The other day I sat watching a talk show on "rape prevention."

"Don't let your daughter go to Frat parties and get drunk while wearing a short skirt or they will get raped," was the advice.

And I thought,

Why have I never, not one single time, seen a show or read an article or book about how to avoid turning a boy into a rapist?

That might actually be effective and place responsibility where it belongs - on the rapist.

As it stands, I'm letting my son snuggle so close to me in my bed at night that I can't sleep. He rolls 360 degrees at least once every two seconds.

He's 2 and seems to need the physical closeness. Since I have absolutely no scientific evidence or even maternal advice on how to ensure that my son does not grow up with a rapist's mentality, I don't send him back to his own bed. What if withholding that snuggle-time is the crucial misstep? I define a rapist's mentality as a pathological inability to recognize a girl in a skirt, even a drunk girl, as a whole human being worthy of his respect, to be valued as more important than his penis.

It's not too much to expect from the male gender.

I'm guessing withholding of maternal and paternal love, physical closeness, disallowing or punishing feelings, yanking the doll out of their hands and replacing it with guns, teasing them for crying, and making jokes about their manhood and sexuality - turns some boys into rapists. The less pathological ones just turn into bad dates and worse husbands.

The truth about rape is that rapists and child pornographers would invent turtleneck porn and turtleneck fetishes if we all made our daughters wear turtlenecks to protect them from bad men. We believe its a lot easier to put a girl in a turtleneck (we can make her do it) and hope for the best, than it is to hold men accountable for their pathological and distorted thinking about girls (we have far less control over them), right?

The problem with this strategy is that it's 100% ineffective.

I'd like to see Dr. Phil or Oprah so a show along these lines:

Prevent Rape - Teach your son not to be a rapist.

Today Oprah issues an urgent call to her viewers to take action against child predators in an all-new episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” “What you are going to see is going to shock you to the core, but I'm asking you to please not turn away because this is happening in our country, to our children, in the United States every day,” says Winfrey.

During the episode, Oprah implores viewers to help put a stop to child predators by contacting their Senators in support of U.S. Senate Bill 1738. Called the PROTECT Our Children Act, U.S. Senate Bill 1738 has bipartisan support and is currently before the U.S. Senate. Oprah.com will feature information and links to connect viewers with their Senators.

Seriously, I don't want to watch this show. I know I will be beyond disturbed.

Reading a mommy blog one day I clicked a link that said, "Sex Stuff." As it was a mommy blog I figured it was an innocuous link to instructions on "the cat position" or ways to trick my husband into getting off the computer to do it more.

What I found was an extensive free pornography web that has disturbed me in a profound way ever since. It was all free. It all involved children and teenagers and it all tied sex to violence. A great deal of it was written in the first person of the victim professing how much they loved the heinous acts being done to them.

Porn ain't what it used to be.

Today's pornography is not innocuous photos of consenting adults having sex.

America we have a problem. It begins with our laws and making excuses for people who have no interest in controlling themselves. "He didn't mean it, he's a good guy except, but I've known him my whole life and the devil must have possessed him, she came onto him and he couldn't help himself." You've heard the lines, maybe you've said the lines, that excuse a 40-year-old man from preying on a 12-year-old child because she has budding breasts.

Well, now our children are budding breasts at 8, 9 and 10 and sometimes younger.

Are we, as a society, just going to keep reducing the age of "he couldn't help himself" to apply to elementary and primary school children who have no control over early puberty, which now affects half our girls? Or are we going to rear up like Mother Lionesses and protect our young?

Every year I see more families retreat inside their homes and create what is essentially their own self-made prisons.

They stop associating with their neighbors, they no longer meet new people, they quit going to school, they don't let their children play outside anymore, they don't let their kids ride bikes down the street, and slumber parties are out. I vacillate between thinking they are the only people with any damn sense to thinking they might have gone over the edge into crazy. My opinion of them is generally related to whether I have recent seen a show like Oprah's today or watched the news.

