Steubenville Rape Case

We had a great discussion in class about the rape that might or might not have occurred in Steubenville. There are so many issues that go along with these kinds of cases.
1) The party was at a Coach's house where there was obviously a nonexistent-low supervision level
2) There was alcohol at the party
3) There was no physical evidence that the girl had been raped
4) The whole fiasco was trending on the internet through many different mediums: video, pictures, statuses, etc.

Reading the article about the "Institutional Rape Tolerance" was hard for me to do. I saw colleges listed where people got raped and one of them was a school that I was highly considering to attend for the next four years of my education. It pains me that even at highly respected places, bad things are happening. They should not be happening at all, but you would think that these people have decent heads on their shoulders. Like the Steubenville boys. I don't think that the other players on the team should get penalized for not standing up for the girl. I think they SHOULD have stood up for her, but I don't think they can get punished for not standing up for her. Even if the boys did not rape the girl, they still should get in trouble for taking advantage of her in other ways. She was clearly unable to give consent to anything and that shuold be the ONLY reason the boys are getting in trouble. As for the online world, I think that the people posting things might have been overexaggerating because teenagers, and people in general, tend to do that. We take words like "rape" and turn them into casual things like "That test just raped me." This is a terrible habit to get into, but the court must realize that the posts online could have been false, especially if someone was posting about the rape when that person posting wasn't even at the party where the rape occured. It just is a huge mess and I feel badly for everyone involved, because at the end of the day it is about trust and evidence. And since there is not much evidence, there has to be trust gained somewhere and therefore trust lost somewhere. I'm curious about this and intend to follow the story closely in order to see how things turn out for the girl and the two "rapists" that took advantage of her. I hope this never happens in our area because I can't even imagine how messy things would get between the school board, parents, and friends.

The Frog Blog: Off To The Next Lily-pad

Frogs are amphibians. The word amphibian means "double life," and that's exactly the kind of life toads and frogs have. They live the first part of their life in water and the rest on land.

Yesterday I made my decision where I will be attending college in the fall. I will be going to University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign! I decided to name this blogpost, "The Frog Blog: Off To The Next Lily-pad" because I see us (students) as frogs. Yep, frogs. Some of us jump to lilypads that are over in the next pond because they like to be individuals in their decisions, some don't jump at all because they are afraid of change, some jump all together with their friends because they can't stand leaving them for the next four years or the next 'x' amount of years. 

In a few months, the only evidence of the class of 2013 ever being at Deerfield High School will be old school transcripts and the pictures of us being all together during our 4 years there. I feel like this is such a bittersweet thing. During the, what it seems like, 40 hour school days, I just want the work to end. I want the grades and competition and anxiety to end. I just want to be with everyone and be seniors forever. But, like the frogs and toads, we can't live our lives in water forever. We must move to land, move to college, move to new places. Bar Mitzvahs of our friends turn into weddings and baby showers. Our monopoly-money purchases of play houses and play cars turn into real purchases of adult vehicles and real homes for our families. 

I'm jumping off to my new lily-pad in less than 7 months and since we are all jumping off to new lily-pads it makes me feel better. More hopeful for the future. We're all starting new but we can always go back to that old Deerfield High School lily-pad and reminisce. It's time for things to change. Nature makes sure that change happens. 

Fifth entry for Fast Girls

So, it's awkward that by reading this ten chapter book, I have learned more about high school than the 3.5 years I have actually been in it. White did an incredible job creating a book that describes the slut without having a biased opinion that distracts, or sways the reader. Before reading this book, I never had the connection between physical abuse or a bad home life with girls, specifically, being sluts. I just always assumed that the reason a girl was getting with a lot of guys was their own business and just because they were easy or doing favors for them. But before I did read this book I always hated how, let's say, after meeting a girl for the first time, other girls will say, "Oh, you shouldn't be friends with her that girl's a slut." Well, my opinion is, if they're not bothering you, why does it matter? Why should someone's sex life interfere with their friends, especially friends who are girls? When this was addressed I was pleased to read the reason why the girls care. Sheer cruelty. Like I wrote in a previous blogpost, the boys spread the rumors to up their reputation, while the girls spread them to be rude. I wish that life was so black and white like White had made it seem in her book. The way she boiled down the definition of a rumor and the reason why people tell rumors was just genius. The only thing is, I wish she had gone further into how to FIX these problems, not just addressing them. But I guess her goal wasn't to fix them, it was to dissect them- which she did.

