Padlocked Jeans & Phi Kappa Tau
Item One: For the past 12 years, a 40-year-old man in Veracruz, Mexico has subscribed to the practice of padlocking his 25-year-old girlfriend into her jeans each morning, presumably so she cannot cheat on him. After years of regularly suffering the excruciating discomfort of not being able to go to the bathroom when she needed to, she finally went to police, who arrested the man. She told police officers she was always afraid to cut the belt loops through which the padlock was secured for fear of what her boyfriend would do to her.
I must admit I had never heard of this particular type of modern chastity belt, but when I Googled “padlocked jeans” in search of an image, I was stunned to find that this is not at all uncommon.
But this case in Mexico was not an example of some mutually consented S&M or bondage game. This was about a man believing he owned and controlled “his” woman, even to the extent of limiting her bodily functions. This represents a mindset, and it is the mindset behind the ongoing sexual abuse of women.
The most distressing part to me of this entire episode is that after the man’s arrest, the woman refused to press charges.
I recently asked my friend Allison Leotta, the novelist and former sex crimes prosecutor in District of Columbia Superior Court, what was the single most surprising thing about her experience as an Assistant United States Attorney. She replied that it was the very large percentage of women who refused to press charges or testify against their husbands/boyfriends/lovers, even after repeated incidents of severe physical and/or sexual abuse. In those situations, Allison was always afraid that the next time she saw one of these women would be in a body bag.
Item Two: One of the enlightened brothers of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity chapter at Georgia Tech University published a guide for pledges and upper class men on how to “succeed” with girls at parties.
Among the techniques is plying them with copious amounts alcohol and asking to dance. If they don’t want to dance, cut your losses and move on to another girl.
“Here is how to dance: Grab them on the hips with your 2 hands and then let them grind against your dick. After that slowly alternate between just putting your hand across their stomach, but make sure don’t go to (sic) high (keep it under the boob) or too low (don’t try to finger her . . . yet).
It gets worse from there and the closing salutation is “In luring rarebit,”.
Okay now, my first reaction is that if I had ever been this young man’s English teacher and gave him a passing grade, I would hang my head in shame. But secondly, this and everything that follows – from the “tongue on tongue” to the “stick your hand up her shirt” to the “butt grab” – indicates at the very least a prevailing attitude about women. If this emotional midget wrote and circulated this “memo,” it was clearly because he thought it was acceptable in the culture and context in which his fraternity operated.
Few of us are so naive or prudish as to believe that sex does not or should not exist on campus, but there is nothing in this apparent attitude that suggests or even implies actual intimacy or mutual consent. This attitude is purely predatory, and the “girls” in question are reduced to objects.
Is it too much to expect of “college men” that they show a little bit of dignity and class? Because you know what? “Girls” actually like that.
Mr. Olshaker:
Sadly, you have really touched on a prevalent problem in this article. Not just that sexual abuse exists in many forms, but we live in a culture that actually promotes it. The really scary thing to me is that girls and women seem all to eager to objectify themselves, somehow not comprehending that objectification is the first step in abuse. And it appears to me that this is happening in leaps and bounds in modern society.
One of the most disturbing things that I have ever seen are the girls in Russia, the UK, and Japan who are noted as “living dolls” or “real life barbies” and spend their lives, money, and energy fully expended to make themselves look like dolls and anime figures, and then–as if that is not bad enough–some of them actually have paid service webcams and interaction sites. So, essentially they are making it even easier for themselves to be victimized.
As to the prosecution of sex offenders/abusers, sadly this is a joke. It is a pitiful joke the amount of time most offenders spend in prison even when they are arrested and taken to trial. They impose sentences on children and adult victims which those victims have to live with every single second of their life, and some of them get as little as months long sentences–even for the most atrocious infant rapes. It makes me nauseous just to know that these monsters are walking around. Why is it so hard for some people to understand that there are some things you just don’t come back from. A man or woman who rapes an infant is useless and should be culled from society in one manner or another, not given a laughable sentence, a few weeks in sex therapy, and released because they finished the “official” prisoner sex offender program and gave the psychologist/psychiatrist the answers they wanted to hear so they could get access to their victim set again. In older children and adult victims that do not press charges or in which charges are not filed by the state due to victim non-cooperation, that also is sad. Repetitive sexual abuse is just as detrimental to human mental health as any other type of torture, regardless if it is “violent” or not. The psychological dynamics are intricate and complicated and frightening and can form weird attachment disorders similar to Stockholm syndrome. In the cases of children, particularly in cases of incest, it is actually quite common for children to confess the abuse and then to say No, I made it up, because it is just easier for them (and everyone else) to deal with. All around, it is just sad, as those who are victimized are repeatedly victimized–sometimes even by themselves.
Gracias,
MD Rice
MDRice,
Re: your great comment:
“In the cases of children, particularly in cases of incest, it is actually quite common for children to confess the abuse and then to say No, I made it up…”
This is the thing people have trouble understanding, and it happens not just to kids but to abused adults. When there’s abuse, the desire for approval intesifies, and victims will often align with them because they see giving them this loyalty under such unmerited circumstances as their ultimate chance to finally gain their approval. They will spend their lives seeking this approval from someone, if not the abuser. It’s a life sentence unless they have extraordinary help and luck working past it.
I’ve seen women who suffered abandonment who spent their lives looking for ways to pull the one who abandoned them into their lives and make them love them.
A very good friend of mine never even really felt welcome when she’d make her yearly trek to her estranged dad’s but would arrive and do all the work, grocery buying and cooking uninvited.
Later, she would adopt an extended family member’s child and the conditions of the adoption were she had to take the child to see relatives so many times a year. This made her very happy. Now she had the best excuse in the world to more or less insinuate herself into his life and into his siblings’ lives. She traveled to her dad’s home, bringing a bed and furnishings to make the required room for the child to stay in. He didn’t try to help in any way, and she didn’t even ask his permission, because this was her all-access pass. It just made me so sad to see it, but in her case he has come around a bit now and is interacting more finally, so it was worth it, I guess. But many more desperate efforts of the mistreated go unrewarded.
Cornerstone,
Thank you for this beautifully written post. Your wisdom in this area is very obvious.
Gracias,
MD Rice
I don’t know how it is in Mexico, but in the U.S. criminal charges are brought by the state, not by the victim. If I remember, this law changed in the 1970s sometime and it was changed specifically for the reason you mention, which is the overwhelming number of women afraid to press charges.
So whether the State presses charges or not is up to them. If the victim is clearly not going to testify and that is the only proof they have, then they will likely drop charges. But in most cases, there would have to be physical evidence in the form of marks on the body or at least testimony by doctors or someone who’d seen it for the man to ever even be picked up. So in many cases when the State drops charges or fails to file charges, they would have gone ahead with it but just didn’t bother. I’m in Texas, and I can tell you that they are very loathe here to punish men for domestic abuse. I believe it’s shameful the number of cases that they decide not to file charges on and I believe they often use the woman’s lack of cooperation as an excuse to not spend the money to do it. Because it’s not really up to her. It’s up to them.
The reality in many places is that even if they successfully prosecute, the man may do no time, and that alone is enough to scare the victims off from testifying.