Photo essay

Rape is glorified in the photo essay, “Bedtime Stories” in the Nov. 23 issue of the UWM Post.

At first glance, the essay appears to be depicting the devastating effects of sexual assault. However, the column written by Diego Costa incoherently suggests that some women may enjoy “objectification” or being a “perennial patriarchic victim.” This may be true for some women, but it is categorized as sado-masochism, not rape. Rape victims do not secretly desire to be victimized.

“Bedtime Stories” may have been an attempt to communicate a new idea or publish a flashy, artsy layout. But these images are not acceptable imagery, and these ideas are definitely not new. It only perpetuates the stereotype that women “really want what they get.”

The average Post reader will interpret this photo essay as a woman being forced to have “unexpected sex” who feels sympathy for her rapist and “rejoice(s)” after her attack.

Simply, the UWM Post has condoned rape as an enjoyable game many women secretly desire to play. This should not and will not be tolerated on the UWM campus.

Colleen Bisher

Post should include statistics on rape

I am writing in regards to the Nov. 23 edition of the Post and the photo essay, "Bedtime Stories," by Diego Costa and Sara DeKeuster on page 11.

This photo essay is blatantly offensive and harmful to women. From the pictures to the text, everything about this photo essay trivializes rape and makes it seem like little more than "unexpected sex." Rape is serious and it happens on college campuses. Would you like to know some of the realities and facts of rape? Would this help put your photo essay in context?

65% of attacks are unreported, making sexual assault the "silent epidemic." Sexual assault remains the most drastically underreported crime.
20% - 25% of women will be raped during their college career.
3% of college women nationally have experienced rape or attempted rape during the academic year. This means, for example, that a campus with 6,000 coeds will have an average of one rape per day during the school year.
13% of women are stalked during the academic year, and each stalking episode lasts an average of 60 days.
90% of women know the person who sexually assaulted or raped them.
75% of the time, the offender, the victim, or both have been drinking.
42% of college women who are raped tell no one about the assault.
5% of rape incidents are reported to the police.
10 times more rapes are reported to crisis lines than are reported to the police.
42% of raped women expect to be raped again.

Source: American Association of University Women (http://www.aauw.org/laf/library/assault_stats.cfm).

Put this in your paper. And get this through Costa’s head.

We can assure you that rape has happened to women before in dark parking lots (on this very campus) and we can also assure you that women usually don't "give in" in "a Stockholm Syndrome state of sorts." Women who have been raped are clearly not experiencing "post-coital melancholy" or feeling "guilty" or full of joy.

How dare the UWM Post allow this misogynist piece to appear in print. How dare the UWM Post take the experiences of women who have been raped and who fear being raped and turn them into a photo essay about sexual fantasy and "animalistic desire."

Did you not think of what this would do to women who have been raped? Did you not think of what message this photo essay might send to men about women and rape? Did you not think at all?

Each time I look at these pictures and read the captions, my heart breaks and I am filled with anger. Turning terror, violation, assault and unwanted sexual intercourse into "unexpected" and wanted sex is not acceptable “news” in a student newspaper where the fear of being raped and the reality of being raped are nothing to fantasize about.

And to tell women that they need to be “freed from feminist constraints” is to tell women that “no means no” means nothing, to tell women that to be free from the fear of rape, to wish for the desire to walk alone at night to your car are ridiculous, trivial thoughts because after all, most women really want to be raped by a mysterious stranger.

Decades of work in the feminist movement are to the UWM Post and Costa, apparently worth nothing at all.

Would this story be any different for Costa if it had been a gay male, walking alone in a dark parking lot and being the “unexpected” victim of a violent gay bashing? Why is the violent act of a man raping a woman something that Costa, and by extension, the UWM Post, something that can be turned into little more than something that exists as "unabashed" female sexuality?

How dare Costa and the Post write that women need to be “freed from feminist constraints” and that women need to be “objectified” and “taken by force.” This is the message that many women have taken away from this photo essay and we are not going to stay silent about the realities of rape. It is not fantasy. It is not “power disguised as powerlessness,” it is not wanted and “unexpected” sexual intercourse.

This article condones rape and adds to the rape culture that exists on this college campus and on most others. Men need to learn that no means no, women need to know that their fears and concerns for their safety in dark parking lots are respected and taken seriously. This article does not, as Costa asserts, depict the fantasy of “a single woman” but, as the text introducing the piece ask about the desires of “every woman”? How dare Diego Costa and the Post allow this to happen and to ask questions about “every woman’s” animalistic desire that result in the answer of being raped by a stranger. The UWM Post needs to learn that enough is enough.

I demand a public apology from the Post and from Costa and DeKeuster to be printed on the front page of the next edition of the UWM Post.