I like how White, more or less, ends the book by talking about how girls have coped (post high school) with being called a slut all their adolescent years. She talks about girls who still have terrible memories from school and cannot even go into the building that was meant only for education and kindness. White wrote about Janice Joplin and women who found inspiration and an outlet for their baggage like writing stories, poetry, and photography. The whole book is pretty negative, not because White ever says, "Being a slut is bad, and this is what those girls had to go through is like". No. She never wrote anything remotely close to that. She just shed a lot of light on why the slut rumor comes about in the first place and how it affects everyone in the picture. The negativity of these circumstances was completely wiped away for me when she mentions the girls who have gained confidence and have changed their ways from these experiences. I like to know there is hope in the world even when someone can feel like they have hit rock bottom due to how others treat them. I feel like if I were to add onto this book I would add some more testimonies from the actual rumor-spreaders, to see what they were thinking when they made the claims they did. I want to hear more from the "popular" crowd, who White mentions fit into a large pyramid that involves the whole student body in respective tiers. I wish she had included pictures of these girls who were named sluts, but at the same time I'm glad I didn't see them. At first, I wanted to know what they looked like to know if they deserved the name they got, but then I thought that it was crazy to assume how many guys a girl has been with or anything of that nature just from looks. There is not one face of a slut, and not even one word for it actually. As I mentioned, the word "slut" has a different meaning and synonym with every class and race. Sure, they overlap, but there are different definitions for everyone based on their personal experiences.

I have definitely benefited from reading this book because I learned a lot about human nature and why a bad past could lead to a bad reputation which could lead to thoughts about suicide or things like paranoia. The saddest part about it all is that I would be reading this book in school, and be hearing the word "slut" from a conversation going on across the room and I wouldn't know how to react. Say, "Hey, do you know what that word is doing to people? Mind your own business and don't label people for what they have done or haven't done." But I guess White didn't intend for people to do that, she just wanted to prove a point. That the slut rumor is rubbish. Don't believe everything you hear. That is  a lesson I learned and will take with me wherever I go. I knew that lesson was important, but I never understood the full impact of it until reading this book and hearing from real experiences. I recommend this book to girls (because there is not much about masculinity in it. sorry guys!). The beginning and end were slow, but the middle was fascinating.

Fourth entry for Fast Girls

Chapter 9 was all about how the slut story is different when looking at the issue of race. An overwhelming amount of white women were the ones who contacted White when she needed testimonies for her book. The beginning of the chapter is about a girl named LaShawn who tells about her time in Los Angeles as a teenager and how her and her friends overcame the stereotype of the sluts because they didn't let the rumors bother them and they didn't separate themselves just because they thought everyone else was separating them. White asks, "Is the dissonance between the story LaShawn tells and the story I hear from white girls a symptom of a fundamental dissonance between black and white girls?" (172). White also mentions the idea that girlhood itself is destabilized across race and class lines. This is confirmed when you look at statistics, like the amount of women with anorexia between black and white women. Black culture seems to protect their women from eating disorders by providing an environment in which extreme thinness is less valued. When some of the girls were picking on one girl of a different race than the group the girls liked to do it because they felt like they belonged to each other and she belonged to no one. "To cause humiliation is to exert control, and to exile another kid is to prove you belong, you are here," (178). Here is another place in the book when White wrote about duality. The secret that the girls here (any race) had was that they learned how to overcome the terrible feelings of being left out and bullied. The girl has to decide whether to give words the weight of gravity, and allow them to drag her down, OR she could walk in the halls and stare straight ahead, looking at a bright future. I am a huge advocate for the idea of being in control of what affects you and by how much. We are capable of changing our mindsets and putting ourselves in situations where we feel welcomed (or vice versa, taking ourselves out of places where we do not feel welcomed).

The last chapter, chapter 10, was really surprising to me. Not because anything cool happened, but because it was so blah to me. The title is, "Getting Over High School" and White just talks about how the sluts of the school are all similar. "Other women I meet are punks, mods, bikers. What's consistent is the tendency among these women to embrace a subculture, to see themselves as moving beneath the story of the normal," (189). Since they were outsiders, these teenagers had to find something that made them feel comfortable and a group of people where they felt wanted. This "counterculture" is the promise that maybe that was a realm where home could be reinvented. There funny part in this chapter was when White told a story about a girl who graduated high school as the slut and years later she bumped into a girl who was popular and had bullied her at school, and the girl ended up punching her in the face when she tried to apologize. Sometimes that anger just can't be directed anywhere else except into violence. I can't imagine Having those kinds of unsettling feelings after high school, where you won't likely see your whole grade again.

