Boy Killed for Being Gay

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1122-gay-shooting-20111122,0,425342.story

[Portion of the Los Angeles Times Article]:

In plea deal, youth gets 21 years for killing gay teen

Brandon McInerney avoids a retrial by pleading guilty to shooting Larry King. The jury deadlocked in the first trial, with some saying prosecutors were being too harsh in trying him as an adult.

A teenager who fatally shot a gay classmate in the back of the head during an Oxnard middle school computer lab will spend 21 years in prison under a plea deal reached Monday, closing the books on a case that drew international headlines and ignited debate on how schools should handle sexual identity issues.

Brandon McInerney, who was 14 when he pulled a gun out of his backpack and shot Larry King two times at point-blank range, will be kept behind bars until he is 38 under the terms of the deal struck by Ventura County prosecutors.

In an unusual arrangement, the 17-year-old pleaded guilty to second-degree and voluntary manslaughter. In return, prosecutors agreed not to go forward with a second trial, which could have resulted in a life sentence.

The family of the victim, Larry King, broke their silence on the case outside court Monday, saying that they supported the sentence but believed school officials hold deep responsibility for what happened.

"Larry had a complicated life, but he did not deserve to be murdered," said the youth's father, Greg King.

McInerney's first trial ended in a hung jury in early September, with jurors torn between murder and manslaughter. Some jurors said they believed the district attorney's office was being overly harsh in trying McInerney as an adult and several showed up Monday wearing "Save Brandon" bracelets.

Greg King said he was satisfied by the deal reached with his son's killer, given the "unpredictability of juries."

"Twenty-one years is a long time" King said. "At the end of the day, this is something we can live with."

McInerney shot King in a school computer lab at E.O Green Junior High in Oxnard in February 2008, after days of conflict between the boys. Students and teachers at the trial testified that King had been dressing in women's accessories and wearing makeup, and was flirting aggressively with male students on campus who did not want the attention.

School administrators sent a memo advising teachers to give King his space, but to report safety problems. Teachers at the trial testified that when they tried to report growing tensions between King and several boys, school leaders shunned them.

The victim's mother, Dawn King, revealed for the first time Monday that she had contacted school officials four days before the shooting in an effort to solicit their cooperation in toning down her son's behavior. The boy had been taken from the Kings' home two months earlier by authorities because of problems at home.

She said she was told that her son had a civil right to explore his sexual identity.

"I knew, gut instinct, that something serious was going to happen," she said. "They should have contained him, contained his behavior."

This article in the Los Angeles Times newspaper caught my attention because of its reference to gender identity.  Larry King was a young 15 year old boy who was shot by his classmate, Brandon McInerney, for being gay.  McInerney, now 17 years old, is sentenced to 21 years in prison.  This devastating incident occurred after an altercation between King and McInerney.  Even though teachers were aware of the days of conflict taking place between the two boys, school officials failed to take measures in dealing with the situation.  When will people begin to realize that this world is not just black and white, but a spectrum of colors?

Unfortunately, in today’s society, there is a lack of awareness towards different gender identities.  Larry King became a victim to the ignorance of society, which ultimately resulted in his death.  As mentioned in class, the definitions of gender and sexuality have been socially constructed and continue to impact our daily lives.  Our society is filled with diverse individuals who need to be accepted for who they are and what they desire.  There needs to be an end to this and other hate crimes against gay and transgender people.  

Pain and the Erotic

Pain and the erotic

Lesley Hall

The pains of love and the agonies of unrequited desirehave formed a constant theme in art from antiquity to the latest pop song. However, in most cases these pains and agonies are emotional or metaphorical, not literal bodily pain. But for some people, pain and love, or at least sexual pleasure, are intricately intertwined - and have been for many centuries.

Sadomasochistic practices have a long, if largely hidden, history. There appear to be depictions of some kinds of sadomasochistic practice in the art and poetry of antiquity, but as with everything else about classical sexuality, controversies rage over the exact meanings. Given thepower relations in Greece and Rome, can the consent of all participants be assumed? The picture is further complicated by the innate violence and cruelty of these societies, exemplified by events such as gladiatorial games.