We're living in a society where every male is a suspect from fathers to brothers to grandparents to uncles to cousins to neighbors to friends' dads.

Why?

Because we don't have the integrity or the guts to put the people who are violating our young in prison and not let them out again.

In effect - we're creating our own prisons inside our houses because we don't feel its "fair" to put sexual predators in prison for life.

Not a good choice America. Change your mind. Watch the show and join me in sending letters to our representatives to pass Senate Bill 1738 - PROTECT Our Children Act.

PROTECT would:

* Authorize over $320 million over the next five years in desperately needed funding for law enforcement to investigate child exploitation.

* Mandate that child rescue be a top priority for law enforcement receiving federal funding.

* Allocate funds for high-tech computer software that can track down Internet predators.

Oh and if you think it's not political - you're mistaken.

Grier Weeks, Executive Director of the National Association to Protect Children, testifies before Congress on Oct. 17, 2007. Weeks discusses the U.S. government's failure to act on information that could interdict hundreds of thousands of sexual predators and rescue hundreds of thousands of children.

"Now, the 110th Congress has the opportunity to do what the 109th, and this administration, did not: Fight back. Pay what it costs. Disrupt this market. Go get these children."

The Republican Congress and George W. Bush's administration failed to act. The FBI representative in the below video says their priorities were International Terrorism.

What it, the FBI and the Republican Administration who sets the FBI's agenda for the lat 8 years that this evil problem has grown exponentially, failed to recognize is the mass exploitation of children in violent pornography IS internal TERRORISM.

Some thing are just worth paying taxes for.

Read more on this issue:

I Agree With Bill O'Reilly (SCREAM!!!!)

Sexual Urban Legend

Photo Source: These are the Senators sponsoring the law to protect our kids: Sen. and Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee Joe Biden (D), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R),
Rep. Wasserman Schultz (D), Rep. Joe Barton (R)

I just read, True Love Waits, by Donna Freitas in the Wall Street Journal, an editorial about the Twilight vampire romance series.

She made some good points about the Twilight Series and the sex involved. I've read the first one and though no one "does it" the book is hot with anticipation.

Freitas argues that this book encourages girls to be abstinent and helps them understand they can have fulfilling romantic relationships while demanding respect from boys.

It's a compelling argument. In theory, it's one I'd like to hop on board with.

Don't do it. It's hot not to do it. And I remember - from being a teenager - how hot it is not to do it, just to fool around, to make him chase me. It really is much hotter not to do it. (Ironically, it's so hot not to do it that it makes you want to do it.)

Except that it doesn't account for the language in the book that struck me as exactly the same dialogue we hear from battered women and victims of teen relationship violence.

Not a small problem when you consider that around 20% of our teens have experienced teen dating violence.

"He couldn't help it," is what Stephanie Meyers argues is an acceptable reason for Edward to want to kill and harm Bella, the heroine. It's not just acceptable, it's romantic.

Battered women and codependent women (women in relationships with addicts) use this excuse in real life, as a "valid reason" to stay and take more abuse from someone who declares his "love" for her and his simultaneous inability to treat her with respect.

The question is - Is it valid?

The reason they don't "do it" in the first Twilight book - is that he's godlike strength "would crush her fragile, delicate, vulnerable body."

Oh, and his vampire instinct makes him literally want to kill her. He wants to so bad that he can barely touch her. The smell of her makes him think "lunch," the same way I feel jerks who catcall think of us - "lunch - meant for my consumption."

Hello, that's not the language of patient, abstinent, sweet and touching young love. That's the language of power and violence.

Meyers pretends Bella has power over Edward because he claims that being near her drives him out of control (wanting to kill her) that he can barely contain himself. But, existing in a pretty state and smelling good is a pretty passive power.

He has POWER and CONTROL- because he gets to choose whether to kill her or not. Lucky for her he doesn't - no matter how much she wants him to - until the 3rd or 4th book. Bella's death was another mingling of erotic and passionate love meets violence and pain. My cousin read me that part over the phone, "Isn't that great writing? Such a powerful description."

