lright, you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there.” So opened the inaugural call for Occupy Wall Street. Linked in a tweet that Adbusters, the Vancouver-based activist collective behind the eponymous anticonsumerist magazine, posted on June 9, 2011, their charge went on: “The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”

Inspired by the Arab Spring; protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square; and 15-M, the mostly youth-led anti-austerity movement that erupted in Spanish cities in 2011 (including an outpouring of 28,000 protesters in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square, in 2011), the idea was for 20,000 people to flood Lower Manhattan and occupy Wall Street for several months.

“Once there,” the text read, “we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.”

In a few short weeks, the forty who came on September 17 turned into 4,000, and what started as a message online turned into a movement. The demands originally aired at New York City’s Zuccotti Park were echoed in demonstrations in London, Lima, Johannesburg, and Jakarta—all over the world.

Ten years ago, when Accra Shepp went looking for such a swarm, he found himself at Zuccotti Park “under a patch of trees, surrounded by enormous skyscrapers on all sides.” Initially, without his camera, he just observed, listened, and felt the pulse of the people. Many of them were camping out there indefinitely; others came briefly, on a lunch break or after work, to declare their solidarity to this cause.

When Shepp next returned, he knew the events unfolding before him were real, and thus worth documenting. A private park was abuzz with experiments in economic justice. So he used a view camera, typically used for large-format images, to make portraits of the protesters and to capture this history.

An interracial couple holds each other and sits on a curb. On the woman’s knee, a sticker reads “Make Out, Not War.”

A woman wearing a black burka and Red Cross armbands, sits in a folding chair with a small sign saying “this space occupied” underneath her left foot.

A middle-aged, white father hoists his bright-eyed daughter, a toddler, on his shoulders. Their eyes sweep the crowd with the skyscrapers looming large around them.

Appearing together in his new book, Radical Justice, these people represent the many citizens that made Occupy possible. In turn, Shepp’s black-and-white photographs dissolve the boundaries between the individual and the collective, reminding us that each person who was present (even the police officers, the newscasters, and anti-Occupiers) was a fundamental player in this revolutionary movement.

Ten years later, as we strive to overcome the ongoing repercussions of the Trump presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the brutal reality of climate change, we continue to confront the severe economic inequality that inspired Occupy Wall Street in the first place.

But we are also living out the power of their early call to action. Our two paramount social justice movements, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, continue to engage the horizontal structure (they have founders, but no one leader) and the political strategy (a blend of social media and old-school organizing) that they, in part, inherited from Occupy a few years earlier.

Similarly, the presidential bids of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in 2020, as well as the rise of the progressive left within and outside of the Democratic Party, are impossible to imagine without those two long months of organizing in Zuccotti Park.

There aren’t many artistic renderings of Occupy. Anarchist Marisa Holmes’s 2016 documentary All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story is a notable exception. As a result, we are often left with little more than anecdotes of how diverse and varied the demographic makeup of the movement was. Radical Justice documents that history and reminds us that activists who have held our country accountable then are not so dissimilar from those who took to the streets in the summer of 2020. In doing so, Shepp’s photographs channel the spirit of Occupy, and its biggest hope as expressed in that original e-mail from Adbusters in 2011: to “[awaken] the imagination and, if achieved, propel us toward the radical democracy of the future.”

Rolling Stone’s recent cover story about rape at the University of Virginia has a far more legitimate claim to having “broken the Internet” than Kim Kardashian’s racy photos. In the two weeks since the piece appeared online, in has gone viral on social media and ignited a wide-ranging discussion about rape on college campuses. Its vivid depiction of the alleged gang rape of a college freshman, whom the piece refers to as “Jackie,” by seven fraternity members fueled such outrage among current students and alums that the university has suspended all fraternities for the rest of the year.

The Rolling Stone story was groundbreaking in that—unlike most media treatments of rape, which presume the perpetrator’s innocence and reserve all skepticism for the victim—it privileged the victim’s point of view. The detailed narrative of the attack proceeds without the interruption of typical journalistic qualifiers (“she alleged that,” “according to Jackie”). This provided a rare opportunity for the reader to experience the attack’s brutality as Jackie remembered it. The magazine’s editors defended this stylistic choice, saying it was clear the account represented Jackie’s recollection rather than the journalist’s findings of fact.

But since its publication, the story has begun to unravel. The article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, initially came under fire for failing to interview any of the young men accused of rape, whose names are not used in the article but whose identities might be deciphered from various details, including the name of the fraternity to which they belonged, which was identified. Erdely has said she chose not to contact the alleged attackers at the request of the victim, who feared retaliation—including further violence—from her attackers or others. Erdely did, however, seek to verify the account of the rape by speaking with friends and other rape survivors in whom Jackie had confided, as well as university administrators to whom she had reached out to for help.

As the story gained steam, other critics—including Slate’s Hanna Rosin, The New Republic’s Judith Shulevitz and The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple—questioned what they viewed as inconsistencies in Jackie’s story. Jonah Goldberg of the conservative magazine National Review said the account stretched credulity.

Last Friday, the magazine’s editors, who originally stood by the story, admitted “discrepancies in Jackie’s account” and expressed regret for not allowing the alleged attackers the opportunity to defend themselves:

We published the article with the firm belief that it was accurate. Given all of these reports, however, we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment—the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story.

Here is the irony: Erdely did precisely what you’re supposed to do with rape victims. She believed Jackie. She sought to protect her from further harm. But in doing so, she put her story in danger and opened her integrity as a journalist to questioning.

Generally speaking, rapes are difficult to report on because they take place out of the public eye, most often between acquaintances, and there are typically no witnesses other than the victim and the perpetrator. The reporter’s task is especially daunting when there is no accompanying trial to bring about physical evidence or compel testimony; he or she must go about gathering information without the use of subpoenas or search warrants.

The other problem: journalists are expected to remain neutral and maintain a healthy skepticism toward their subjects. In the case of rape allegations, they have the conflicting responsibilities of ensuring they don’t convict the perpetrator in the press or further traumatize the victim. Does the Rolling Stone controversy show that it’s impossible to be a good journalist and be sensitive to rape victims?

The answer is no. But it requires at the same time a sensitive reporter and a victim who is ready and willing to open him- or herself up to the scrutiny journalists must engage in. This is not to say that there is any such thing as a perfect or ideal victim.

It may well have been impossible for Erdely to have found a victim who was raped in college and still attending the school, where he or she would be likely to see the attackers on campus, and comfortable with a reporter approaching them. This person would have not only have had to heal enough to withstand journalistic scrutiny, but also be able to weather the barrage of questions and criticism from the media, fellow students, and the university administration that failed to protect her in the first place. Faced with that challenge, Erdely should have either focused only on alumni (as she does elsewhere in the article), who would have been comfortable with her approaching her attackers, or not have written the story at all.

The complexities and pitfalls about reporting on rape are why many journalists choose to avoid the subject altogether. This, of course, is a problem in its own right. In the case of comedian Bill Cosby, it had the ultimate effect of silencing victims, and allowed a rapist to assault scores of women with impunity for decades.

Around the same time the Rolling Stone article dropped, male journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic and David Carr of The New York Times expressed regret about failing to address accusations of sexual assault against Cosby. In a recent post, Coates reflects on a 2008 profile he wrote about Cosby for the magazine. “At the time I wrote the piece, it was 13 people’s word—and I believed them,” he writes. “Put differently, I believed that Bill Cosby was a rapist.”

Yet Coates admits he chose not to address these allegations at length or further investigate the claims because:

The Bill Cosby piece was my first shot writing for a big national magazine. I had been writing for 12 financially insecure years. I had just been laid-off by Time magazine. My kid was getting older. I was subsisting off unemployment checks and someone else’s salary. I had just been laid-off by Time magazine. A voice in my head was, indeed, pushing me to do something more expansive and broader in its implication, something that did not just question Cosby’s moralizing, but weighed it against the acts which I believed he committed.

Carr reveals that he did not even consider confronting Cosby about the allegations when he interviewed him in 2011 for a piece for Hemispheres, United Airlines’s in-flight magazine. “I knew when the editors of the airline magazine called that they would have no interest in pursuing those accusations in a short interview in a magazine meant to occupy fliers,” he says. “I did the interview and took the money.”

In these striking admissions, both Coates and Carr show that there is a price journalists pay in daring to address rape allegations. Coates feared it could hurt his career, causing him to suffer financially. Carr, on the other hand, suggests that his editors would never have approved of such questioning.

These journalists, one could say, got off scot-free. Yet Erdely, who is brave enough to take on a story about rape in the first place—and dared to trust the victim—is paying a price that those who actively turned away from the stories or survivors will not.

Rape will always be a hard subject to write about. It goes without saying it is a much harder experience to live through. I recently spoke with Claudia Garcia-Rojas, author of a media toolkit for reporting on sexual violence by the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls and Young Women, about the criticism of the Rolling Stone article. “What all of these breaking stories about rape show is how objectivity is an impossible standard,” she said in an e-mail. “Media is complicit in reinforcing widely held cultural beliefs, thereby revealing how objectivity often sides with the perpetrator.”

Watch the writer discuss reporting on rape with MSNBC’s Irin Carmon:

”Reporting on Rape and Sexual Violence: A Media Toolkit for Local and National Journalists to Better Media Coverage”

Alert: Many spoilers follow!

Last year, Orange Is the New Black became one of my new favorite new shows by diving—headfirst—into a great unknown. A TV series ostensibly about a white, upper-middle-class, bisexual Smith graduate serving a thirteen-month sentence for money laundering and drug trafficking dared to delve into the backstories and inner lives of women of color—and not only that, but women of color who are facing years of prison time.

This season, creator Jenji Kohan fades the first-season protagonist Piper Kerman (played by Taylor Schilling) even further into the background, thus giving its diverse ensemble of actresses an even bigger opportunity to wrestle with the complex layers of race, sexuality and class that make up their worlds, and ours.

