NY Times Article: Indian Lesbians Talk About The Struggles Of Being Indian, Female, & Gay.
The Female Factor
Gay Women Face Double the Pressure in India
By NILANJANA S. ROY
Published: October 19, 2010
NEW DELHI — Next month, Sumati Kaul will take part in her third annual Gay Pride March in India. And for the first time since she began telling some friends and associates that she is a lesbian, she is planning to do so without a mask.
As recently as July, when smaller marches were held in several cities, she kept on her mask and avoided the cameras.
“I didn’t want my family to see me on television,” said the 31-year-old software company manager.
But then the social pressures faced by many Indian women — to marry, to be a dutiful wife, to bear children and carry on the family line — hit her with special force, given her sexual orientation, and forced her hand.
Just two days after participating in the July march with her partner, she found herself in her hometown of Moradabad, a conservative community in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, being taken by her family to “see boys” as they lined up candidates for an arranged marriage.
“I realized after the third meeting with potential grooms that I couldn’t live this way,” Ms. Kaul said.
She told her family she did not want to marry and, when pressed for her reasons, she explained. Then she left home, certain that her relationship with her family had been broken beyond repair.
Coming out to her family was, in one sense, a relief, and she earns enough from her job to continue living independently in Delhi without help from her relatives. But unless she is willing to change her life to conform to her family’s expectations of a proper Indian woman, she said, she cannot return to Moradabad.
“My family won’t talk to me, and my uncles will either force me into a marriage or kill me,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone.
She sees no possibility of reconciliation. “To my uncles and my father, ‘lesbian’ is a dirty word,” she said. “Unless I get married, there’s no way back for me.”
As she spoke, her partner listened, nodding. She, too, will be in the Gay Pride March next month, but she will keep her mask on. Her family lives nearby in Delhi and is even more conservative than Ms. Kaul’s.
Gays and lesbians in India seem to have more freedom than just a decade ago. Nightclubs now hold “pink” nights in most of the major cities; India’s first gay-themed bookshop, QueerInk, is staging a gay and lesbian festival in Mumbai this week; the Gay Pride marches have drawn more women each year since their tentative start in four cities in 2008; and the marches this year will coincide with the Nigah Queer Festival, an annual event that started in Delhi in 2007.
But, says Lesley Esteves, a writer and journalist in Delhi, Indian lesbians face very different challenges than gay men do. As women they have considerably less control over their lives than their male counterparts.
“The problems lesbians face are also the problems women in general face in India,” Ms. Esteves said. “Economic disempowerment and economic inequality are at the root of it.”
These issues may be common to many Indian women, but Ms. Esteves said they were amplified for lesbians. A woman who reveals that she is a lesbian risks disinheritance. And in parts of the country where women must have permission from their families to work outside the home, the option of moving out to live one’s own life does not exist.
In Nepal, Sunil Babu Pant, a pioneering gay rights activist and politician, sounds upbeat as he outlines recent legal victories there. Mr. Sunil Babu, Nepal’s first openly gay politician, is a founding member of the Blue Diamond Society, which works for gay and lesbian rights.
In 2007, the Supreme Court ordered the Legislature to scrap all laws that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and draft same-sex marriage laws. He hopes that Nepal will see its first gay or lesbian marriage early next year, once those laws are ratified.
“Our society is very tolerant — we respect diversity,” he said. Lesbians in Nepal face similar pressures as in India to marry men and often struggle for financial independence, but a key difference, he said, was the level of support from civil society.
“Many women have to make a choice — either they give up their personal desires, or they run away from home,” he said. “But the level of reconciliation with families is higher compared to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.”
Compared with Nepal, the laws lag behind in India. Same-sex relationships are no longer criminalized, thanks to a landmark ruling by the Indian Supreme Court in 2007, but there are no measures barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
And the country is far from being lesbian-and-gay friendly.
“Our safety depends on invisibility, and you find greater invisibility in the metros” — the large cities, said Ms. Esteves. “In small cities like Bhopal, it’s much harder to hide.”
That, in part, is what drew 26-year-old Monideepa Bandopadhyay to move to Calcutta from the small town of Barasat. There have been cases where lesbian couples have been threatened with violence by their families.
“It’s not ideal here,” Ms. Bandopadhyay said. “Say the word ‘lesbian,’ and men feel threatened, they think of porn actresses. You can feel very unsafe if you’re open about your identity. But at least here there are other women like me. I can have a relationship without too much fear.”
In Delhi, Ms. Kaul and her partner are excited about the Pride March next month, but also nervous. “I worry all the time,” Ms. Kaul said. “I worry that my uncles will come here someday and force me back to Moradabad.”