In addition to this apology, we also demand that the Post print facts and information about campus rape and about the day-to-day realities and fears of rape that many, if not most, if not all women are faced with. We also demand serious consequences for Costa, as this is not the first time he has used his position at the Post to espouse misogynist views (simply pick up any past issues of the Post, esp. the ‘Lesbians Inside’ issue).

The UWM Post does not simply circulate to UWM students, it is distributed throughout Milwaukee. This rape glorifying photo essay has reached women across the city, women who do not need to have the traumatic experiences of rape and the real, every day fear of rape, treated like something that has every right to happen because after all, “she asked for it.”

Jennifer Curtis Durnall
Graduate Student
Lesbian Alliance of Milwaukee Board member

Art used to celebrate eroticized rape

As a fellow male, I challenge Diego Costa to acknowledge his photo essay as a contribution to rape culture. According to Bell Hooks, “We live in a culture that condones and celebrates rape.”

Under the pretext of “art,” you celebrate rape by eroticizing nonconsensual sex. You blur the boundaries between sexual fantasy and sexual victimization with captions such as “unexpected intercourse,” and you portray women as objects deserving and desirous of sexual violence with subtitles like “woman lays motionless,” “inert and weary,” and “guilty and rejoiced.”

You reproduce the culture of fear constructed by rape by producing a strange man in a parking garage as the violator, and you legitimize rape by suggesting that “giv(ing) in” to “unexpected intercourse” results in a sensual “post-coital melancholy.”

Your “art” reinforces male supremacy built upon rape culture. Publicly apologizing for your contribution to violence against women and stepping down from your (abused) positions of power at the UWM Post will be acceptable if not sufficient remuneration for your offense.

Peter Barwis
Graduate Student

Objectification end doesn’t jibe with photo essay

I'm writing in regards to the photo essay, "Bedtime Stories." It seems the photos advocate forceful, unwanted sex. Oddly, this isn't the most offensive aspect of your essay: it's the justification behind the acts depicted in your photos.

That women disguise their latent “power” with their outward “powerlessness” is hardly a defensible argument. Your hypothesis that this mysterious “need for objectification” undermines the victimization wrought by repressive patriarchic structures is equally ridiculous (and at the same time, an objectification of women themselves).

After all the struggle that women have gone through to secure such basic rights like suffrage and protection from domestic violence, it is appalling to see a misogynistic, glorification of brutality such as this, your art.

Adam M. Lippert

Photos essay shows woman less than human

I am writing to express my disgust and disappointment in the Post’s editorial decision to carry Diego Costa and Sara DeKeuster’s “Bedtime Stories” photograph montage because it trivializes and romanticizes the crime of rape while contributing a mainstream media landscape already rife with blatantly misogynistic images.

I ask you, what critical social commentary or specific questions regarding art and gender does the piece offer? The authors of this piece deliberately frame a rape sequence and then innocently beg the question in the margin — to paraphrase — I wonder if this really turns her on?

Then they wonder if all women have a deeply repressed sexual fantasy involving rape. They masquerade their text in socio-artistic babble that attempts to raise questions about female sexuality and patriarchal tension, I am guessing. Yet their entire piece comes from a place so divorced from the realities of violence against women that I am hard-pressed to find a shred of credibility in their argument.

I wonder if the authors fully grasp how terrifying it is to be chased down, cornered and physically overpowered. Do they realize how often acquaintance rapists use the defense that their victims really wanted it or seemed to be enjoying it? This is classic “blame the victim” logic, and this blame falls upon the woman in most cases in this patriarchal, Judeo-Christian society.

Have the authors not tuned in to the shameful history of violence against women in this country, and the ongoing reprehensible treatment of the women who actually have the courage to report the crimes to authorities? Their “photo essay” offers very little in the way of lucid thought or evidence to support their suggestion that physical force is behind every feminine sexual drive.

Clearly their captions beneath the shots declare the “woman” is actually enjoying the assault. Their hyper-objectification of “woman” here (they can’t even be bothered to refer to her as “the woman,” because that would afford her a shred of identity and dignity, making her less of an object and more of a human) condones what feminists have been fighting against for decades.

They fail to make the connection that the more the media depict women as objects, the easier it is for perpetrators of violence to look upon them as just that. And don’t they see, as media scholars such as Jean Kilbourne have pointed out, how much easier such objectification makes it then, for an already troubled individual to disassociate him or herself from the woman as a person and commit violence against her?

What’s worse, the authors link feminist thought with the repression of female sexuality, which speaks resoundingly of how little they understand the premises of each wave of feminism.

And before I qualify this letter with a reference to First Amendment rights, I instead ask Costa and DeKeuster to look long and hard at this piece again, and ask themselves what were you thinking? What are you really trying to say?

The glib playfulness with which you depict the trauma of rape in “Bedtime Stories” reflects a shameful lack of judgment and constitutes a direct affront to all women.

Rachel Dodakian

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