can we PLEASE stop talking about Michelle Obama's fashion and get back to the incredible work she does?

Quick, name one designer that Michelle Obama has worn in the past six months. Now tell me the name of her initiative against childhood obesity. 

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a tad tired of seeing full-fledged reports and photo time lines of Michelle Obama's wardrobe choices. She's beautiful, yes. And has killer arms. Like most women with her level of education, she mixes expensive pieces with dresses from Target. Sometimes everyone loves her choice and sometimes people are divided. But here's my question: why is what she wears even an important enough "issue" for people to be "divided" over? Aren't abortion and gun control enough for Americans to have foaming-at-the-mouth arguments about?

I just love what this photo, by rosae posey, does. It makes the audience examine the notion that a woman is defining a part of her identity with the length of her skirt. That somehow a woman is making a statement about what sort of woman she is with some arbitrary line on her legs. (After all, where is the line between "provocative" and "asking for it?" There isn't really one, of course).

It also made me think again about how men are rarely, if ever, forced to make a statement about their sexuality with their choice of clothing.

Share this photo if you can, and see what kind of conversation starts around it. It'll be nothing if not interesting. 
source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roseaposey/7173294256/in/photostream

Are there really evolutionary reasons for gender differences?

A recent NY Times article titled "Darwin was Wrong about Mating" caught my eye, as I'm never a fan of the whole "it's biological" argument about supposed differences between men and women. You should read the whole article, but I wanted to point out a few key things I took away from it.

A few researchers have been testing previous studies that "prove" that men are more interested in casual sex and less selective of their sexual partners. However, some researchers tested this out by using a fake lie detector, and found that when men were not hooked up to it, the numbers reinforced the idea that men have more sexual partners than women. But when they were hooked up to a machine that they believed would go off if they lied about the number of actual sexual partners, the numbers shot down. Both men and women reported sleeping with an average of 4 partners. (Actually, women's average was 4.4 to men's 4.0 - take that, gender stereotypes).

Some further thoughts on findings like this from the article:

"But the fact that some gender differences can be manipulated, if not eliminated, by controlling for cultural norms suggests that the explanatory power of evolution can’t sustain itself when applied to mating behavior. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve pushed these theories too far. How many stereotypical racial and ethnic differences, once declared evolutionarily determined under the banner of science, have been revealed instead as vestiges of power dynamics from earlier societies"

So let's think about that - just as scientists used to find bogus data to "prove" that white people had larger brains than black people, or that women were ill-suited to life outside the home, so is it still possible that so-called scientific findings are used to enforce current societal power dynamics. After all, why even question men being promiscuous and not invested in the lives of their children if it's all biological and there's nothing you can do about it?

But according to this article, these gendered traits are not biological, but probably more a reflection of societal norms. Pretty cool.

So what does it all mean?

rape is never a joke. ever.

This weekend, I went to the house of a new friend for a dinner party of sorts. This friend, a male, is an all-around great guy: smart, kind, funny, and genuine in his insistence on helping me carry heavy things up the stairs.

So when another guest at the dinner, a female, walked into his house and said something like "God, it gets dark so early now, walking alone in this neighborhood makes me I feel like I'm about to get raped," I didn't expect this response from him: "Here's my thing. Trust everyone till you get raped."

He said it in such a light-hearted, easy, joking way. And it really fried my egg, both because of the insensitivity of the comment, and because of being once again confronted with the fact that even wonderful guys who genuinely respect women (or at least really really seem to) are still capable off an off-the-cuff jokey rape comment.

Thankfully, I have never been the victim of a sexual assault. But we all know that sexual assault is often a common part of the life experience of American females. I think almost any lady who went to college has seen the statistic about one in four women experiencing an attempted or completed rape while in college, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And this number seem better than in actually is, since only 54% of rapes are reported to the police. (here's a (notso)fun fact: even with 46% of rapes being reported, only 3% of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. Hope you didn't think the justice system in America was anywhere close to good).

So, now that we've established how common rape is, let's go back to my friend's comment about how we women should just trust everyone until we get raped. Because there were about 6 women in the room, it's more than likely that least one of us had been the victim of a sexual assault. When he said this, I looked around to try and see if anyone was blatantly offended, but there were other conversation. No one seemed to be visibly upset, but then, these sorts of comments are so common that if there was a victim in the room, she'd probably become pretty skilled at hiding those feelings.

If there was a victim in the room, and in other similar cases, no woman should ever have to have her assault made light of. It simply reinforces a feeling that she is under a man's control, that even after the act she will have to live with shame and hurt, all the while people say things to let her know that it actually wasn't even a big deal, so much so that they can make dumb remarks that aren't even close to witty about the act of rape.

Even if you were 100% sure that no one around you was anything close to a victim of sexual assault, you still shouldn't make a joke about rape and talk about it the same way you would talk about stubbing your toe. Remember the victim who died recently in India after being gang-raped and thrown out of a bus afterwards? So hilarious! Said no one, ever.

So bottom line is, guys (and girls), no matter how much you respect women, don't make rape jokes. It's likely that a victim is within ear shot, and it's also just repugnant to make light of sexual assault.

check out this graphic

Check out this graphic the next time someone pulls the "but what about all the guys who are falsely accused of rape?" line. It wraps up the horrible stats about how little rapes are reported, and, of those reported rapes, how few of them a tried for rape, and how a tiny percentage spend any time in jail.

54% of rapists are never even accused.
97% of rapists will never spend a day in jail. (RAINN)

2013: The Year to End Rape

warning: this post is graphic.

I don't have any original thoughts to report, but I just wanted to pass on an incredible new site that I found: Women Under Siege. Part of Women's Media Center, it highlights instances of sexualized violence around the world, and writer Lauren Wolfe recently decreed that 2013 be the year to end rape.

She describes the gruesome story that made its way through the news before Christmas: how a 23-year-old female medical student in India was randomly chosen by a group of 6 men to be the victim of a disgustingly horrifying gang rape and assault.

Wolfe writes how her body was "destroyed by the bodies of the men who allegedly assaulted her and also by the rusting metal bar doctors say they used to penetrate her. The bar removed part of her intestines."

This image and thought has stayed with my for days now - the agony that woman must have felt is incomprehensible.

Women's Dignity March on Jan 2, in Dehli, India

After being hospitalized, the woman died from her wounds a few days later. Wolfe writes: "It has taken an attack that lies nearly outside of comprehension to prompt demonstrations, but the outcry has begun."

Thank God.

Were this woman's death to go unnoticed, as one of the countless rapes that occur every every year, her death would become even more tragic. This gruesome act must be the beginning of a movement. It must be the catalyst to bring a world struggling to admit the realness and prevalence of rape into the light. We must use it as a way to begin the discussion about rape in our own country - and while reports of this terrible nature are not common in America, rape is nevertheless a common act that is not bound to the third world or people of different ethnicities and cultures.

So, here's the action: talk about this rape. Think about the terror that women in some countries live with every day, and how even in America and the rest of the first world, it is basically a statistical certainty that there has been a time in every woman's life when she has felt unsafe. For some women, this feeling is a constant reality. Talk about what happened in Dehli, talk about what happens here, and talk about what needs to be done to change the paradigm, whatever you believe that to be. Talk talk talk. Get the conversation going. That's how historical change is started. This is the year for open conversations about sexual violence, about rape, about how to end it, and for taking action. This is the year to end rape.