Ms. Esteves says that despite the progress India has made in the last few years regarding gay rights, the reality remains harsh, especially for lesbians.
“It’s great to have pride marches,” said Ms. Esteves. “It’s great to be able to come out without fear of being prosecuted. But lesbian rights are still harder to fight for — it’s not as ‘respectable’ as joining the fight for women’s rights in general, and there has been more organizing by gay men than by the lesbian community so far. As women you’re not supposed to possess desire, let alone ‘alternative’ desire. And that’s still the bottom line.”
Globe & Mail Article: Less Male Teachers In The Classroom Means Boys Have Less Male Role Models!!!
Failing Boys
The endangered male teacher
Carolyn Abraham
From Monday’s Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Oct. 18, 2010 4:57AM EDT
Last updated Monday, Oct. 18, 2010 11:50PM EDT
A new study says male elementary teachers live in a steady state of anxiety, with 13 per cent reporting they had been wrongly accused of inappropriate contact with students. Part 2 of a six-part series.
The male elementary teacher is the spotted owl of the education system, the leatherback turtle, the Beluga.
More related to this story
- Live chat Monday: Failing boys and why we should care
- In quotes: ‘I live life on the edge every day I step into the classroom’
- U.S. schools seek role models for boys
Poll
The gender of a teacher makes no difference to learning outcomes for boys
Agree
Disagree
His presence is so endangered that in many public schools his numbers can be counted on a single hand. In some schools, it requires no hands at all.
“It is now possible for a child in Canada to go through elementary school and high school and never see a male at the front of the class,” says Jon Bradley, an associate professor of education at McGill University, where men make up just five per cent of the elementary teachers in training.
The trend isn’t new. Men have been the clear minority in primary teaching since the days of the one-room school house. But with their numbers dwindling to less than 20 per cent nationally, fixing the imbalance has taken on a certain urgency and there’s already been talk of affirmative action. Of all the theories offered to explain why boys trail girls in academics, the lack of male role models tends to lead the pack.
Boys increasingly grow up without fathers at home, male high school teachers have slipped into the minority, and at the primary level, where children gain their first impressions of schooling, the numbers look bleaker by the year. “They’re getting the bias, unintentionally, that school is a girl thing,” says Mike Parr, an assistant professor of education at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont. “They don’t see teaching or reading, or even learning, as a guy thing.”
Yet the barriers that keep men from teaching are tough to tear down. Several countries have crafted programs to recruit more men and, for the most part, have failed.
If they’re not turned off by the prospect of being the only man using the unisex bathroom, or the lone male at the lunch table, men, several studies suggest, see the profession as a nurturing, feminine domain, underpaid, over-worked, low in social status and – for a male – stigmatized.
The most troubling deterrent men cite is the fear that society – for historical reasons – is suspicious of a man who enjoys working with young children. And a new study from Nipissing, where researchers have delved into the male-teacher shortage, suggests the fear is warranted.
In a recent survey of 223 male elementary teachers in Ontario, nearly 13 per cent reported they had been wrongly accused of inappropriate contact with pupils.
The study, to be published in the McGill Journal of Education, found the incidents ranged from a male teacher chastised for holding the hand of a female student to more serious accusations that took weeks to resolve.
“[It was] very, very stressful,” one male teacher wrote, “Why bother! It makes you think you should just do the job as described and forget about being HUMAN!”
While the sample size is small, and contains no comparison of allegations female teachers face, the study, partly funded by the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, suggests male teachers work in a steady state of anxiety.
“I live life on the edge every day I step into the classroom. All it takes is one parent or fellow teacher to perceive that the line between nurturing and pedophil(ia) is blurry and I am a dead duck!”
Prof. Parr, and co-author Douglas Gosse, write in the paper that the results show a balance must be found to keep student safety paramount and still allow male teachers to feel comfortable doing their jobs.
“We have to erase the social stigma,” says Prof. Parr.
A marketing campaign, similar to billboards used to attract women to apprenticeship programs, he says, could help this with images of men working with young children, so society can see men that way, and men can see themselves that way.
Boys, he believes, need male role models in school more than ever, when the modern world sends mixed messages of what it means to be male – “A sissy is still a sissy – we want boys to grow up nurturing, sensitive, and understanding…[and] they get bullied…it’s not cool to be smart.”
Rosemary Tannock, a psychologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, doesn’t buy the idea of school boys in crisis. She doesn’t believe their poor performance reflects a feminized education system but suggests that current testing methods are not an accurate way to gauge how well boys are learning.
While she thinks that having more male teachers would be valuable for girls and boys, she says that “gender makes no difference [to academic performance] – it’s the quality of the teaching.”