Sure, part of the appeal of OINB is its binge-worthiness. Combine character depth and a rewarding sense of closure and I, despite my 2-year-old, will find time to watch something that lasts for twelve and a half hours in a day! But the show’s real seduction has always been that it lets me, as an African-American woman, see some semblance of myself in its characters: in other women of color, in incarcerated women and in queer and transgendered women that the rest of society has chosen to ignore or render invisible.

This power is not OITNB’s alone. The politics of recognition and representation are powerful to many, so much so that the reality of the first African-American president and the idea of the first woman president sometimes act as a stand-in for real policies to end gender and racial disparities. When Harry Belafonte called for artists to engage in more political action, Jay-Z responded with a succinct rebuttal: “My presence is charity. Just who I am. Just like Obama’s is. Obama provides hope. Whether he does anything, the hope that he provides for a nation, and outside of America is enough.”

Meanwhile, television shows like Scandal, Being Mary Jane, Devious Maids and, to a lesser extent, Mistresses, all showcase diverse casts. (Some of those shows have courted their own controversies about propping up racial stereotypes, demonstrating that diversity alone is no guarantee of thoughtful engagement with race as a subject.) OITNB, meanwhile, sets itself apart, literally, by taking place in a women’s prison. And for me, that distinction comes with an added burden and moral authority: the show should not simply be diverse (though that is a feat unto itself). It should help us imagine a different world—not only for its fictional characters but their real world counterparts, too.

The basic conflict this season, in which authority is pitted against political idealism, however, is quite familiar. In Litchfield Penitentiary, authority gets turned upside down and idealism is squeezed out. This is most explicit in the power play between the corrupt prison assistant warden, Natalie “Fig” Figueroa (Alysia Reiner), and her ambitious and sometimes well-meaning second-in-command, Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow). They disagree often over the prison budget; is Fig willing to spend enough to fix one of the prison’s bathrooms, now flooded by sewage waste and feces? Caputo wants the situation remedied immediately; Fig redirects the funds to her husband’s campaign and hires shady contractors. By the end of the season, Caputo, with Piper’s help, exposes Fig’s embezzlement, but not without demanding oral sex from Fig in exchange for keeping mum (once she complies, he reveals that he’s already turned her in).

But the season’s best battles are saved for Red (played wonderfully by Kate Mulgrew), the former head chef of the prison kitchen and leader of the all-white group known as “Red’s girls.” Red spends the season hustling her way back up to the top of the prison pecking order. Standing in her way are several factors: she’s older; her former assistant cooks have betrayed her; she doesn’t have any contraband goods; but most importantly, Yvonne “Vee” Parker (a masterful Lorraine Toussaint), a drug dealer who grooms children in foster care to work for her, has arrived.

We quickly learn that Vee is a threat to Red because they have a longstanding feud from a previous era: when a younger, more naïve Red first got locked up at Litchfield. At that time, African-American women like Vee ran the prison. Now, facing a new pecking order, Vee uses all the devices at her disposal—fear, manipulation, and even lethal force—to seduce the younger African-American women into submission and the other inmates into using drugs.

Through Vee’s steady climb to authority, OITNB puts racial hierarchies in relief. Part of her appeal to Tasha (Danielle Brooks), Crazy Eyes/Suzanne (Uzo Aduba), Janae Watson (Vicky Jeudy) and Black Cindy (Adrienne C. Moore) is racial pride; she constantly reminds them of her own golden era—in which African-American women like Vee garnered respect because they supplied drugs and goods to other inmates—while revealing how little they matter in theirs. But like everything else Vee does, her politics are a ruse, her solidarity a sham, and her sociopathic entrepreneurial behavior appears to be the real danger to Litchfield’s social order and safety.

Her presence convinces the audience to cheer for her downfall, root for Red and want everything to go back to the days in which Red’s all-white crew was dominant or at least, last season, when the racial hierarchies of prison mirrored those on the outside.

Vee eventually meets a tragic and well-deserved end, but with it comes an even bigger question: will the other African-American inmates resume their place at the bottom of Litchfield’s ladder? The notable exception to this is Sophia (glamorously played by Laverne Cox), whose transgender identity and hairstyling skills seem to afford her the luxury of racial fluidity. She is not a member of any racial gang and is one of the few characters who get along with everyone. But because she exists outside of all groups in a prison system that thrives on racial classification, she is not a threat to Vee, Red or the racial hierarchy itself. One of the real shortcomings of this season is that she, like Piper, seems to have receded in the background, despite Cox’s landing the cover of Time magazine.

* * *

Political idealism is the biggest threat the social order at Litchfield. Piper no longer has any; Vee takes advantage of it with her crew; and the show’s newest character, the Asian-American biracial character, Brooke SoSo, a former Occupy Wall Street protester who tries to organize her fellow prisoners, emerges as the prison jester.

She doesn’t intend to be the butt of the joke. Like Piper did last season, she is importing her own brand of progressive politics into an institution that necessitates conformity and breeds dehumanization. She doesn’t get very far. When she and four other women present the administration with their demands, they’re a mixed bag: humane living conditions, an end to the use of solitary confinement for no reason, and better maple syrup. Political idealism in OITNB is source of sympathy and humor, but the funnier I found SoSo’s ineptitude, the less I believed that things could change.

Toward the end of the season, Piper considers exposing Warden Figueroa’s embezzlement to a journalist. He tells her that he’s only interested in a story about corruption, not about the inhumane conditions the inmates face. Nobody, she learns, gives a shit about the real problems these women face. So Piper gives the dirt to Caputo, bargains with him to not be transferred to Pennsylvania, and takes down Figuero, all without any hope of making a big difference.

And that was my final takeaway from the season. This show has never been about dismantling those systems of power, inside and outside of prison, that separate so many women, especially African-American and Latina women, from their lives and families. It neither preaches mass reform of the prison system nor presents us with viable alternatives. In this way, OITNB is not political art, and most definitely pure entertainment.

By making political idealism and its sister, organizing, a gaffe, OITNB ignores the many ways that women resist their confinement. After watching this season, I reached out to Tamar Kraft-Stolar, the Women in Prison Project director at the Correctional Association of New York and a friend of mine, to ask about her experiences organizing with incarcerated women. She replied:

“Women work against the dehumanization of prison in many ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, sometimes individual, sometimes collective. From speaking out to change punitive laws to sending letters to their children, and everything in between. We consider all these actions to be forms of feminism—because, in ways big and small, they uphold the basic human dignity and rights of women, and they are part of creating a world where women have agency, and are valued.”

Some of this we see happen on OITNB. But, for the most part, the show treats political idealism—be it for racial equality or gender equity—as peril or parody. And that’s where the show’s seductive power lies: it does not push us to challenge the unjust policies and laws that lock up women for problems that are social and economic, not criminal. And maybe that’s why we keep watching. We like the show, we enjoy the characters’ antics, we have fun with these women as an ensemble—and the place where it’s all happening is prison.

In the final episode, Soso intervenes in a tense argument between inmates by asking for unity: “We should be leaning on each other, finding support in our fellow criminals so we are not isolated. I need a friend.” The women stop bickering, chuckle, and tell her they already have friends. And though her plea falls flat, Soso’s idealism is no joking matter, and maybe it could inspire us to do more than look on. Art, after all, can lead to political transformation. As Kraft-Stolar says, “To truly make the changes we need, people will have to go beyond understanding that orange is the new black to understanding that razor wire is the new red, white and blue. And that until we reverse course in our incarceration nation, women will never achieve justice or equality and none of us will ever truly be free.”

Participants at Suzanne Lacy's "Between the Door and the Street" performance in Brooklyn on October 19, 2013. Photo courtesy of Creative Time.
 
Last Saturday evening, almost 400 women and handful of men sat themselves on front stoops on one block in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, to discuss the meaning and future of feminism at the “Between the Door and the Street” performance. 
 
Invited by the Brooklyn Museum, Creative Time, and Suzanne Lacy, an artist best known for staging political performances that spark civic dialogues and debate, the participants were dressed in black while donning bright yellow pashminas – two shades when used together are one of the easiest color combinations to see from long distances. And the effect worked: the participants stood out brightly from the audience, remarkable as much for their racial and ethnic diversity as they did for the wide range of topics they addressed.

As I walked up and down the street, I overheard a variety of conversations marked by ease and improvisational exchanges. Facilitated by “stoop leaders” who were often community organizers from one of the participating 80 political groups, the conversations themselves spanned the gamut: from racial discrimination against Latinas in the workplace to queer friendly midwifery practices, from the Dreamers advocating a humane pathway to US citizenship to groups demanding the end of police harassment of black communities.  

By encouraging us to eavesdrop on these discussions, Lacy sought to break the fourth wall — the imaginary wall at the front of a traditional theater stage that separates the actors from the audience — as well as challenge the historical record of feminism as racially exclusive and single-issue focused.  

In this sense, the performance achieved its goal.  “Our vision is simple,” said Ms. Lacy. “You can see the piece as an exercise in empathy on one hand, and coalition building on the other.”

The coalition building was apparent.  You could see this from the more highly visited groups, like Jagakbo, a peace making dialogue group between North and South Korean Women, Girls for Gender Equity, and the Sex Workers Project. Based on the street plan, it was hard to tell whether or not there were any community groups mixed together.  And at first, I felt that each stoop seemed to self-contained by organization affiliation and oftentimes a racial and linguistic homogeneity that seemed to work against the goal of rendering feminism as the umbrella for a variety of social justice concerns.  But, over time, I saw the collection of conversations occurring next to or across the street from each other as a chorus, polyphony of voices that articulated contemporary feminism as multiracial, intergenerational, and politically expansive.

Achieving empathy, however, was an even more complicated feat. Creative Time’s chief curator Nato Thompson hoped the performance cultivates “the art of listening.”  As he put it, “Gatherings across race, class, and gender that are open, protected, and you can listen and hear discussions are extremely rare.”  At first, the demographics of the audience only slightly mirrored the racial and gender diversity of the stoop dwellers. And hour later, the crowd was different.  Standing out now was the fluidity of the group and the presence of those people not typically associated with feminist gatherings: men of color and young children.