More explicit reference was made in the famous Sanskrit textKamasutra, composed somewhere in the north of India, probably late in the third century AD. Its recommendations for the use of scratching, biting and slapping presented these as ritualized concomitants of eroticism rather than the overflow of aggressive passion. However, again questions of consent arise from male-centred assumptions that the woman's cries, whimpers and protests were merely an equally ritualized response of pleasure. By contrast, Van Gulik claimed in The Sexual Life of Ancient China (1961, republished 2003) that episodes of sexual sadism and masochism in China were very rare in either handbooks of sex, or erotic and pornographic literature, in spite of (or because of) the general pervasiveness of cruelty, by modern Western standards.

The potential for erotic arousal among participants or viewers of Western European medieval religious ceremonies involving flagellation remains a matter for speculation, although Gibson, in The English Vice (1978), draws attention to an early fifteenth-century Catalan painting, 'Flagellation of Christ', in which the floggers certainly appear to be deriving sexual pleasure from their work. Renaissance humanist Pico della Mirandola described the passive flagellatory desires of a friend, which he found both puzzling and amusing.Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and poetry include motifs of sexualized violence, for example Cleopatra's allusions to the “lover's pinch, which hurts and is desired”.

In the Restoration period, Snarl in Shadwell's The Virtuoso(1676) made, perhaps for the first time, the connection between pedogogical punishment in English schools and addiction to 'le vice anglais' in later life. Otway, in Venice Preserved (1682), depicted a masochistic Venetian senatorengaging in what might today be termed 'puppy-play' or 'kennel-training' with his mistress.

The birch over the bed in Hogarth's series of 'The Harlot's Progress' alludes to flagellation as an erotic speciality for hire, further attested to by inventories of paraphernalia confiscated in raids on London brothels. 'Fladge' as asubgenre in pornography emerged before the end of the eighteenth century and proliferated during the Victorian era.

Erotic response to being flagellated was thus reasonably well documented from the Renaissance period, but there was less evidence for the erotic reaction of the actual flagellator. Havelock Ellis, in Love and Pain (1913), one of the first major studies of the subject, gave the earliest reported example he could find of “sadistic pleasure in the sight of active whipping” as 1672 (though Gibson, as mentioned, found an earlier visual allusion). Ellis pointed out that whipping as a punishment was common in European societies for many centuries, and beating of wives, children and servants an accepted practice: therefore devotees did not need to go far to seek it out and observe it for their own pleasure. By contrast, the desire of powerful members of society for apparently humiliating punishment was highly puzzling.

Theorizing painful pleasures
Although flagellation is often considered to be 'le vice anglais' par excellence, the first medico-scientific treatise on the subject probably came from Germany. De Flagrorum Usu in Re Veneria & Lumborum Renumque Officio (On the Use of Rods in Venereal Matters and in the Office of the Loins and Reins), by the German doctor Johann Heinrich Meibom, known as Meibomus, was first published in Leiden in 1629. It attempted to explain, in the light of contemporary understanding of anatomy and physiology, why chastisement might be arousing.

A more psychological explanation was given in the personal testimony of the Swiss Enlightenment philosopherJean-Jacques Rousseau, in his frank, though posthumously published, Confessions (1782). Rousseau recounted the lasting effects of youthful experiences of corporal punishment at the hands of his schoolmaster's sister. Themes of sadism and masochism famously pervaded the works of the eventually eponymous Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), alongside other forms of sexual transgression, and their philosophical underpinnings were expounded upon at great length. These themes also figured in the fiction of the late nineteenth-century Austrian writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895), author of Venus in Furs (1870), who gave his name to the passive endurance of pain.

A number of early attempts by sexologists to analyse the subject tended to conflate wider instances of cruel punishments within society with the (conscious) erotic enjoyment produced by similar experiences within a minority. The early sexologists also tended to make gender-biased assumptions, seeing sadism as an excessive manifestation of inherent male aggression, and masochism as merely an exaggeration of the submissive role assigned to women, even though male masochists were not uncommon. Following the rise of Freud's theories, psychoanalysts elaborated complex explanations of sadistic and masochistic behaviour (conscious and unconscious). Well into the later decades of the twentieth century, discussions of sadomasochism tended to be framed in terms of psychopathology and dysfunctionality.

