Letter from the Chair: Kim Cook

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Hello everyone!

I hope you all had a delightful holiday season with good food, good friends, and plenty of time to rest and recuperate!  I can’t tell you how excited and honored I am to be serving the DWC as Chair for the next two years. One of the things that makes it exciting to me is that I’m following in the footsteps of our past DWC Chairs whose vision and effectiveness make this such a great “home” for us when we meet annually and throughout the year as we continue our work.

Since we all left Atlanta, the DWC Executive Council, along with the editorial board of our journal Feminist Criminology has selected Dr. Rosemary  Barberet (John Jay College of Criminal Justice) as the next editor. She will take the helm this coming summer, and between now and then will be working closely with the current editor Dr. Jana Jasinski to transition the editorial offices to New York.  Let’s take a moment to thank Dr. Barberet for her excellent application, and Dr. Jasinski for her years of service as the editor.  I also want to thank members of the DWC Executive Council for working on this during the holiday season: Christina DeJong, Emily Lenning, Stacy Mallicoat, Denise Boots, Tara Richards, Carrie Buist, and Deena Isom.

Moving forward, we have quite a lot to accomplish together. The DWC is celebrating our 30th year with several important events at the conference in San Francisco.  We are grateful to the leadership from Susan Sharp and Amanda Burgess-Proctor for organizing our 30th Anniversary events.  We will have featured speakers and sessions at the ASC conference in San Francisco.  In addition, there will be a special anniversary issue of our journal, Feminist Criminology.  So, please look for announcements about these events so that you can plan to attend.

In addition, the committees established for the DWC are now finalized and the updated committees are posted on the website. Please take a look to make sure you’re on the committee you intended to sign up for and let me know if you have any questions.

If you are able to do so, please consider making a contribution to our 30/30 campaign in order to support the cost of our 30th anniversary celebrations.  You can donate publicly, and designate your contribution in honor or in memoriam to someone whom you admire, you can also donate anonymously if you prefer to do that.  The list is growing daily and we are always grateful for your tax deductible contributions.

Please let me know if you have ideas to contribute to the DWC. We strive to be open and inclusive; your participation in that helps us to achieve our goals.  Thank you all so much!

Warm regards,

Kim

Kimberly J. Cook, Ph.D., Professor
Department of Sociology and Criminology
University of North Carolina Wilmington
601 South College Road
Wilmington, NC 28403
910.962.3785 (office)
910.962.7385 (fax)

cookk@uncw.edu
http://www.uncw.edu/soccrm/Cook.html
http://www.uncw.edu/soccrm

Rape Myths Lite: ABC’s “The Middle”

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-by Dr. Alesha Durfee.

I recently watched a taped version of “The Middle” (an ABC sitcom) that originally aired on 1/9/14. “The Middle” is a fairly funny sitcom that both my teen kids and I watch. I was shocked when halfway through the episode I saw what I can only describe as “rape myths lite”.

In the “Sleepless in Orson” episode, a “bad boy” kisses Sue (the main teen girl character) without her permission – they are not dating, and she is upset, shocked, and angry. She yells at him….. .but of course each time he does it (it happens five times throughout the episode) she begins to think more fondly of him and to talk to her friend more and more about him. She transitions over the episode from being appalled and angry to anxiously looking for him out the window – not in fear, but because she wants him to force her to kiss him again. At the end she is actually pursing her lips and leaning in for a kiss.

A boy kisses a girl against her will on "The Middle"
The storyline is clearly drawn from stereotypes about schoolboys chasing girls around the schoolyard trying to kiss them – it’s done in a very comedic fashion. “The Middle” is a “family” comedy so the situation is presented as “just a kiss” where “no one got hurt” and “everyone laughed”. But that’s what makes this episode all the more troubling to me. It’s far easier to spot and dispel rape myths in stark contrast – when you have a documentary or a news story or anything that shows how harmful the actions were, where you can see the consequences of actions. If you ask a teenager if someone has the right to pressure someone else into sex, the majority of teens that I’ve met say “no”. They know the rhetoric, even if they don’t necessarily believe it or act on it.

But it’s the more insidious representations of rape myths – how Sue suddenly now likes a boy because he kissed her despite her protests – that is troubling to me. My teens laugh at Sue’s changing expression post-kiss (from appalled to intrigued/excited) and I worry about what they are taking from the episode. I can explain rape myths to them, but that only conjures up images of the documentary or the news story. Does that mean that they don’t see the messages conveyed about gender, sexuality, and bodily rights in this episode? And since (thankfully, hopefully) so far their world looks a lot more like “the Middle” than a documentary or news story, does that mean they don’t see the rape myths that are in their everyday world? Because ultimately what we find “funny” says a lot more about what we believe and our perspectives on the world than when we are asked for our (measured) responses. And I’m disappointed that this is what we as a society still finds funny.

Dr. Alesha Durfee is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University’s School of Social Transformation. She can be reached at Alesha.Durfee@asu.edu.