And because the participants spoke in their natural voices, the audience often had to strain to hear them, pushing up against one another, and sometimes only to pick up fragments and phrases.  This also meant we also had to literally lean into the speakers and each other, generating a feeling of intimacy and trust amongst strangers.   

The event, however, was not without dissenting voices.  Last week, three participants and 31 supporters signed an open letter that said, “As women who come from different socio-economic and racial backgrounds, we understand that not all activism can or should be paid. However, we do think that the arts community has an imperative to try harder to set a better standard of compensating women for their labor, and for practicing solidarity economies that support women’s participation instead of exploiting them.” 

But for the participants with whom I spoke, the ability to simply to talk to each other about such important topics in the public was enough. One Dreamer, Mateo, a self-identified undocumented queer woman, said, “I think the interesting part is that we were just having a conversation with each other and even getting to know each other the more we talked. And say things without having to be hypocritical, or sin pelos en la lengua, without hairs in your tongue.”

Another woman, a performance artist named Lyfe, spent her afternoon with a group of African American women talking about gender, spirituality, and religion. She said, “It was good because it was liking having a conversation with your homegirls out loud. And some of the things we talk about amongst ourselves in our sister circles need to be talked about in the public, in broader spaces.”

One audience member, Elizabeth Shipley, confessed, “That within in ten minutes of arriving, I was personally moved. It is just so unusual to hear a lot of the voices that are never made public, right here front and center.”  She went on, “It felt like when I went to the very first Women’s World Cup [in 1991] and watch 90,000 people cheering on two teams of women.  You just don’t always see that many people come out and hear women’s voices that often.”

The most radical moment for me was when the participants broke character, left their stoops, and joined the audience in the streets.  Though still distinguished by their black and yellow costumes, the speakers and audience engaged each as equals, comrades in the struggle for gender justice, and continued the animated conversations en masse. 

And it is then that I realized that I was always part of the performance.  That my eavesdropping, the most mundane of activities, had become the deeply political, collaborative act of witnessing. And considering that we don’t listen to their voices every day, it was transformative to watch so many women, who are visible in their communities but overlooked in the dominant culture, amplify themselves as our most valuable political experts and thought leaders.  And tell us that if we simply listened and leaned into them in lot more, we might actually change the world. 

Sand Diego Mayor Bob Filner. (AP Photo)

This is part eight in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California, rape and social media, George Zimmerman’s prior acts of violence against women, mobile apps to end sexual violence, and a review of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black.)

The storyline has become all too familiar: a well-known politician is accused of sexual harassment by several women; he first plays defense (a public denial), then goes on the offensive (a public apology), and finally, admits to past behavior and pledges to get “help.”

That’s been exactly the path for San Diego Mayor Bob Filner. Recently, seven women, ranging from a retired Navy rear-admiral, a dean at San Diego State University, and the head of the Port Tenants Association, have publicly come forward to accuse the mayor of sexual harassment.

During his press conference last Friday, Filner said, “I have failed to fully respect the women who work for me and with me, and…at times I have intimidated them.” His solution: two weeks of intensive therapy at a behavior-counseling clinic starting on August 5.

Though he acknowledged disrespecting women, Filner stopped short of admitting to sexual harassment. Instead, he deflected our attention away from the psychological and social harm that sexual harassers inflict on their victims to understanding his sexual harassment as something for which he can recieve medical help.

Though Filner has yet to disclose having an actual disorder, his rehab stint suggests that he believes his behavior can be medically diagnosed. This too conforms to another pattern of high-profile sexual harrasment claims. Just this month, show biz CEO Richard Nanula resigned from his post as chairman of the boad at Miramax after a co-worker claimed sexual harrassment. His defense: he was previously treated for sex addiction.

But even that is a deeply flawed rationale, because the debate over whether sex addiction should be diagnosed as an official disorder still looms large. According to a recent study conducted at UCLA that measured brain waves in self-reported sex addicts, “the brain response of these individuals to sexual images was not related in any way to the severity of their hyper-sexuality but was instead tied only to their level of sexual desire.” In other words, the scans did not indicate addiction.

Similarly, author of The Myth of Sex Addiction David J. Ley told The Huffington Post, “When [people] assert that sex addiction is like these disorders, they ignore the many ways that sexual behaviors are not like alcohol and drug use. Drugs and alcohol introduce a foreign substance into the brain.”

He went on to say, “We excuse people for diseases—we have destigmatized alcohol dependence so that people can get treatment. Maintaining [sex addiction] as a disease makes it more acceptable to people, and allows people to use it as a justification for…unhealthy choices.”

Taking it one step further, a medical diagnosis (whether it is sex addiction or not) can also be used to justify harmful and often illegal sexual behavior. Sexual harassment at work, on the other hand, is unwanted and unwelcomed sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other physical conduct or offensive or abusive remarks about a person’s sex or gender. Like the Filner scenario, power differentials are often at the heart of such allegations, and because men have more power in our society than women, the vast majority of sexual harassment cases involve female workers who have been harassed by male co-workers or supervisors.

The American Association for University Women reports that for “many victims of sexual harassment, the aftermath may be more damaging than the original harassment. Effects can vary from external effects, such as retaliation, backlash, or victim blaming to internal effects, such as depression, anxiety, or feelings of shame and/or betrayal.” According to data complied by Equal Rights Advocates, victims of sexual harassment lose $4.4 million dollars in wages and 973,000 hours in unpaid leave each year in the United States.

Politicians who are serious about ending sexual harassment must move beyond the disease or moral decay defense. Instead, as founder of Stop Street Harassment Holly Kearl told me in our online interview, “They can set a good example in their own life and treat everyone they encounter with respect and always ask for consent before engaging in any sexual conversations or activity. And they can set a respectful tone among their own staff and supporters and call out sexual harassment when it occurs.”

On a policy level, they should make sure that workplaces comply with the federal and state laws, but also, Kearl suggests, “mandate sexual harassment education in local schools, and work with administrators at schools and campuses to ensure the enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972 as it applies to sexual harassment complaints.”

It would be nice to believe that Filner, after his two weeks of therapy, would come back to work and lead the charge to end sexual harassment—in the schools, the streets and the City Hall of San Diego. But he probably won’t. And this is not just because 60 percent of San Diegans surveyed over the weekend believe he should be recalled if he does not resign. He seems to be unaware that to sexually harass women is far more dangerous than a pathology or breach of public trust. It is part of the larger epidemic of violence against women that preserves our system and social practice of male dominance and gender inequity.

And let’s be clear, that’s something that can be controlled and cured.

This is part eight in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California, rape and social media, George Zimmerman’s prior acts of violence against women, mobile apps to end sexual violence, and a review of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black.)

This is part seven in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California, rape and social media, George Zimmerman’s prior acts of violence against women, and mobile apps to end sexual violence.)

[Warning: This contains very minor plot spoilers from the series.]

From Marissa Alexander’s twenty-year sentence for firing off a warning shot to stave off her batterer to the forced sterilization of nearly 150 women by doctors in a California prison, the unfair treatment of incarcerated women is slowly making front-page news.  

It is also the subject of Netflix’s hit new series—from Weeds creator Jenji Kohan and based on Piper Kerman’s memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. The series explores Kerman’s experiences as a white, upper-middle-class Smith graduate who was found guilty for money laundering and drug trafficking for her former girlfriend six years prior to her serving a thirteen-month sentence in 1998.

Because of its daring topic, tone and setting, the show is frequently compared to Showtime’s Weeds and HBO’s Oz. Like Weeds, Orange Is the New Black also wrestles with the causes and consequences of women’s roles in the drug trade. But I must admit that I stopped watching Weeds after two seasons because I found the representations of Heylia and Vaneeta James to be caricatures of blackness rather than complex African-American women characters.    

Not so much with Orange Is The New Black, for while the show appears to traffic in tired stereotypes about race, class and sexuality, it also, episode by episode, tries to challenge some of those assumptions by filling in the women’s stories through flashbacks and empathy. Sometimes it is successful, and sometimes it is not.

Moreover, there is something to be said that the most racially and sexually diverse show of 2013 is set in a women’s prison. When Piper (played by Taylor Schilling) enters prison, she is surprised by how racially segregated the women’s lives appear to be. The irony is that she seems unaware that her outside life (her friends and family) is even more racially homogenous.

The majority of incarcerated women alongside Piper’s character are also white (reflecting the real demographics); however, African-American and Latina women disproportionately populate the show and America’s prisons.  

This is striking because, even though the main character probably had to be white and college-educated for the book and then show to be picked up, each episode focuses on another character’s backstory—often a woman of color—and offers the viewers some insight into the limited opportunities and restrictive relationships that plague these women inside and outside of prison’s walls.

The highly acclaimed show Oz differed from Orange because it provided a sustained critique of structural power. It did so by: (1) using narrative realism; (2) depicting prison as hyper-violent; and (3) setting it in “Emerald City,” which is both a play on the omnipresent wizard in The Wizard of Oz and a visualization of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of “panopticism” in which a highly sophisticated, diffuse and seemingly anonymous system of discipline and surveillance maintains the order and control of prisoners (and these days most Americans).

”The problem with TV violence, it’s a lie,” said Tom Fontana, who writes most of the show’s episodes and was one of its executive producers, to The New York Times in 1999. ”People get shot and don’t bleed. They get hit and walk away. If you have to do it, you have to do it as horrifically as it really is.”

Part of the project of Oz (for better or worse) was to show how prisons systematically relegate people to the status of both animals and non-citizens. In Orange, all of the incarcerated women are guilty of making bad choices and the crimes for which they are sentenced. Its social critique is also tempered by its humorous representations of bureaucrats of the state (the warden, correctional officers, and prison doctors) as boorish and buffoons.