Third entry for Fast Girls

Chapter 6 was basically all about isolation in high school versus being in the “popular” crowd. A few pages talked about this pyramid where the popular kids were on top and everyone below them in each tier would make fun of the ones below them, and so forth. The inverted pyramid of this is truly the real one though- where the isolated person is alone at the top of this (the slut) and then everyone else is below them and finally the popular kids make up the base of it. A lot of people who were isolated at schools had experienced bad home lives, including parents kicking her out and even parents sexually abusing their children. The isolation brings up a whole new realm of things including this idea that the slut is some sort of disease. “Even if boys claim to have slept with her, they are never really ‘with’ her; to show any loyalty to her would be to make themselves contaminated too,” (125). White brings up a survey that Cosmo Magazine took in 1999 asking readers if they should reveal how many people they’re slept with. People answered that whether or not it is true, the person should respond with a low number when asked how many people they have slept with. I feel uncomfortable with this and the idea of lying to someone. Especially if you are going to marry someone, they deserve to know the truth about who you are/were. The chapter rounds out talking about Janice Joplin and how she was a very independent woman. She had a lot of confidence in whatever she did and for many high school “sluts”, gaining the confidence to overcome their bad reputation or at-least cope with it better.

Chapter 7 was my favorite chapter so far. It was about the cruelty that girls have towards each other. I know we can all be mean at times, but why do we do it? One victim of rumors said, “Boys would run their mouths, say they had sex with you, but it wasn’t so much to malign you as it was to build his own image among his friends. The really vicious ones were the girls. They said awful things about you with no other aspiration but to hurt you personally,” (133). After reading this quote I felt so enlightened. Girls are just as much a problem in the slut rumors as the boys are. White brings up how the slut has a sense of secrecy in the acts she does because no one sees it happen but everyone talks about it. “Her techniques are a mystery,” (134). Not only are other girls a little jealous of the slut because of all the attention she is getting from the rumors, they also are wondering how the slut gets to be the way she was. What does she do? How does she do it? Why can’t I do that? Things of that sort. This is why an author named Naomi Wolf wrote a book called “Promiscuities” and she said, “We are all bad girls, in the best way possible. Shameful feelings surrounding female desire need to be relieved because they are compromising our pleasure; if the cloud of shame was lifted, the ‘inner slut’ would introduce us to new horizons of desire,” (146). I definitely agree with this statement because I think people hold back too much because they are afraid of how society will look at them if they act a certain way. The rumors that float around, especially in a high school hallway, can be so far out there. One girl named Christine experienced people coming up to her and telling her that they heard what she had done at a party she hadn’t even attended. We CANNOT believe everything we hear! It is so simple. But sometimes it’s not simple. People lie, even when we confront them to avoid drama. White ended the chapter by saying, “Maybe only after girls have finished with the wars in the hallways do they gain any perspective on why the wars came about,” (152). The big picture of everything is much more important than the nitty gritty details and petty fights. Girls need to be less snappy and more cautious to not believe everything they hear.

Chapter 8 was probably one of the scariest chapters I have ever read in a book, including horror books that I have read. It is called ‘Basement Histories’ and talks about girls getting sexually taken advantage of at ages as young as 7 years old. When adults say to them, “Let’s call this our little secret,” (155), they feel like they have an obligation to obey them and also feel a sense of being chosen for something, but for some reason they do not feel good being chosen for that, so they don’t know what to think in the end. A lot of “sluts” have had these experiences. White says that in her interviews the girls who talked about sexual abuse far outnumbered the girls who didn’t. This really says something disgusting about our society. Even if a girl gets with a lot of guys, it might not always be for the reasons that the gossipers assume. There were a lot of testimonies in this chapter that included people talking about boyfriends raping them at the age of 13, about fathers masturbating on young children and telling them not to tell the mothers, or even about gang-bangs on a drunk girl at a party. I just wanted to skip to the next chapter. I cannot even believe that things happen like this in real life, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. These girls had lost their innocence so early in the game and so unwillingly. I’m glad this chapter wasn’t as long as the others.  

Second entry for Fast Girls

The fourth chapter was all about sexual problems in the suburbs and how generalizations about sluts can also be applied in a "safe environment" like the suburbs. The problems began for a woman named Karen when she was in middle school going to spin-the-bottle parties. From there, everything went downhill. When White went with Karen(age 35 now) to visit some childhood sites, Karen mentioned how she got nervous around people she saw on the streets. White wrote, "Her paranoia is contagious; throughout our visit I will watch people watching her, and wonder if they're part of the mob from the past," (83). It would be terrible to have people bully you and not even know where the rumors are coming from and who is spreading them. At-least when you know who is spreading the rumors you can try to confront them about the problem. These rumors start to make the fast girl experience issues with the idea of class. They feel like they do not have any value because of things written on their mailboxes like "Slut" and "White Trash". If that isn't enough, there is so much pressure from boys at school because in some cases, the jocks or kids who you would not normally expect to gang-rape high school peers will get a power trip and commit the unthinkable. There is a "suburban clich'e of safety," (89) that boys break but girls get the most attention from that usually. (I know that boys are sometimes the victims of girls gang-raping, but in the book I am reading, the girls are the targets so that's the opinion I am basing this reflection off).

