Hi everybody, my name is Liz Spickel and I'm the editor of Tech Lotto which is a website about technology and popular culture written in English and Spanish. And I wanted to talk to you about something that strays a bit from that mission, though it is about an editorial that ran online. That editorial is below this video and I paste it in the entire copy of the editorial because I think it's important that we're on the same page. So you go ahead and read that and I'll wait. Oh, hold music, sorry. Okay, oh great, that was fast, your fast reader. So Dan Rottenberg is the editor of the Broad Street Review. That is an arts website out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that is affiliated with the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It's full disclosure, I've known Dan pretty much since I was a teeny, teeny talk and that's because of Philadelphia journalism, circles, parents, kids playing in the same park, I mean that kind of thing. So I've known him for many years and talked to him recently. I haven't spoken to him about this particular column which I think is really retrograde and disturbing and propagates some ideas that I think are pretty damaging to women. I thought a lot about how to respond to it and felt kind of compelled to. Dan used to be a print guy and you know when something is in print, it really isn't forever. I used to comfort myself with that thought as a journalist that if I wrote something that I wasn't happy with, that worked out a weekly newspaper, you know, the next week I could pretend it never happened. Unfortunately online or maybe fortunately everyone can hear you scream. So if you scream something that you don't feel good about, you know, you're screwed. So Dan has sort of ignited a firestorm of controversy about what he wrote. Actually I wanted to mention that in the 1970s rape shield laws began to be enacted and this means that now what it means now is that it's inadmissible. What a woman was wearing when she was raped, what her prior sexual history was. So that's because women were, there were fewer rape convictions because the jury would automatically think well she was kind of a slut anyway so she deserved it. And it became clear that that was not a legally justifiable process I guess. I'm not a lawyer but I was a rape educator for several years and so learned a lot about this kind of stuff. So the rape shield laws which are now quite old and sort of accepted wisdom seem to be something that Dan is not familiar with. So my first sort of response was wait a minute, I can't even believe we're having this conversation. Then I started thinking about how we were having this conversation in a very heterosexual fashion assuming that the male gaze is always focused on the female, the female is the person who's objectified, the objectification takes place because the man does that and et cetera, et cetera. But really I don't think that gets to the heart of the matter. I mean everything is heterosexist, that's the world we live in. I think what really gets to the heart of the matter is how this kind of writing can negatively impact women. As it is, as you might read in an excellent article by Tara Murther in Philadelphia Weekly, rape is still, after so many years of this being the case, underreported. So statistics do not even tell the full story. The reason it's underreported is because women feel it's their fault and they feel culpable, they feel ashamed and they feel like if they tell people what happened, it's just going to, people are going to think that they were asking for it, they deserved it. The reason that I can say this so unequivocally is because I am a rape survivor myself. And it was precisely this kind of rhetoric that Dan employs that I believe prevented me from not only seeking some kind of legal action against the person who raped me, but seeking psychological help, which I desperately needed at the time after I was raped. My story, I just very briefly, I was living abroad, I was 17 years old, it was this summer before I went to college for my freshman year. And I lived in a house, one of those, you know, immersion programs where you live in a house with a native family. And the family, this was in the Dominican Republic. And one of the men in the household raped me. And rather than tell anyone, I thought it best that I not tell because I thought a lot about my behavior and how my behavior was responsible for this. You know, I had at one point gone on his motorbike and maybe that was implying something. I had the night that the rape occurred. I wore a skirt, which I never did there, never did. And I started, it was kind of a long, flowy skirt. I wouldn't say it was really tarded up. But I started to think about, you know, maybe that was what made him do it. I started thinking that it was my fault that I hadn't explained sufficiently what American women expect or don't expect. I mean, I can't begin to tell you, even as a teenager, all of these complicated things that I thought about and thought, you know, well, I know it, I am to blame. I made this happen somehow. I'm not sure how I made it happen. Something that I have rarely told anybody is that it happened again. And the reason that it happened again is because I continued to live in the same house with my rapist for about a month thereafter, because I couldn't tell anyone. The shame was so great and the sense of culpability above all. You know, this column that Dan has written suggests that women must be responsible in some way if they don't want to be victims. I would say that there are certain crimes that are not motivated by the victim's behavior. I think their rape is motivated by a lot of things. I don't, you know, it's a crime of power. It can sometimes be a crime that is related in some way to sex, I guess, but it's not something that, you know, sort of the average man sees a woman who's wearing shorts and just gets so inflamed that he can't stop himself from attacking her on the bus or something. I mean, it's, and the idea that we as women need to be the ones to control ourselves in order to protect ourselves rather than, you know, kind of thinking that these are criminals who need to be penalized and like any other crime. You know, I, I, it's hard for me to talk about because I feel like my not telling anybody at the time was such an awful mistake. This was a guy who was never held accountable for his actions. I know where he lives now. He has a family. You know, it's like, what's the point now? But there are times I think, God, you know, my life was changed irrevocably. I used to say my life was ruined. I have backed off of that. But it was pretty messed up, you know, and, and got really complicated for me because of issues of mental illness. So I'm going to stop there and I'm just going to say that I'm, I'm really concerned about the article. I want people to be thoughtful about how they engage in conversation around the article and, and keep in mind that I think if women are responsible for anything, it is to tell other women, this is not your fault. This is not something you did. And I wish somebody had told me that. Thanks. See you later.