The show itself is also intentionally less violent. In a recent interview in Entertainment Weekly, the show’s creator Kohan said:

…women’s prison’s are different. It’s not Oz. I was talking to the warden at Chino, and he’d worked in women’s prisons and men’s prisons, and I said “What’s the difference?” and he said, “Women are communal. Men are out for themselves and they’re animals and they’ll kill. But women will form packs and try to be a family.”

Orange insists on showing how women—through wile, wisdom or wit—find solace in each other as they negotiate their constant invisibility and vulnerability in the prison system.

And it is here that the show succeeds and disappoints. Since Kerman was placed in a correctional facility (versus a maximum state penitentiary), we should not necessarily expect that same form of violence as Oz (or Alcatraz and The Wire for that matter).

But, it shows violence against women in prison as fleeting: when Piper is confined to the Special Housing Unit of the “SHU” for engaging in “lesbian activity” or another character is taken to psychiatric ward, strapped to the bed and forced to take anti-psychotic drugs.

Most troubling is its treatment of sexual violence.

Recently, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission reported that staff members rather than other prisoners commit 60 percent of the alleged acts of sexual abuse. Because incarcerated women cannot legally consent to sexual activity with prison staff member, all sexual interactions between them and guards are sexual assault.

While this is repeatedly mentioned by characters on Orange, sexual interactions between guards and prisoners do occur, and in two disturbing contexts: (1) the season-long “courtship” between one young Latina woman and a young white male correctional officer, which results in her pregnancy; and (2) when this same character has sex with another CO, in order to get him fired by reporting she was raped.

The show not only reproduces stereotypes that women in prison are untrustworthy and lie about sexual assault, but also cushions the real violence experienced by women in prison as romance.

Nevertheless, by the end of the season, Piper’s character has deteriorated so much because of her life in prison that she is barely recognizable to her family, friends, or even us the viewer. The final act of violence is both surprising, individualized, and to certain extent, excused.

The show was just picked up for a second season and has already garnered significant attention. At The Washington Post, Dylan Matthews called it “the best prison show ever made.” The Daily Beast gave it high praise for its depiction of Sophie Burset (played by Laverne Cox), a transgendered African-American woman who demands safe and equal healthcare access for all women in prison.

And this is what I think the show does well. The series begins with the privileged perspective of Kerman and slowly but surely, with each episode, I became more invested in stories of women we normally do not “see”: queer and straight women of color and working class women.

So, I will be back next season with hopes that the show provides the “agency” to these women (that critic Yasmin Nair has called for) and a more sustained argument about why they (as opposed to Piper Kerman) have so few life choices and are routinely victims of racially and socio-economically biased legal system.

Until then, I will simply remain curious about the lives of some of its more novel characters: the misunderstood Haitian lifer, Miss Claudette; the sympathetic pot-selling yogi, Yoga Jones; and the backstories of best friends Tasha Jefferson and Poussey Washington.

This is part seven in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California, rape and social media, George Zimmerman’s prior acts of violence against women, and mobile apps to end sexual violence.)

HarassMap report. (Courtesy of HarassMap)

This is part six in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California, rape and social media, and George Zimmerman’s prior acts of violence against women.)

The advent of smart phones and social media has not only ushered in new methods of shaming rape victims but also generated applications, some of them free, used to prevent sexual violence itself.

This is how they work: GPS-enabled phones send data to Circle of 6, OnWatch, Bsafe and other app makers to show your location. Some apps also allow users to receive an emergency phone call from their contacts, call 911, or track them as they walk to their destination).

Many of these apps were submitted in the White House’s 2011 “Apps Against Abuse” technology challenge—a national competition to provide young adults with tools to help prevent sexual assault and dating violence.

Circle of 6 was one of the two winners. “In the fight against gender-based violence, mobile and mapping technology provide concrete tools to connect people to each other and to critical resources,” said Nancy Schwartzman, co-creator of the Circle of 6, an app that is both free and simple to use.

On Circle of 6, you upload six of your most reliable contacts (your trusted circle) to which you can send the following texts: “I’m looking up healthy relationship info,” “call me I need an interruption” and “come and get me” and your location will be immediately sent to them.

I did send the “call me” text to my circle at lunchtime, and the only responses I received were “I am in meeting right now” and two phone calls fifteen minutes to an hour later. My friends seemed to be thrown off by the Circle of 6 verbiage that preceded my “come and get me” alert (at least that’s what they said).

Schwartzman texted me that to avoid such responses, "We usually encourage folks to talk to their friends about the app and putting them in their circle, so it is not a surprise when it happens. It can be of course, but the app is also trying to encourage conversations." I’m definitely rethinking my circle now, not the app. Of all the ones I tested, Circle of 6 was by far my favorite.

The other winner was OnWatch, which customizes alert modes to allow users to contact their friends, your Campus Police, local 911, or all three if they need help via phone, text, e-mail and Facebook. Two exciting features about this app are: the Watch My Back timer countdown and “I’m Here” alert. Since I opted out of the monthly subscription of $4.99 or yearly-one for $49.99, I could only use them during my a one-month free-trial period.

Similarly, B-Safe, the personal safety alarm has a monthly subscription of $1.99 and annual subscription of $19.99. Endorsed by celebrity Jada Pinkett-Smith, B-Safe is has a red alarm button that will automatically alert your “guardians” of a threat and text them a map with your location for help. My favorite was the Fake Call function, which allowed you to select the caller and the time of the call ranging from immediately to ten seconds to ten minutes. Before this app, I would just pick up the phone and have imaginary conversations in order to stave off the jeers from street harassers.  

But while all of these apps are geared towards people that are active texters and high school or college aged users, there is rise of sexual assault mapping by organizations, like HarrassMap and Women Under Siege, that use crowd-sourcing to help people who are locally organizing to end sexual violence or traveling internationally. These maps record every instance of sexual assault and harassment submitted to their site.

In the recent protest in Egypt, HarrassMap has been particularly effective in helping victims of sexual violence. “HarassMap takes a social approach,” said Rebecca Chiao, co-founder of HarrasMap in Egypt. “We do direct interventions to rescue the women, but in our normal, long-term work, we target bystanders to intervene.”

Unfortunately, since 80 precent of sexual assaults are committed by an acquaintance rather than a stranger, users are likely to constrained by the same factors—fear, shame, and guilt—that typically inhibit victims from getting help. And because none of the apps can prevent perpetrators from targeting victims, there is a risk that that potential victims are made to feel responsible for sexual assault prevention.

But, they also do something more. They innovatively engage and redefine the bystander as friends, guardians, survivors of gender-based violence, volunteers and witnesses, in order to reduce the likelihood of individual and collective acts of sexual violence.

As a survivor of sexual violence, it is good to know there is an app for that.

This is part six in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California, rape and social media, and George Zimmerman’s prior acts of violence against women.)

Editor's Note: This post has been updated with a response from Nancy Schwartzmann.

George Zimmerman. (Reuters/Joe Burbank)

This is part five in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California, and rape and social media.)

Last year, when the murder of Trayvon Martin began making national headlines, a USA Today/Gallup poll found that public opinion about this case was divided along racial lines—72 percent of blacks said racial bias was a major factor in the events that led up to the shooting death of Martin, while non-blacks were significantly less certain, with 31 percent saying racial bias was a major factor and 25 percent saying it was not a factor at all. That same racial divide was reflected in surveys conducted in 1995 about the murder trial of O.J. Simpson.

The New York Times’s Charles Blow was right when he said this comparison was a “bit loaded because the cases are miles apart in the details and circumstances.” But I do think there was one crucial link between Simpson and Zimmerman: both men repeatedly were accused of violence against women well before their murder trials began.

Zimmerman’s attorneys successfully argued that those acts were inadmissible or irrelevant. But these accusations offer us other truths: that violence against girls and women is often an overlooked and unchecked indicator of future violence.

It was well-documented that Nicole Brown Simpson was a victim of domestic violence. In Zimmerman’s case, two pieces of character evidence never made it to the trial. First, a recorded statement from Witness No. 9, Zimmerman’s female cousin, in which she said that he molested her for ten years when they were both children, beginning when she just 6 years old. Second, a report filed in August 2005, when Zimmerman’s former fiancé sought a restraining order against him because of domestic violence.

The latter accusation is especially important because it provided the blueprint for Zimmerman’s own claim of self-defense again Trayvon Martin. According to the Miami Herald, Zimmerman

was also involved in a domestic dispute with his ex-fiancée, hair salon employee Veronica Zauzo. Zauzo claimed Zimmerman was trolling her neighborhood to check on her. At her apartment, they spoke for about an hour when she asked him to leave. He asked for some photos and paperwork and she refused. A pushing match ensued and her dog jumped up and bit him on the cheek, Zauzo claimed. Zimmerman, in a petition filed the next day, painted her as the aggressor, wanting him to stay the night.

In her petition, Zauzo alleged that Zimmerman has previously slapped her in her mouth as well. According to court records, the Orange County circuit judge ordered them to stay away from each other for more than a year, but no charges were filed.

During the bond hearing, Zimmerman’s wife, Shelley Nicole Zimmerman, used the fact that that he filed an injunction against Zauzo as proof of his innocence.

Zimmerman’s pattern for violence had already been established: trolling a neighborhood for his victim, pushing her when confronted, attacking her character, and arguing that she was the aggressor when charges were filed against him. While the Assistant State Attorney Bernardo de la Rionda brought up both testimonies in the bond hearing in April 2012, they were not presented as evidence during the trial. In contrast, the judge did rule that evidence of marijuana that was found in Martin’s system was admissible.

Such differences led many (including myself) to conclude, as Mychal Denzel Smith wrote, that ”Trayvon Martin and Black Manhood Were on Trial.“ But they also reveal a system of power that dismisses the experiences and voices of survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence as invisible and untrustworthy.