Indeed, most studies have found male teachers have no impact on boys’ academic performance or their school-related problems – that peers are the dominant influence. What’s more, a “feminist critique” published in the Journal of Education Policy last year argued that women have taught boys well for decades, and only now that girls are outperforming boys do people suspect young males suffer under female teachers.
Prof. Parr agrees there’s no proof male teachers will boost boys academic performance. But he says that studies to date have not been long term, and that history shows it worked for girls.
When calls came for more female role models in math, science, law and medicine, he says, it contributed “to increases in aspirations of girls overall and to their increasing presence in medical school and law school.”
“Why does this same logic not apply to men serving as models for boys [and girls] in the younger grades?”
Having trained elementary teachers at McGill for 25 years, and seeing “the vast majority” of former male graduates eventually leave teaching, Prof. Bradley believes it’s time to move beyond billboards.
“We need to get fairly draconian,” he says, and use affirmative action to ensure that 20 per cent of teachers at every school are male.
When most of the teachers, elementary school principals, and support staff are women and “the token male on staff tends to teach phys ed,” he says, the entire system has an intrinsic bias against boys.
“Females are making the decisions, they’re choosing the books, and setting up the class.” Which is why he believes that the early grades focus too heavily on sitting still, and stress co-operation over competition.
A few years ago, he tried to launch a network of male elementary teachers, but couldn’t drum up enough support – “Probably,” he says, “because most teachers are female.”
Toronto Star Article: Sick & Twisted Col. Russell Williams Documented Murdering Innocent Women.
The secret life of Col. Russell Williams exposed
Williams leaves the Belleville courthouse yesterday afternoon.
STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR
BELLEVILLE—The charges against the colonel took 36 minutes to be read out to a silent courtroom.
David Russell Williams stood facing the clerk listing his crimes, his head bowed as if the weight of his deeds were crushing him.
To the first count of murdering Marie-France Comeau, a flight attendant who worked at his air force base, he pleaded in a clear voice: “Guilty, your honour.” To the second count of killing Jessica Elizabeth Lloyd, his guilty plea was barely audible.
Crown attorneys then took turns revealing the full extent of Williams’ depravity, evidence that left family members of victims covering their eyes and gasping — “He’s sick,” one said. In an overflow courtroom, some members of the public got up and left. “Oh, my god,” said one woman. “Disgusting,” said one man.
By day, Russell Williams was the commander of Canada’s biggest air force base, CFB Trenton. By night, he broke into homes, taking pictures of himself modeling the bras and panties of little girls.
He escalated quickly, from fetish break-ins, to sex assaults with no penetration to rape and murder. He logged his crimes, kept track of police reports of his crimes and left notes and messages for his victims. “Merci,” he thanked a 12-year-old in a typed message on her computer.
“Merci beaucoup,” he captioned a souvenir photo he took of his penis strapped to a sex toy he stole from a 24-year-old Ottawa victim in June 2008.
We learned that Williams made a video of his brutal beating and asphyxiation of Comeau after breaking into her home Nov. 24, 2009. He also made sex tapes of Lloyd after kidnapping her the night of Jan. 28, taking her to his cottage in Tweed, raping and torturing her for at least a day before dumping her corpse in a field.
Lloyd’s mother, Roxanne, sat in the front row, cradling a framed portrait of her daughter.
We learned that Williams, 47, had pedophile tendencies, stealing underwear of girls as young as 9 years old during the 82 fetish home invasions and attempted break-ins between Sept. 2007 and November 2009. He broke into 48 different homes in the Belleville-Tweed area and Ottawa. One, he hit nine separate times. And he was good at it.
Sixty-one of the 82 break-and-enters went either undetected or were not reported. He targeted homes where attractive women lived, but as is disturbingly evident in photos of him naked and masturbating in young girls’ rooms, he had other tastes.
Williams took “thousands” of pictures of his crimes, Crown attorney Robert Morrison said, all of which he kept on his computer. The court saw numerous pictures of Williams dressed in the panties and bras he stole, often lying on the beds of his victims, masturbating.
There were photos of him wearing the stained pink underwear of a girl under what looked like his air force issued pants. Morrison suggested Williams might have worn the stained pink panties to work at the base he commanded.
There were photos of him lying in beds surrounded by the stuffed toys and panties of little girls, or of him wearing negligees and camisoles. In all the photos, his expression was stern, as if on parade for inspection.
On New Year’s Day 2008, he broke into a home in the Ottawa neighbourhood where he lived and sprayed semen on a 15-year-old girl’s dresser. He then took a picture of himself with the girl’s make-up brush touching his penis.
“There is nothing to suggest that make-up brush was stolen,” Morrison added to the audible gasps of the family members.
