in Holden Beach, NC. These pictures were taken in July, 2008. In front of this store are several large signs proclaiming “50% OFF EVERYTHING! NO GIMMICKS!” It carries shirts, wind chimes, children’s toys, and a collection of horrible racist and sexist items that have to be seen to be believed.

As you pass the great whites, you are greeted with this banner in the front window:

Pirate things are even more popular than usual at the beach because of the recent Johnny Depp movies. This flag is a clever play on the word “Booty” which in pirate-speak means “treasure,” and in hate-speak means simply “sex” or “vagina.” The imperative is basically a declaration of intent to rape.

In case that sentiment might seem too subtle, peruse some of the following T-shirts that were available:

First, the ever-popular “Fucking Bozo Inside” shirt. Oops, we mean, “Female Body Inspector.” We didn’t get a chance to take a picture of the version behind the counter that added the line “Lie on the ground and spread your legs,” you will just have to take our word for it. The bold sans-serif declaration of intent to ogle and sexually harass has the added feature of being an easy-to-read aid for identifying bozos at a distance.

The first of many shirts that conflate hunting animals with guns and hunting women with … penises presumably. It also conflates women’s breasts and the trophy parts of deer’s bodies, and sex and taxidermy. It’s so humorous to imply you would like have sex with and then kill and stuff a woman and hang her on your wall! Your friends will chuckle for weeks at this amazing play on words!

The “woman-as-prey-to-my-big-gun” theme was so thrilling it was used in many different shirts, with varied degrading images of women.

I am sure if you had the temerity to suggest this shirt might be offensive, the wearer would tell you sincerely that he just really loves hunting raccoons! What’s so horrible about that?

In case you can’t read it, the punch line of this shirt is in the small text under “YOU CAN’T TAKE MY GUNS, MY DOG OR MY FLAG.” It reads “BUT FOR A SIX PACK YOU CAN BORROW MY WIFE” and then in another font concludes “A SOUTHERN TRADITION SINCE 1861″ 1861 is the year the 11 slave states seceded from the United States and the American Civil War began. From the use of this date, we are led to believe that “traditional” southern men have been enslaving their wives and pimping them out for a measly bit of beer for almost 150 years. But it’s just a joke, right? A real “southern gentleman” loves his woman, right? He’d only wear this shirt on vacation.

We’ll finish this post off with another clever conflation, this time of a woman and cooked chicken. This woman is for sale, just like chicken! She has legs, breast, [sic] and thighs just like a chicken. “Eat” has the clever double meaning of “devour food” and “have oral sex with.” Oral sex typically isn’t limited to “legs, breast, and thighs” but we can’t expect the creators of this shirt to actually know anything about that. The “with gravy” is probably a reference to male ejaculate. This shirt makes crystal clear the attitude that women are interchangeable, faceless body parts, meant only for consumption by men. The conflation with food doesn’t even register as cannibalism, because women clearly are not human to the people that create and wear items like these.

Wings

A visit to Holden Beach, North Carolina produced a startling array of horrible things. This store, Wings, was our first stop. It looks like a normal, family friendly store. It carries bathing suits, kids’ toys, and lots of souvenirs, in case you want a little piece of hate to take home with you.

This shot glass was our first clue that this might not be the place for us. Above the “Holden Beach” script at the bottom are the words “The Perfect Woman!” and an image of a pair of legs topped by huge breasts and a rear end. The “perfect woman” has no head. We’re not sure why it has legs, presumably to carry the breasts and butt around. We searched for a “Perfect Man!” glass, perhaps one with a penis atop a wallet, to no avail.

Near the shot glasses were the mugs shaped like breasts, a staple of beach-junk shops. Even though it is illegal for a woman to show her breasts in public, even though breast-feeding in public has caused outrage and uproar, even though there is legal precedent for it being OK to sexually harass a woman because she is simply not wearing a bra, these are perfectly legal and normal to sell. Our searches for household items in the shape of disembodied parts of men’s bodies were fruitless.

Near the mugs was a large display of horrible images of black people. This item shows a wooden carving of black people as savages.

We aren’t sure what this item is for. It was with a collection of “Jamaican” tchotchkes.

It looks an awful lot like this “vintage” humidor found on Ebay, doesn’t it?

But as long as they are Jamaican, not American, it’s OK, right?

This is all just in good fun, right?

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More shockingly horrible items were found in the T-shirt section, for those who want to wear their hate instead of put it on a shelf. You will have to decide which of these is the worst:

This shirt shows that men that use strippers are quite aware that women sex workers are desperate, that they only take such degrading jobs because they have to support their families. And the men think that is pretty darned funny.

This is the front of the next shirt.

This is the back.

The text makes it clear that the creator and proud wearers consider a woman to be nothing more than a collection of genital parts, and a woman that has sex with a man is a “slut.”

We’ll end with this shirt, since everyone “loves a happy ending”

We’re honestly not sure what this shirt is trying to convey. Is the creator sophisticated enough to know the horrific ending of “Madame Butterfly”?

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Some stats for you: the racial makeup of Holden Beach is 98.73% White, 0.38% African American, 0.25% Native American, 0.25% Asian, and 0.38% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.13% of the population