Unfortunately, these gender and racial disparities are even further exacerbated by Zimmerman’s non-guilty verdict and the conviction of domestic violence victim, Marissa Alexander, an African-American mother who was sentenced to twenty years in prison for firing a warning shot in 2010 to scare off her husband when she felt he was threatening her. Like Zimmerman, she claimed self-defense and tried to invoke Florida’s “stand your ground” law. The result: a Floriday jury found her guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

In our current moment of post-verdict protests, we should reflect on several moments in which the legal system failed Trayvon Martin. But, as his cousin’s and former fiance’s disclosures suggests, the system fell apart long before the fateful night that Zimmerman profiled and murdered this innocent teenage boy. And I cannot help but wonder if Zimmerman had been held accountable for the violence he had already inflicted on girls and women, that Trayvon Martin might be with us here today.

This is part five in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California, and rape and social media.)

Trent Mays (l) and Ma’lik Richmond (r) sit in juvenile court in Steubenville, Ohio, March 15, 2013. Both were found guilty of sexual assault. (Reuters/Keith Srakocic)

This is part four in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt and the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California.)

Five years ago, a Chicago jury found R&B singer R. Kelly not guilty of all fourteen counts of child pornography, despite videotape evidence of him allegedly sexually assaulting an adolescent girl. The jurors determined that the tape, which had long gone viral through downloads and bootlegs, was inconclusive. At the time, this was our version of a sexual assault case that had gone viral.

Since then, technology has dramatically reshaped our rape culture.

Our widespread use of social networks, online games and smartphones is two-edged. It has made it easier for perpetrators to target children and teens and to distribute and therefore “virtually” repeat their attacks. But it has also made documenting the ugliness of sexual violence and the guilt of perpetrators easier.

The once shocking story of Steubenville, Ohio, is now a pattern: sexual assault of a minor by two or more young men, filmed on a phone, texted or shared on social media sites, sometimes followed by formal accusations and arrests, almost always proceeded by online threats against the victim.

In two different cases this April, teens Rehtaeh Parsons of Canada and Audrie Pott of California, tragically committed suicide after photos of their alleged sexual abuses were posted online.

“As sexual assaults go viral, people definitely use these new technologies to re-traumatize their victims, often with fatal consequences,” Scheherazade Tillet, executive director of the gender-violence prevention organization A Long Walk Home (and also my sister) told me in an interview.

But, she added, “we also have something we have never really had this way before—unusual insight into attitudes and behavior the perpetrators themselves.”

This understanding is important because public perceptions of rape culture often stem from longstanding myths about rapists and their victims. The image of the rapist as a stranger, driven by circumstance and lack of control, lurking the bushes still prevails. This stereotype directly contradicts what we know to be true: 80 percent of perpetrators know their victims and are intentionally predatory in their actions.

These video, texts and tweets change the public profile of sexual assailants. They reveal what advocates and victims already know, that the rapists are more often than not the boys-next-door, prized high school athletes, and opportunistic everyday bystanders who either join or do not deter the attack.

This not only gives prosecutors access to evidence that could be crucial to building their cases, but helps understand how we can best work with potential bystanders as well as help the larger society “unlearn” rape culture. By doing so, we can go a long way to reduce public victim-blaming and prevent future assaults.

This is part four in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here are my posts on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, the sexual assaults happening in Egypt and the forced sterilization of incarcerated women in California.)

An inmate serving a jail sentence rests a hand on a fence. (Reuters/Joshua Lott)

This is part three in my series on the global epidemic of violence against women. (Here’s my post on Serena Williams’s victim-blaming, and on the sexual assaults happening in Egypt.)

At the same time news broke that doctors in California prisons illegally sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010, most of the feminist movement’s media attention and activist muscle have been focused extreme anti-choice restrictions in North Carolina and Texas. That’s typical of a larger problem: even though correctional institutions collectively are the second-largest provider of reproductive health services in the country, most politicians and pundits never mention incarcerated women in the debates about reproductive rights and the war on women.

This is partly because GOP legislators in those states have resorted to sneaking and cheating in order to severely limit abortion access. But, it is also because we are stuck in a hierarchy of traditional reproductive rights activism, which has historically placed abortion as its primary concern, and other issues, like forced sterilization, far below.

Unfortunately, this has everything to do with what types of violence against women spark the most outrage and, ultimately, what kinds of women matter more than others. According to Center for Investigative Reporting, many of the doctors who sterilized inmates who had multiple children or assumed to be likely repeat offenders.

One particularly egregious doctor, Dr. James Heinrich, saw sterilization as good social policy. “Over a ten-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money,” Heinrich said, “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children—as they procreated more.”

“Forced sterilization has always targeted people considered the least valuable in our society,” Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, told me in a phone interview. “In the early twentieth century, that meant white immigrants, by the mid-twentieth century, that meant poor women, black and Puerto Rican women, and other women of color whose bodies were not seen as fit to be protected by the state.”

In 2010, African-American and Latina women made up 59 percent of the California prison population.

In our e-mail correspondence, Tamar Kraft-Stolar, director of the Women in Prison Project at the Correctional Association of New York, wrote, “The majority of incarcerated women are from some of the most marginalized communities—poor communities and poor communities of color—that have been historically the targets of racist eugenics programs, and that have been systematically stripped of political power and the supports and opportunities needed for individuals and families to thrive.”

“These issues are just as important as the brutal Republican attack on reproductive rights and their tolerance and perpetuation of rape culture,” Kraft-Stolar told me.

And like those problems, the assaults on the reproductive rights of incarcerated women also have far-reaching social consequences. They not only impact the life of the individual (and too often forgotten) incarcerated woman, but the well-being of her family, her community, and eventually our country.

Last year, the same North Carolina GOP senators who are now restricting abortion access gave us a warning shot when they rejected a plan to compensate victims of a state-sanctioned mass sterilization plan that targeted mostly poor minorities from 1929 to 1974.

This means that the victims of forced sterilization as integral to the future of the women’s movement as the fight over choice.

The crisis of healthcare in prisons goes far beyond reproductive rights.

Opponents of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi rally in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, July 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

This is part two in my series on the global epidemic of sexual violence.

Last Wednesday, the world watched an increasingly familiar scene: Egyptian crowds gathering in Tahrir Square to demand social change. Once the army announced it had ousted President Mohamed Morsi, these same streets became host to victory celebrations for some, and violent conflict for others. For over ninety-one women who were sexually assaulted that night, Tahrir Square became what Egyptian women’s rights activist. Soraya Bahgat described as “a circle of hell.”

In many ways, the attack against these women is part of a global rape culture in which women’s bodies are used as tools of war and targets during social unrest. During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, for example, it was widely documented that the Mubarak regime paid men to systematically sexually assault women during the demonstrations.

But this recent wave of rape is part of another frightening reality: women’s bodies are also casualties of “freedom.”

In an e-mail, Rebecca Chiao, the co-founder of HarrassMap Egypt, a group that rescues women being sexually assaulted by mobs in the recent protests, wrote, “Whoever is at fault for paying thugs, no political actors have made a serious effort to punish or prevent mob harassment/assault/rape.”

Régine Jean-Charles, author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary, told me in a phone interview that this insidious response is “not new” but consistent with “a global pattern of social movements not including ending gender-violence in their liberatory visions.”

Even in our own Occupy Wall Street movement, women were subject to sexual assaults and misogynist jokes.

Real social change must include eradicating rape culture. Until then, as women continue to be on the frontlines of protests—be it in New York City or Cairo—with our political brethren, our bodies, our rights and ultimately our lives remain on freedom’s sidelines.

For more Nation.com reporting on Egypt, check out Bob Dreyfuss’s blog for live updates on the clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the army.

Serena Williams at final match at the French Open, June 8, 2013. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

This is part 1 in my series on the global epidemic of sexual violence.

As a lifelong Serena Williams fan and African-American rape survivor, you can imagine my deep disappointment when I read her remarks about the Steubenville rape victim in the recent Rolling Stone profile: 

I'm not blaming the girl, but if you're a 16-year-old and you're drunk like that, your parents should teach you: Don't take drinks from other people. She's 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn't remember? It could have been much worse. She's lucky.

Williams suggests she was misquoted, but even so, her words were disarming to those of us who fight for women’s rights, including of course, Williams, who has demanded equal prize money for male and female tennis players. Rightfully, much has been made of the victim-blaming statements, her subsequent apology about her insensitive and misinformed comments, and her reaching out to the victim and her family.

But, I believe Williams’s comments reveal a far more disturbing truth: they are the logical result of growing up in America’s “rape culture.”

Rape culture is the complex set of attitudes, practices, and systems of power that naturalize and normalize rape and sexual violence in the United States.  Because of the dominance of rape culture – in the courtroom and Congress, in the military and our middle schools – many Americans do not even have a working definition of rape and have Pavlovian response to rape victims.

After years of growing up in a rape culture, our knee-jerk responses are (1) to blame rape victims for their attack; and (2) to sympathize with the accused rapists. 

According to Robert Eckstein, an expert in the prevention of violence against women at the University of New Hampshire, one reason for this reaction is: “We don’t want to believe that people who are our classmates, our teammates, and the people we socialize with are capable of this type of behavior.”  Eckstein says, “People sympathize with them and are willing to give them a benefit of the doubt.”

Contrary to public perception, most assailants plan their sexual assaults by targeting and alienating vulnerable victims.  One way of undoing our conditioned responses is by strategically shifting the blame away from the rape victim and emphasizing that role that we all can play, as bystanders, community members, and third party witnesses, in preventing sexual violence.

Today, several bystander intervention campaigns exists all across the country to empower the public to identify these threatening circumstance and intervene before an attack occurs.

Unfortunately, most of these campaigns are for college students only and do not reach our must vulnerable populations: middle and high school aged students who make up the vast majority of 44% of all sexual assault victims who are under the age of 18.  

While schools are not the only site of the current onslaught of pro-rape rhetoric, entertainment, and legislation that we currently face, they are one of the primary places in which we are socialized into the gender norms and practices. 

By holding each other accountable for perpetuating a rape culture, we might just be able to beat this epidemic one-generation, and a couple of future tennis players, at a time.