Throughout most of the day, Williams sat with his head bowed low, as though he wanted to crawl under a bench. But he looked at the video screens when pictures of himself in women’s lingerie were posted.
“The offences emphasize his obsessive behaviour,” Morrison said.
There was a pattern to the photos he would take during a break-in: He would first photograph the bedroom of his victim, then the underwear in her dresser. He would then arrange the lingerie neatly on a bed or on the floor, before modeling them and ejaculating.
Another ritual was to turn his back to the camera and peer back over a shoulder. There were also many close-ups of his penis, protruding from women’s underwear.
He collected hundreds of panties and bras from his break-ins, so many that he twice took some of his “trophies” to a field in Ottawa and burned them. He kept the photographs, though, and hid them on hard drives he stored in the ceiling above the basement of his Ottawa home. He used a system of deep electronic folders to make them more difficult to find.
There were four crown attorneys in court, and it soon became clear why so many. The reading of the facts took such time that voices croaked before handing over the task to another.
The court heard of Williams’ chilling escalation from fetish burglaries, to sex assault and finally murder from September 2007 to January 2010. On July 10, 2009, he was at a neighbour’s house in Tweed, which he would eventually break into nine times. This was his sixth visit.
At 1:30 a.m., he watched as the young woman stripped and stepped in the shower. Williams stripped naked, broke into her home, walked to her bedroom and stole her panties. “He admitted that at this point he wanted to take more risks,” Morrison said.
In another escalation, he hoped to watch a teenager undress, and while waiting outside her window, stripped naked in the bushes and masturbated.
Near the end of the first, long day of facts, crown attorney Burgess turned the attention to the first of two sex assaults, in September 2009, near Williams’ Tweed cottage. The victim, known as Jane Doe, is already suing Williams and over the incident. He broke in while she and her newborn baby slept.
He beat her, bound and blindfolded her with pillow cases and fondled her while taking pictures of her naked. Two hours later, Williams left.
The day in court began with a warning.
“I caution the court and the public that these facts will be extremely disturbing,” Burgess told the court at the outset. Referring to the 40 family members of victims in attendance, he added: “We recognize that representation of the evidence will further cause them emotional pain.”
Outside the courtroom, Andy Lloyd, Jessica’s brother, said the facts you heard were “horrible man. It’s terrible, terrible stuff.”
He said his mother brought a framed portrait of Jessica to court to “bring my sister’s face back into it, so that it’s not all about him, and what he’s done and to try to remember that there are families who are very angry at what he’s done.”
Williams, he said, looked “like a broken man,” but noted that he did occasionally look up to see his trophy pictures on big screen televisions set up in court.
As Williams sat in court, the military moved to remove him from the forces, beginning a month-long process that will strip him of his rank and medals. However, Williams will still have a right to his military pension.
Williams became a suspect when he was stopped at a police roadblock Feb. 4 on Highway 37, leading from Belleville to Tweed, where Williams owns a cottage on Cosy Cove Lane. The tire treads on his vehicle matched those found at Lloyd’s home, along Highway 37, the day after she disappeared.
Questioned at an Ottawa police station Feb. 7, Williams confessed to his crimes, Morrison told the court.
His first known break in was September 2007, when Williams invaded the home of his next door neighbour on Cosy Cove Lane. He was friends with the family. They would have dinner together and go fishing. He broke into their home three times.
One of the photos shows Williams lying naked on the bed, masturbating with a red panty believed to have belonged to his neighbour’s daughter. Fourteen of the photos he took that night show him “with his penis protruding from (stolen) underwear,” Morrison said.
As the photos flashed on the screen, a family member of the Cosy Cove victim sobbed at her seat in the courtroom. She left the courtroom during a break and didn’t return.
On Nov. 1, 2007, he broke into the home of another neighbour on Cosy Cove Lane. He spent at least two hours taking photographs in a bedroom.
“Here, Mr. Williams is kneeling on a bed wearing a camisole, with his penis in his hand,” Morrison told the court, describing the picture on the screen. “There are many similar photos.”
Morrison often noted Williams’ “obsession with organizing the items he stole,” first taking pictures of the whole stash he stole, and then taking pictures of each item individually.
“This is a process he carried out over and over again,” Morrison added.
Williams did everything to get into houses: he picked locks, he pushed through window screens and, often, he walked in through windows and doors left open. In many cases, the victims didn’t know they had been burglarized, and didn’t call police.
He left few clues, aside from a muddy footprint here and there. Forensic experts were unable to get DNA evidence from semen he left in one of the homes.
He was obsessed with gathering personal information of his young victims, often taking pictures of documents that identified them, or of the photos of family and friends they had in their rooms.
When he couldn’t identify girls he targeted, he would refer to them, in his computer, as “the mysterious little girls.”
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