Yeah, of battered woman syndrome - not of true love.

This is not the language I want to use to make my daughter demand respect and maintain abstinence.

This is the language that makes victims of girls and women. It makes them believe that being a victim is romantic. In real life it's not at all romantic.

It's a distortion of love - not True Love.

A man who expects me to not to violate my own sense of self-preservation to win his love actually loves me. We need to stop being confused about that.

If I have to give up my self, my abilities, my life, my safety, my sense self-preservation to be with him - that is most definitely NOT true love. Those are all red flags.

You know another connotation of the word Twilight is a distancing from feelings surrounding reality - they used to put birthing mothers into a semi-coma called Twilight Sleep. This way they could participate in the labor, but without awareness or feeling.

Not my idea of healthy love.

I had to learn these lessons the hard way. God willing my daughter won't have to.

Should most of the issues in this series, or any of the red flag language, come up for Ainsley I hope her first and only instinct is to RUN FOR HER LIFE AND NEVER LOOK BACK.

I, quite ironically, am wishing Edward the Vampire Boyfriend was mine. I have a rare genetic condition called Hemochromatosis. Basically, my body doesn't get rid of iron as it should. Iron is poisonous, especially in the liver where it sits in my body. The only treatment is for me to be bled.

I really need one pint of blood removed from my body every week for the next while. Hot and passionate Edward would be a lot more fun then the phlebotomist at the lab. My husband, he's pretty great with the dishes - but, he hardly ever offers to suck my blood. And unlike, Bella, that would really be an asset in a mate for me.

Oh, and if you're going to buy the books to read - to make sure they are or aren't appropriate for your daughter (you probably should since all the girls all over America are talking about it) feel free to buy them here to support these Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me book reviews.

Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)

New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2)

Eclipse (The Twilight Saga, Book 3)

Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga, Book 4)

The Host: A Novel

For more in-depth reading about how using romantic language and imagery really turns into violence against girls and women read these:

Battered Woman, Do Not Stay

Gossip Girl & Date Rape

Dating Violence

Sharpton Protests Ant-Girl Lyrics

Empowering Girls: Twilight, Female Crack Cocaine

How Falling In Love is Addictive

We all know how objectification works, some men see women as an object for their sexual pleasure.

But, what happens when girls and women begin to see themselves as an object for men's sexual pleasure?

The Association for the American Psychological Association
(APA) calls this self-objectification and/or self-sexualization in the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls.

There's a host of evidence that when girls are exposed to too much media that they begin to view themselves less as three dimensional human beings and more as sexual objects. When this occurs, psychologists note the increase of:

* eating disorders

* low self-esteem

* depression or depressed mood

One interesting study noted that teenage girls from Figi had great body image and self esteem - until they were exposed to Western television. Once exposed, they became preoccupied with weight and body shape, purging behavior (throwing up) and body disparagement. Prior to television the Figian culture emphasized a robust body shape and based notions of identity not on body, but on family, community and relationships. The transition between healthy self-image to the increase of eating disorders was only 3 years.

Self-objectification is also directly linked to "diminished sexual health" among adolescent girls. One study found that when girls viewed their own bodies as objects for male pleasure condom use and sexual assertiveness, (saying "no") decreased.

Another study found that "undergraduate women who frequently watched music videos or read women's magazines, who attribute greater realism to media content, or who identify strongly with popular TV characters were also more accepting of sexually objectifying notions of women."

Accepting these sexually stereotypical and objectifying views manifested in negative attitudes toward breastfeeding and negative attitudes about normal body functions like menstruation and sweating.

When I read the APA's definition of self-objectification and self-sexualization it was like a mini-awakening for me.

That explains why, as a teen and young adult, I allowed boyfriends to treat me as their sexual object or plaything. It explains why I crossed many of my own sexual boundaries and didn't want to object "for fear of being rude" on several occasions. It explains why I allowed boys and men to make inappropriate comments about my body and its development from even the earliest age - heck, I didn't even know was "allowed to object."