“Do you know what the gender is?” is the question people most frequently ask expecting parents, including me. Usually, I give the conventional response: “No, we are waiting to be surprised.” But occasionally I offer up one of my two real answers, “We don’t know the sex or the gender” or “I don’t really believe in gender anyway.”

Eyebrows are raised. And then a series of explanations follow.

Sometimes I go into a long monologue, à la feminist philosopher Judith Butler, about gender being a fiction, consisting of two opposite categories and a series of staged acts that we tacitly agree to “perform, produce, and sustain.” On the most basic level, why is blue is the agreed upon costume color for boys, while pink is the color for girls?

Butler’s groundbreaking 1990 book, Gender Trouble, goes on to argue that we preserve the performance in order to maintain a fantasy of order, rules and normalcy. To break away from these two categories, to actually understand gender, as it really is—unstable, complicated, and multiple—risks harsh social punishments.

It is hard for most people to separate sex from gender. Sex refers to the biological differences, the presence of XX-female or XY-male chromosomes. (Even this is not a hard-set rule, as the Intersex Society of North America reminds us, about one in 1,500 to one in 2,000 babies is born each year with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definition of female or male.)

Gender, on the other hand, is neither biological or chromosomal but social and cultural. The traits we associate with “being a boy” or “acting like a girl” have no grounding in science, but we assume they are natural and normal. For example, in the emotional spectrum, an excessive emotionality from girl children means dolls and princess clothing and hyper-aggression from boy children translates into trucks and knights.

Some parents try free their children from these constraints—their versions of live and let live—by allowing their children to chose their own gender identities. Canadian parents Beck Lexton and Kieran Cooper created quite a brouhaha this past January when the revealed that they decided to bring up their 5-year-old child, Sasha, as “gender neutral.”

Trying to avoid stereotyping and boxing their child into one gender category, they referred to Sasha as “‘the infant’” and kept their child’s sex a secret from all but a few close friends and relatives. As Sasha grew older, “he was encouraged to play with dolls as much as Lego, slept in a neutral yellow room and was allowed to wear both boys’ and girls’ clothes,” reports the Daily Mail.

While I found their decision laudable, some of my Facebook friends responded to my post of this story with shock. On The Today Show, panelists Donny Deutsch and Star Jones suggested that these parents should be locked up for injuring a child.

Lest we think parents of color are more rigid, the Washington Post recently published “Transgender at Five,” a story about Tyler, now 5, who insisted at 2 years old on being a boy. At first these interracial parents thought their daughter was a tomboy, but over time came to recognize that her persistent question, “When did you change me?” wasn’t going to go away. Now, they are embracing Tyler’s gender as his choice.

In utero, gender ambiguity might be socially acceptable or even garner kudos (especially from older generations who like the idea of keeping it a surprise), but it has grave consequences for adults. As Kellee Terrell’s post on TheRoot.com, “No Justice for CeCe,” reminds us, transgender women and gender-nonconforming individuals, particular those of color, are especially vulnerable to vicious attacks and hate crimes.

Terrell points to two recent studies conducted by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs: “According to a 2011 study (pdf) people who were both transgender and of color were almost 2.5 times more likely to experience discrimination and nearly two times as likely to experience intimidation as non-transgender white individuals. A 2009 report conducted by the same group found that of the twenty-two people who were murdered in 2009 because of their sexual orientation, about 80 percent were people of color and half were transgender women; the other half were overwhelmingly men who defied gender stereotypes.”

Rather than policing gender as a biological fact from which people should not deviate, we should recognize that gender is experimental, variant and ever changing.

One of the things I am going miss the most about being pregnant is the freedom to imagine and therefore refuse gender rules. And in the meantime, green and yellow, gray and orange, purple and brown onesies offer far more options than pink and blue to me.

Picture this. On route to an appearance on Meet The Press, the vice president engages in a sexually explicit conversation with her lover. Her staff, overhearing, blushes at the graphic nature of the conversation and quickly ushers her into the car, switching the topic from innuendo to the hardline immigration stance she will be taking on air.

Welcome to television’s new world of women and politics: that actually happened on HBO, two Sundays ago. This spring, both ABC and HBO launched two new shows, Scandal and Veep, respectively—that portray women in politics as a sexy, powerful and fun. Both are refreshing departures from the real world of politics and even the cloistered asexuality of The West Wing.

In the cultural imagination, female political figures rarely get to be sexy and powerful. This is partly because politics is still a male-dominated world. Data compiled by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University show that women currently hold 16.8 percent of the 535 seats in Congress and 23.7 percent of the seats in state legislatures. There are six female governors; of the 100 big-city mayors, twelve are women.

But this is also because the provenance of politics and sexual attractiveness is itself a double standard. For men, sexual appeal, competence and power are seen as qualities for leadership. Think Bill Clinton’s cool pose on the saxophone, Barack Obama’s inaugurating Men’s Vogue, and even John Edward’s golden-boy smile (pre-trial).

But for women in politics, sexuality is often a liability. Unlike for their male counterparts, competence in a woman is a necessity, but often not very sexy. While this might explain (and this is not always a bad thing) why there are almost no scandals involving women politicians, it also means that to be successful in politics, women have to deliberately play down or inhibit those charismatic qualities—call it swagger, sexiness or a winning smile—upon which many of their ambitious male counterparts thrive.

Not so much on television. Scandal is a fast-paced, surreal Shondra Rimes drama about DC fixer Olivia Pope (played by Kerrie Washington), who regularly dons Armani and Valentino while valiantly taking on Washington’s most powerful men. Veep, on the other hand, is an acerbic comedy about one of the best-dressed politicians ever to appear on television, the foul-mouthed, eco-friendly Vice President Selina Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus).

Living up to its title, Scandal is all about forbidden romance and stolen glances. Pope is the African-American woman with whom the married white GOP president, Fitzgerald Grant (played Tony Goldwyn), is desperately in love. She has the White House on speed dial, unabashedly kisses the president in the Oval Office and is DC’s most effective political negotiator (loosely based on real-life Washington strategist Judy Smith). Salvaging the presidency more that once, she is brains and beauty, wrapped in a white Tony Burch trench. Firm in her convictions and keeper of everyone’s secrets, she puts people on edge.

If Pope has too much access to the White House, Veep’s Selina Meyers has too little. She can’t get a single piece of legislation she backs passed because POTUS refuses to coordinate agendas with her. Her ineffectiveness not only comically reveals the limits of the vice presidency but also highlights the gender gaps that most elected women politicians continue to face. Olivia Pope is powerful precisely because she’s not elected. For women, even being elected doesn’t mean they get to be powerful.

This is biggest and most crucial difference between these two shows.

“Scandal” revels in the fact that “smart power” can be sexy too. But then again, Olivia Pope has never run for office. She is powerful, but was never elected—which reflects the fact that there are so few women of color who are elected officials. Currently, women of color constitute 4.5 percent of the total 535 members of Congress, and there are no women of color serving in the US Senate.

Meanwhile, Ernesto Martinez, the costume designer for Veep who dresses Julia Louis-Dreyfus, said in the New York Times’s “Outfitting the Veep” that for “most politicians, their stab at looking good is not really so great. The idea was to be powerful, but attractive.” Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Kirsten Gellibrand worked; instead, he had to turn to our most famous unelected Washington woman: Michelle Obama.

Ultimately, how well dressed or charismatic a politician is shouldn’t matter. But these shows reveal that women who run for office have to play by a different set of rules than everyone else. And they also give us a picture, if only for sixty minutes, of how fun it would be if there were some more cracks in Washington’s glass ceiling.

Yesterday, the GOP-led House voted to approve the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), trending as #fakevawa on Twitter, almost exclusively along bipartisan lines with 222 members voting in favor and 205 against.

First passed in 1994 with broad bipartisan support, VAWA originally provided $1.6 billion in funding toward the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women, extended victim’s rights for redress and established the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women.

Full disclosure: as a rape survivor, I have been a direct beneficiary of VAWA’s funding for I, like millions of women across the country, went to my local rape crisis center for help. Since then, through my work as a university professor and the co-founder of A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit that empowers college students to end campus sexual assault I have witnessed firsthand how VAWA’s Grants to Reduce Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence, Dating Violence and Stalking on Campus Program have increased resources for victims and prevention programs on campuses all over the country.

This year, the bill’s reauthorization has become enmeshed in a series of political battle between Democrats and Republicans over the scope of its protections. Democrats have fought to expand its coverage to include protections for groups especially vulnerable to gender-based crimes, such as gay, lesbian and transgender victims, Native Americans and undocumented workers. Those provisions were part of the Senate bill that passed in April.

The approved House Republican version, on the other hand, removed such stipulations, with Republicans claiming that their bill was both gender-neutral and “victim-centered.”

As a result, House Republicans risk advancing the perception that the GOP isn’t standing strong for women’s rights, which is more than just a perception—they are, after all, the aggressors in the War on Women. By denying the expanded protections—recommendations made by a victim’s rights advocates, law enforcement officials, and survivors themselves—Republicans are also legislating a hierarchy of victimhood, determining which groups deserve funding, resources and equal protection under the law.

This is especially appalling because Native Americans and undocumented immigrants experience disproportionately high rates of domestic and sexual violence, while bearing the even greater burden of social stigma and discrimination by law enforcement than other Americans.

The National Taskforce to End Sexual and Domestic Violence Against Women also reports that while members of the LGBTQ community experience sexual and domestic violence at approximately the same rate as non-LGBTQ victims, they are more likely to be denied services than heterosexual victims. Forty-five percent of LGBT victims were turned away when they sought help from a domestic violence shelter, according to a 2010 survey, and nearly 55 percent of those who sought protection orders were denied them. Thirty-four percent of Native American women, on the other hand, will be raped in their lifetimes, and 39 percent will be subjected to domestic violence. Of special concern to House Democrats was the bill’s failure to protect abused immigrant women, nearly 75 percent of whom, need legal protections to prevent abusers and perpetrators from using immigration status as a tool of abuse, exploitation and control.