The fifth chapter talks about family values and home wreckers. A Catholic philosopher quoted in the book that, "Her self disperses at the same rate as her lovers multiply," (98). This is an interesting perspective and ratio to describe something that is such a big part of humanity. There is definitely a double standard in high school and that is also addressed in the book. "Today the modern high school slut still has no remotely comparable male parallel," (98). This is SO true!!! Girls are sluts but if guys get with a lot of girls they are "studs". Why doesn't this change? Honestly, I don't think this ideology ever will change. White then brings up the temptation that people feel when they are married and how a home wrecker is a woman who thinks she can get anyone she wants when in reality she has no one. But, if the world was recreated, the mother still has to be in the picture, and so does the home wrecker. This is for good reason too. The home wrecker is the "Reference point on the map. She is from the wrong side of the tracks and hence indicates the location of the right side of the tracks," (109). Duality. White really has a few nice paragraphs about this because she gives the home wrecker the benefit of the doubt in a way. We NEED her in the world. We need the bad to see the good. I am starting to like this book a lot more!!

First entry for Fast girls

When I first heard about this book from the class book talk in the library, I thought that it was a non-fiction storyline about a girl who got branded as a slut in high school. I was completely wrong. The book actually began as more of a definition of high school. In the first chapter there were a lot of things mentioned. Some of the topics covered were the main crisis’ of teenagers in high school, Marijuana addicts, the importance of the cafeteria and seating arrangements, popularity, and finally the Columbine shooting and the significance of the “unsafe kids” who no one would suspect to commit horrible crimes. Reading about the Columbine shooting was extremely hard for me for two reasons. One, the more obvious reason, is that I go to a high school that is highly noted for its excellence in academics and extra-curriculars and I could not ever imagine something like a mass shooting happening right down the hall from me. The other reason that the shooting story hit home for me was because this winter break I was in Boston for a week-long International Youth Group convention. There we participated in an anti- gun violence rally. We heard a man named Colin speak about how he was shot during the Virginia Tech Massacre. Hearing a survivor from one of these shootings really shows you the reality of the situation. This reminded me of the quote in the book that was, “Columbine briefly illuminated high school’s tribal world, its primitivism, its phenomenal danger; the destructive darkness that the counseling center tries to counter with its cheerful slogans” (36). I guess all high schools are alike in that aspect because when I think of our counseling office I think of the "cheerful slogans".

                The second chapter was all about a rumor that got passed around during a pep assembly at a school called Calhoun High. The rumor itself was not important, but the idea of rumors was the key. White wrote, “Rumors flourish in periods of sudden crises, sustained tension, impending decisions, boredom from monotony,” (43). I can definitely agree with this and I think in high school the most rumors are spread are from boredom from monotony. Rumors move quickly and they happen “outside the realm of adult supervision,” (45). After the rumors story, there was a short story about a girl named Madeline. She matured quickly in high school and although she was innocent from the inside, her physical appearance said otherwise. People said that she was asking for the bullying and gossip. White also spoke about the misconception about how sexually active the slut was. “In my interviews I talked to some girls who had actually been promiscuous, some girls who hadn’t. Some girls were virgins; one girl had slept with seventy men in the space of her high school years. But in the mind of the crowd, all of these girls had slept with ‘everyone’,” (50). I feel bad for the girls who actually had not done anything, but had gotten the reputation from it. High school is full of lies and I just don’t understand why lying is overwhelmingly present in a school environment. I guess because teenagers are always in competition and will say anything to get ahead, or make sure someone else doesn’t get ahead. Reputation. Reputation. Reputation.

                The third chapter was about the slut archetype (category of the unconscious). I learned about how passing a rumor is appealing to people, which is why some of them do it. “The rumor is a form of verbal and even physical connection: the cupped hand on your ear during the whisper, the way people come close when passing it on. It’s a bond that seems vital even if it is only transitory,” (57). The slut is defined as a powerful person yet also powerless. The slut is also alone, or, a category of one. The archetype of the slut is unsafe while everyone else is safe. The slut has the wrong kind of desire while everyone else has the right kind. It doesn’t matter who the slut is or where she is from, she almost always fits into the “slut archetype” that is mentioned in the book. White also mentions pornography and how it is so easy now for anyone to look at it, either online or just media in general. These images fuel the slut rumors because people are attracted to the thought of sexual acts. White also brought up that girls who were called sluts in high school had suicidal tendencies later in life. I thought this was a far stretch for her to make because there is not a big enough correlation to make this statement true. The book is decent so far, and I’m looking forward to reading more testimonies.