Do you think you've ever self-sexualized or self-objectified?

Do you worry about this with your daughter?

Read 10 Antidotes to Self-Objectification and Sexualization of Girls for ways to prevent your daughter from objectifying her own body.

Empowering Girls: Marketing Boundaries

APA Reports Sexualization of Girls Devastating
Taekwondo For Girl Power

Avon is offering $5,000 per week over the next year for the purpose of empowering women.

If have a great idea that will empower women you should apply to be a recipient of the Hello Tomorrow Fund.

This week's winner is Sandi Gallagher from Dracut, Massachusetts.

Sandi will use her winnings to support a free dental program for domestic violence victims. In cases of domestic abuse, offenders often strike at their victim’s mouth, whether to symbolically quiet them or gain control, causing damage to teeth and gums that many victims cannot afford to repair. Sandi is a professional dental assistant serving on an all-volunteer team at the St. Luke Dental Clinic that offers a full range of pro-bono dental services to the women, restoring self confidence as well as dental health.

Some previous winners include:

Deborah Fallon, 40, will utilize her award to support Portal to Hope, a program that directly supports the victims of domestic violence as they rebuild their lives, including a special program focused on young women in their teens and early twenties.

Linda Reszel Brice, 55, of Lubbock, Texas has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the US, as well as one of the highest rates of premature birth and related complications such as low birth weight and infant mortality. Linda, a full-time professor of nursing at Texas Tech University, was alarmed by these statistics from the perspective of both a health care provider and concerned citizen. She and her students determined they would become involved with a program that sought to curb these statistics and began working with The Stork’s Nest, a non-profit venture founded in 2000 and sponsored by the March of Dimes. The Stork’s Nest aims to provide assistance to mostly low-income pregnant women and teens in the Lubbock area, and since its inception the program has helped more than 1,200 women ranging in age from 12 to mid-30s.

Shelly Renee Brown, 43, who works at Carnegie-Mellon University, will apply her award towards a college-tour program for inner-city high school-aged girls from predominantly African-American communities interested in careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Georgie Jennison, 24, a Chester College senior will apply her award to help fund “Girls of Opportunity,” a new creative arts mentorship program which aims to empower at-risk teenage girls through creative expression and exploration of key issues they face, including pregnancy, violence, illiteracy, and negative body image. “Girls of Opportunity” will offer its gender-specific arts-based initiative to at-risk teenage girls aged 11 to 17 in the greater Derry, New Hampshire area.

Check out some of the other ways women, like yourself, have found to empower women by reading the press releases about the winners.

By now no one will be surprised when I say that I’m not a huge fan of Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

Some might see Belle as a redeeming character because she is smart and loves to read. She is, after all, bright enough to tell Gaston, the quintessential good-looking football player type, where to go. Good for Belle, even though all the other village girls love Gaston, she thinks he’s a moron and is looking for something different.

When her mad scientist father gets held as a hostage by the mean ugly beast, Belle, the loyal daughter, finds him. Selflessly, she trades her own freedom so that her father can go to the invention festival. What?!?

Here’s the first lesson we need to tell our daughters, Your dad and I will never, ever trade you for anything. If you are ever held by a beast or anyone else we WILL bring the police and find you or die trying. If you are ever kidnapped or someone tries to take you then you should do anything you can to get away. Scream, bite, scratch, kick and run as fast as you can.

The rest of the story is basically how Belle is such a good and sweet young woman that she transforms the compassionless, angry, self-absorbed, violent, ugly and mean beast into the Prince he always was inside.

Basically, the story is just early training for future battered women everywhere. This is Stockholm Syndrome. Women love to love their abuser and fantasize that eventually she’ll love him enough that he’ll start treating her with love and respect. Every woman who gets abused desperately wants to believe that her compassionless, angry, mean, self-absorbed jerk of a husband or boyfriend has a kind prince locked inside and if she is just a good and sweet and forgiving enough wife or girlfriend then she can change him into a sweet guy.