Republicans claim that the differences in the Senate and House bills are a result of Democrats’ politicizing a key issue for both parties. They’re wrong, and I can’t help but think about the thousands of victims who will continue to be underserved and vulnerable to future abuse and exploitation.

This ranking of victimhood, of whose experience with violence does and doesn’t count is not only profoundly undemocratic but a surefire guarantee that the real pandemic of domestic and sexualviolence is here to stay.

Last week, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a decision that a woman from Kansas could be sent to jail if she refused to testify against the man she accused of sexual assault. 

The 24-year-old woman initially filed charges in August 2012 against a 63-year-old Nebraska man for sexually assaulting her when she was 7 years old. Last year, however, she refused to testify in court because she felt it would bring further shame and humiliation to her family. In response, Lancaster County District Judge Paul Merritt threatened her with a contempt charge and ninety days of jail time, saying that the case hinged on her testimony.

Unfortunately, this case is not unique but part of growing trend of criminalizing rape survivors in order to guarantee their testimonies at trial.

In April, law enforcement officials in Sacramento, California, detained a 17-year-old girl for twice failing to appear in court against the man accused of raping her. Prosecutors argued that her testimony was crucial because the defendant, Fran William Rackley, was accused of sexually assaulting another victim and therefore posed a clear and present danger to the larger society.

For many victim rights advocates, the detention was seen as a violation of California Marsy’s Law, a state constitutional amendment that protects and expands the legal rights of victims. Thanks to the diligent efforts of her lawyer, Lisa Franco, and advocates, the judge ordered an ankle-monitoring bracelet as an alternative to more jail time after she already had been detained for more than a week.

In both cases, the judges recognized that threatening or detaining the victims might not be the best way to address the victim’s reluctance to take the stand. And yet, ultimately the rights of the victims were seen as secondary to public good.

Ironically, the fact that these two young women came forward in the first place is an anomaly. Sexual assault is one of the most underreported violent crimes in America. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), 54 percent of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to the police, based on a statistical average of the past five years. Those rapists, of course, never spend a day in prison. Factoring in unreported rapes, only about 3 percent of rapists ever serve a day in jail.

Executive director and co-founder of the sexual and domestic violence prevention organization A Long Walk Home Scheherazade Tillet (full disclosure: my sister!) told me that “many survivors of sexual assault do not report their rapes because they know the process can be so humiliating and terrifying.”

She continued, “We see this especially in cases when the victims know their perpetrators, are young people, or when the defendant is a older and more powerful. It is a lot to ask of anyone to recover from this huge trauma and also go through the formal judicial process. It is really cruel to threaten them with jail, if they can’t do both.”

To criminalize those who initially do come forward only makes it harder, not easier, for future victims. Instead, prosecutors and judges should be trained by and work in tandem with victim advocates, rape crisis counselors and rape victims themselves to insure that testifying against one’s attacker does not produce more trauma and coercion.

“Why aren’t you and your boyfriend married after almost fourteen years of being together?” I’m often asked. “Well, it seems wrong to get legally married when many of our friends can’t,” I say.

People often greet my response with an awkward silence. But, the pause is a question itself: What if heterosexual couples voluntarily refused the benefits of marriage that are denied to most of our gay and lesbian friends and family?

Last week, the issue of marriage equality roared back in the headlines when President Obama stated that he believes gay and lesbian Americans have a right to marry. While his speech was heavier on the rhetoric than the politics, it did capture a growing ideological shift amongst Americans, especially young voters, from that of antipathy to empathy to public support.

Obama’s statement is a watershed. Yet how do those of us who benefit from heterosexual privilege, yet believe in full citizenship for all Americans, push that needle of solidarity, and ultimately social change even further to the left?

Thus far, both right and left have sought to use boycotts as a political tactic. The conservative National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) recently boycotted Starbucks because of the company’s support of the freedom to marry. Fortunately, five days after NOM launched its “Dump Starbucks” petition, it received only 19,000 signatures, compared to the nearly 250,000 individuals who have signed SumOfUs’s retaliatory “Thank You, Starbucks” card.

In contrast, following the passage of California’s Proposition 8, gay marriage advocates called for the boycotting of those companies and individuals who supported the ballot that decreed “only marriage between a man and woman as valid or recognized in the California.”

But if marriage equality is one of the major civil rights issues of our times, then should one of the most successful civil rights strategies—the boycott—be deployed against the institution of marriage itself?

In One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, journalist Rebecca Mead reports that wedding industry is worth $160 billion to the US economy and has every interest in ensuring that weddings become more lavish and dresses become more expensive. On average, American wedding ceremonies cost $25,631; the average dress $1,458.

As a result of this huge economic incentive, groups like the youth-led National Marriage Boycott ask people to pledge to “deliberately forgo the privilege of marriage until it truly a right for all,” help repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and wear an equality ring as public symbol of their support.

For many, boycotting marriage might be too a radical proposition. Yale law professor Ian Ayres, co-author of the book Straightforward: How To Mobilize Heterosexual Support For Gay Rights, recently stated in an interview that “if you roll the clock back ten years ago, heterosexual couples sent wedding invitations to their friends and family, including their gay friends, without the slightest sense of unease.

“Now, there is often a slight sense of unease, and sometimes I even hear embarrassment, like the heterosexual couple feels strange for taking this wonderful benefit of marriage, when their loved friends who are gay cannot take that right. There are loving heterosexual couples who are choosing not to marry until marriage equality comes to their state.”

I, for one, have decided if I get married, it can only be in the handful of states that support marriage equality. Currently, I live in New Jersey, where Governor Chris Christie recently vetoed the state legislature’s passage of the gay marriage bill. New Jersey does have civil unions, but it is clearly defined as a legal arrangement between same-sex partners only. Even if a heterosexual couple wanted to be in legal solidarity with gay and lesbian couples here, our only options are privilege or renunciation.

At the time of his veto, Christie said he shared Obama’s position of supporting civil unions. Now Christie chides, “My position is really clear on it. It’s not going to change. I just do not believe that marriage should be between anyone but a man and a woman.”

The tide is changing. But clearly not fast enough.

I am weighing in late on the HBO’s “Girls” phenomenon. There have already been various and valid concerns about the show for its racially monochromatic casting. (For some of the most thoughtful criticism on this point, see Dodai Stewart’s “Why We Need to Keep Talking About the White Girls on Girls”, Kendra James’ “Dear Lena Dunham: I Exist” and Jenna Wortham’s “Where (My) Girls At?”)

Nevertheless, I wanted to watch a few episodes and understand how its interior world worked before belatedly entering the fray.

But the show’s writer, director and leading actress, Lena Dunham, beat me to the punch. In an interview with NPR this week, she responded to the criticism by way of authenticity: “I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls.”

Using autobiography as defense, Dunham sought to nullify concerns about why she set an all-white cast in one of the most diverse cities in the world. At first, it made writerly sense to me. It was her gut. Her subconscious. An absence in her imagination.

An accident.

But then one line stood out: “Each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me.” Sadly, Dunham seems to have no women of color “close” to her. And yet, she is hardly unique, because for all our talk about the multiracialism of the millennial generation, friendship segregation in high schools, colleges and, yes, even in Brooklyn, is more than a coincidence. It is a crisis.

Recent data has shown that while a substantial number of whites and blacks claim to have interracial friends, when asked to list the names of their close friends, only 6 percent of whites and 15.2 percent of blacks actually listed a friend of another race.

In her book Talking To Strangers, political scientist Danielle Allen says this is caused by “interracial distrust,” the negative feelings, such as fear, that limit the interactions people of different racial and ethnic lines have with one another.

In turn, such groups do not only perceive each other as “strangers” who should not be trusted, but end up creating racially homogenous economic networks and social capital as a result. In our racially stratified society, such differences do not mean “separate but equal” as friends, but decreased access to quality healthcare, education, jobs and political representation for communities of color.

Segregated friendship also has structural origins. In their 2006 report, “Residential Segregation and Interracial Friendships in Schools,” sociologists Ted Mouw and Barbara Entwisle found that patterns of friendship segregation seem to parallel those for residential segregation.

For young people, “residential segregation is important because it results in school segregation,” Mouw and Entwisle write, “which restricts opportunities for interracial friendship.”

Unfortunately, most American school districts are decreasing their efforts to desegregate schools, while school segregation is rising for Africa-Americans and Latinos. And with the conservative Supreme Court revisiting the constitutionality of affirmative action this summer, we can assume that this tragic trend will continue on college campuses across the country.

So, when Dunham confesses that “I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.” We realize that her experiences growing up in New York and attending a super-liberal arts college were enough. For some reason, these progressive enclaves did not prepare her to live in a world with women of color as peers, as muses and as one of the girls.

It’s not too late to include such complexity as the show progresses. But the bigger question is, why were there no women of color in that world in the first place?

The real problem with our society’s obsession with the celebrity baby bump is not what it shows, but rather what it hides.

Everywhere you turn, celebrity women are sporting the baby bump. Jessica Simpson shared her naked bump on the April cover of Elle. Actress Nia Long struck a similar pose on the cover of Ebony back in October. And both were clearly homages to Annie Leibovitz’s iconic Demi Moore photo of 1991.

In the case of 2012’s most famous new mom, R&B diva Beyoncé, “the absence of evidence” of her bump led to maelstrom of Internet rumors. Blogs questioning the legitimacy of her pregnancy were so cruel, her younger sister, Solange, took to Twitter to defend her.

Even I got caught up. Now in my first pregnancy, I went through great lengths to insure that I was bump couture. Vintage empire waist dresses, trips to Rosie Pope Maternity store and my infatuation with well-dressed celebrity mom made the last nine months a fashion feast.

Only one caveat: my bump came with no lucrative endorsement deals, fashion lines or Oxygen reality shows. I was not part of the “growing number of underemployed actresses, singers and would-be entrepreneurs” who are discovering, as New York Times writer Jacob Bernstein puts it, that “motherhood pays.”