What kind of codependent crap are we feeding our daughters at bedtime? We’re setting them up to be victims with this story. Is it any surprise that 30% of women put up with abuse at some point in their lives? Come on!

I recommend telling our daughters the truth.

If you marry a mean and selfish or violent beast of a man you will never, ever change him into a nice guy. People are who they are. No one has the power to change anyone else. Don’t waste your life trying.

The best thing to do is to marry a guy who is already good and sweet and kind and generous. Find someone who treats you with respect from the beginning and skip all the fairytale drama.

Here's the Challenge: add, if not completely replace some of these princess horror stories with stories that have good messages like The Practical Princess, and other liberating fairy tales. And give your daughters a new perspective on the old messages found in Disney's version.

By Tracee Sioux

Did everyone see Oprah yesterday? About the battered women and what staying in this type of situation does to their children?

I know this column will reach a battered woman, because according to the US Justice Department, 30 percent of women are beaten by a significant other at one time or another.

This is an issue very close to my heart as I was a battered girlfriend for two years, between 14 and 16-years-old, so I actually know why these women stay. I also know how much courage it took to leave.

In college, when a boyfriend started getting abusive I left quickly. But then he stalked me for months and finally the police were going to put him away for two years. I begged them not to. I knew the last thing I needed was for that man to plot my murder for two years. The court required him to leave the state immediately and not allow him to return for two years to avoid prison.

The key, of both yesterday’s Oprah and my personal experience, was said very clearly by the battered woman’s son who witnessed everything.

DO NOT STAY!

Many women stay because of their children. I can understand the thinking behind this. You don’t want your children to come from a broken home. You don’t want to put them through a divorce. You don’t want the stigma.

You are so confused that you think he will change. That if you do enough things right, he will stop his abusive behavior. You believe him when he says “You make me hit you, if you had cleaned the house like you were supposed to then I wouldn’t have to hit you.”

You believe him because you want to believe you can somehow make him stop by being exactly what he wants you to be. You believe him because this is logic you use on your kids and you are telling the truth, “If you cleaned your room yesterday you wouldn’t be grounded.” You want him to be telling the truth, but he’s not.

You believe, in your heart, that you deserve abuse because you are a terrible person. You are a whore, a slut, a horrible mother, a bad cook, a terrible housekeeper, stupid, idiotic, moronic. Whatever names he chooses to call you. The worst my ex-boyfriend would call me was “used-meat.” After all, who wants a girl who’s not a virgin anymore? You have been listening to his berating of your self for so long that you believe every word of it is true. That’s why you stay. You stay because you think no one else would want you and you’re not strong enough to stand on your own. This is emotional terrorism and every word he says is untrue.

To get out you need to repeat to yourself all the good and wonderful and true qualities about you over and over and over until you believe them enough to go. You need to quietly work your self-worth up through praise of self until you no longer believe his lies about you.

Your daughter, when she hears his opinion of you over and over and sees him hit you, comes to believe these things, not only about you, but about her own self. If you are a terrible slut, then she is a terrible slut. If you deserve to be hit, then she does as well. It doesn’t matter if she is three or 14, the result will be that she will find someone who hits her or emotionally terrorizes her and she will call it love.

You can not raise an empowered girl if you are staying in an abusive relationship. It is an unequivocal impossibility.

Battered women, I know it’s hard to feel that you are worth leaving him for. But, it’s not as hard to feel that your children are worth leaving for. And they are.

The last bit of advice is not to leave without a plan. I left without a plan twice. Frankly, it was scary. Both times the man stalked me, attacked me in public, stole my mail, called my job so many times I got fired, harassed my friends, broke into my house, etc.

This is the link to Oprah’s resources about how to make an escape plan. Here, also, is a link to the National Domestic Violence Hotline website.

You are strong enough to make it on your own.
You are good enough to find someone else.
You are smart enough to find your way out of this.
You are a wonderful person who deserves to be free of abuse.