For the vast majority of American women, however, pregnancy and childbirth make us more financially vulnerable, not less. Consider that women without children make ninety cents to a man’s dollar, mothers make seventy-three cents to a man’s dollar, and single moms make only about sixty cents to a man’s dollar. Race and ethnicity matter too. “At Rope’s End,” a report by NYU’s Women of Color Policy Network, found that black and Latino single mothers have a median wealth of zero, whereas white women report a median wealth of $6,000.

In our recession, single women mothers are most likely to be unemployed and as a result, their children are more likely to experience the devastating impacts of our stalled economy. Finally, a 2007 study from Cornell University showed that all things being equal—résumés and job experiences—mothers were offered $11,000 lower starting salaries than non-mothers. In contrast, fathers were offered $6,000 more in starting salaries than non-fathers.

Fortunately, organizations like the American Association of University Women and MomsRising respond to this great income disparity by lobbying Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, legislation that President Obama says “will help ensure that men and women who do equal work receive the equal pay that they and their families deserve." By creating stronger motivation for employers to base wage discrepancies on genuine business needs rather than gender and empowering women to negotiate for equal pay, the is a first step towards protecting mothers from workplace discrimination.

Until then, only for the chosen few does the baby bump mean a financial one.

“What does one wear to a SlutWalk?” I asked myself as I combed through my closet. A strapless romper? Too dated. A white pleated sundress? Too summer wedding. “What do you think I should wear?” I asked Solomon, my partner of thirteen years, who was becoming as exasperated by my private catwalk as I was. “Whatever you want,” he answered. “Isn’t that the point?”

It was indeed the point. SlutWalk, an anti-rape march and street protest that has gone viral, is as much about freedom of expression as it is a political protest. The first SlutWalk, organized last April by Heather Jarvis and Sonya Barnett in Toronto, was a response to a Toronto police officer telling a group of students in a public safety class that women "should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized." Since then, more than seventy SlutWalks have popped up in places as diverse as Chicago, Berlin, Cape Town, New Delhi and Mexico City. New York City’s highly anticipated SlutWalk is scheduled to take place on October 1.

In the United States, SlutWalks have been greeted with a mixed response. Feminist icon Alice Walker recently told the online magazine Guernica that she “always understood the word ‘slut’ to mean a woman who freely enjoys her own sexuality,” and observes that “the spontaneous movement that has grown around reclaiming this word speaks to women’s resistance of having names turned into weapons against them.” I agree. In her op-ed in the Washington Post, Jessica Valenti, founder of Feministing.com and author of the Purity Myth, wrote, “SlutWalks have become the most successful feminist action of the past twenty years.”

But SlutWalk’s critics abound, and their ranks are as diverse as the movement’s supporters. “I think when a woman is dressing in an immodest way, in a provocative way, she has got think about what is she saying by her dress,” said conservative singer/songwriter Rebecca St. James on the Fox News show Hannity, confirming that women also participate in victim-blaming. Meanwhile, writer Rebecca Traister penned the most visible feminist criticism of the marches in The New York Times Magazine; in “Ladies, We Have a Problem.” Traister described the SlutWalkers as “dressed in what look like sexy stewardess Halloween costumes” which “seems less like victory than capitulation (linguistic and sartorial) to what society already expects of its young women.”

Sexy stewardess, however, wasn’t quite what I had in mind that morning—and Traister, like many of SlutWalk’s critics, seems to have missed a critical aspect of the march’s pageantry. While many participants at the DC march I participated in wore in jeans and sneakers, the women who stood out the most were rape survivors wearing the clothes they had been assaulted in—from pajamas to thigh-high boots—carrying signs that said, “This Is What I Was Wearing When I Was Raped.”

After texting back and forth with fellow feminist Holly Kearl, author of Stop Street Harassment, who tried on twelve different outfits ranging from running clothes she is routinely harassed in to a business suit, I solved my wardrobe predicament: a black-and-white baby-T cut-out that reads, “Got Consent?," suede strapped heels and a black pencil skirt hiked up to a mini held together by a charcoal leather belt that hadn’t seen sunlight for years.

Sadie Healy, a speaker at SlutWalk DC, wore the green-and-gold sequined outfit she was assaulted in to the march. She told me that “every law enforcement officer, district attorney and even friends and family I spoke to about my assault asked me what I was wore that night.”

“I wore that outfit,“ Healy continued, “to show that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you are wearing, they will call you a slut because you come forward and say you were sexually assaulted. The word has everything to do with who we think deserves to be sexually assaulted.”

The sartorial reappropriation that Healy, a white, college-educated Mid-Westerner, managed to find at SlutWalk, however, may well not be possible for women of color who always wear the added complication of race. That’s what Farah Tanis, co-founder of the New York–based feminist group Black Women’s Blueprint, recently declared in “An Open Letter From Black Women to the SlutWalk.” The letter, directed at organizers of SlutWalk NYC, expresses concern that “Black women and girls have found no real space in SlutWalk.” “As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves ‘slut’ without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is,” Tanis and others write. “The perception and wholesale acceptance of speculations about what the Black woman wants, what she needs and what she deserves has truly, long crossed the boundaries of her mode of dress.”

“Approximately 40 percent of African-American women report coercive contact of a sexual nature by age 18,” Tanis told me in an interview. “Part of the problem with SlutWalk in the United States is that is doesn’t speak to the myriad of needs and the complex situations that African-American and even Asian-American, Latina, and Native American women experience when it comes to sexual assault.”

As the co-signers of the open letter suggest, the word and iconography of “slut” can be more difficult for African-American women to reclaim because of the longstanding stereotypes about black women as innately hypersexual. Dating back to the eighteenth century, European and white American slaveholders routinely applied the myth of the jezebel, the sexually promiscuous and morally loose woman, to justify their widespread rape of enslaved black women.

This myth, however, grew to encompass not only slave women and the jezebel fast became the catchall for all black women’s sexuality, regardless of their social standing or legal status. A white woman, with the exception of prostitutes and some manual laborers, could be a “lady,” the model of respectability, modesty, and even sexual purity. A white woman can be labeled a slut on the basis of specific behavior, such as perceived promiscuity. But black women, stereotypically, can be considered sluts at any time, no matter what they do or wear.

We witnessed the jezebel’s most recent incarnation this summer when the New York Post ran the headline describing Nafiassatou Diallo, the West African hotel maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Khan of sexual assault, as a “hooker”—when the only “evidence” backing up the accusation was an unnamed source. “Not all women can stop being called a slut when they go home,” Tanis says.

But it is precisely because of the sexual stereotypes associated with black women, says Robin Givhan, fashion critic for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, that “the reverse is also possible. It would seem to me that black women might have an even more powerful reason to want to defuse the power of the word ‘slut.’ ”

“There has always been a strategy amongst African-American men and women that you win respectability by being respectable. The marchers and protesters in the civil rights movement wore their Sunday best because it was a show of their own sense of dignity,” Givhan tells me.

“But I wonder if we have gotten to the point when that doesn’t have to be the only way. I would raise the question, ‘Are black women confident enough in their respectability and femininity that they can wear shorts and a halter and say I am still someone worthy of your respect? Someone who is worthy of being respected? Especially, in an age when the icon of American womanhood is Michelle Obama?’”

Many SlutWalk organizers around the country—who operate independently—deserve the legitimate criticisms that they have not been inclusive of women of color. At the march I attended, despite the efforts of SlutWalk DC organizer Samantha Wright, the majority of women were white.

And that’s precisely why I decided to march. While I had heard the critiques, and agreed with aspects of them, I made the choice to participate as a way of protesting the alarming rates of sexual violence that black girls and women experience. During my speech, I said I was there

because too many women and girls, who look like me, haven’t always been invited to marches like this.… Because young girls, and especially girls of color, are called Jumpoffs. Whores. Sluts. Almost everyday. By friends. By strangers. By parents. By police officers. ’Cause when I took that long walk home after I was raped, my spaghetti strapped dress was turned inside out. And I was afraid to go to the police and be told it was my fault. Scared of someone telling me that being trapped in a room wearing a spaghetti-strapped dress with a man who threatened my life wasn’t rape.

As a longtime activist against sexual violence who has seen the way survivors are consistently silenced, the idea of a march that brought attention to sexual violence and celebrated its survivors was too compelling to ignore. I had to be there.

Still, one of SlutWalk’s biggest strengths—spectacle—might be its ultimate weakness. So far, only a handful of SlutWalks have maintained momentum after the march. For Chai Shenoy, author of “This is Why I Don’t Care to SlutWalk” and an attorney for Washington Empowered Against Violence (WEAVE), the real problem with SlutWalk DC is that “SlutWalk is not a movement, it’s a march.” To create long-term change, says Chai, “It needs to have a purpose beyond just a march. I think it needs to have larger purpose, a call to action, beyond people who already belong to the same community coming together.” Shenoy believes that such a “call to action,” would entail working with communities and grassroots organizations already committed to ending sexual violence, ultimately creating more opportunities for women of color and immigrant women to engage.

None of this negates the fact that SlutWalk has been the most successful protest against sexual violence in the United States since the birth of the Take Back the Night marches in the 1970s. For me, walking alongside women who confidently wore the clothing in which they had been sexually assaulted was exciting and empowering. As a black woman and a rape survivor, it was one of only times in my life that I felt like I could wear whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted, without the threat of rape.

But like any great spectacle, SlutWalk risks going out of style. In order for it to be more than a passing fad, it has to become a healthy marriage of substance and spectacle, a movement that builds on the anti-rape activism of black women, like civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks, as revealed in Danielle McGuire’s recent book At the Dark End of the Street. One that integrates, as its organizers and protesters, those women—lesbian, queer and transgendered; women of color, low-income women and sexually exploited workers—who are most vulnerable to sexual assault and more likely to be called “slut,” regardless of what they’re wearing.

Maybe this is why when I got back on the Acela after the march, I felt compelled to pull my down my skirt. Just a little.