However, as the century drew on and attitudes towards sexuality in the Western world became more liberalized, various surveys of sexual attitudes and behaviour revealed that significant percentages of individuals admitted to finding pleasure in certain sadomasochistic scenarios, either in reality or as fantasy. In this changing social context, and with the increasing belief that sexual pleasure was in itself a good thing, subcultures of individuals interested in consensual sadomasochistic practices developed, gradually and with great discretion.

They developed codes of conduct to ensure the safety of participants, embodied in the rubric 'Safe, Sane and Consensual', prior negotiation of the parameters of a 'scene', and a system of 'safe words' to stop or slow down the action. Far from the masochist, or 'bottom', being at the mercy of the sadist, or 'top', it was widely claimed that the bottom controlled the scene by defining its limits; while the top was not indulging in a frenzy of violence, but consciously and attentively deploying certain practices, some of them demanding considerable skill and dexterity. Definitions were further complicated by the discovery that very few defined themselves as exclusively either sadistic or masochistic.

Sociologists researching these communities found the individuals involved very similar to the 'normal' population, and in many cases they were pillars of society, although uncomfortably aware of the social stigma their activities incurred. They strongly differentiated their activities in 'play', desired and experienced as pleasure by both parties, from violence and cruelty and extremes such as 'lust murder' with which sadomasochism had traditionally been associated.

Explanations
Early writers such as Meibomius pointed out the anatomical reasons why stimulation, even painful stimulation, in the gluteal area might evoke arousal in the contiguous genital organs, as well as alluding to the general tonic effect on the system. Modern science similarly suggests that effects such as increasing the blood flow to the area would have this result. Havelock Ellis, in Love and Pain, pointed out that sadomasochistic practices were points along an erotic continuum, often consisting of the intensification of acts widely regarded as 'normal' concomitants of sexual activity. He also theorized that psychological factors played a part, since informants described being aroused simply by the thought of whipping. This theme was suggested in Rousseau's account of his own proclivities, which he never seems to have indulged as an adult.

In the later twentieth century physiologists pointed out the effect of pain in producing natural endorphins and a resultant 'high', an experience which is also found in certain sports and other non-sexual activities, such as alternating hot saunas with cold plunges. It has also been recognized that, during sexual arousal, sensations which might be considered painful in the non-aroused state may be experienced as intense but pleasurable. Certain kinds of pain can also become eroticized through their association with sexual pleasure, or in anticipation of it.

A recent popular fantasy trilogy by Jacqueline Carey,Kushiel's Dart, Kushiel's Chosen and Kushiel's Avatar, takes as protagonist Phèdre, a courtesan who is blessed, or cursed, by the god Kushiel to be an anguisette, experiencing all pain as sexually arousing. However, in real life, even the most dedicated masochist seldom eroticises or enjoys all and any pain, looking forward to a visit to the dentist, for example, with no more ardent anticipation than anyone else. Researchers have suggested that psychological andsymbolic elements are significant in sadomasochistic pleasure and for many, though not all, an explicit context ofdominance and submission is of considerable importance.

Although sadomasochistic motifs are rife within popular culture, there is still much discomfort and even taboo about these practices. Media reports of fetish events, or of allegations of celebrities indulging in 'kinky sex', typically strive for a jokey, distancing note. At a further extreme the severe sentences handed down in the 'Spanner' case of 1990, for what can well be argued were victimless crimes of engaging in consensual (albeit extreme) masochism, demonstrate the continuing unease that many feel at the blurring of the boundaries of pleasure and pain.

Video Games and Gender.

My favorite video game growing up definitely had to be Killer Instinct. I remember going over my uncle's house, sitting in front of his television and playing it on the SNES for hours. I actually have a SNES emulator on my computer and play it occasionally when class gets boring or need a study break.

The best part of Killer Instinct was that you could pick your character's outfit color: green, blue, gray, pink, yellow, orange, white, or red. You could pick Cinder, a naked, flame male, and make him pink. Yup. You could pick Spinal the skeleton and make him red. How awesome.

However, the creators of Killer Instinct only included one female character in the game, Orchid. She was scantily clad and was thin with large breasts. As a little girl, I of course always picked Orchid and eventually mastered all her moves and when I got bored of her I masted Cinder, the naked flame man, and made him pink. At least I had some options.

Given the options, I'm sure I would've enjoyed playing other video games if they included female characters. The only other game I remember playing was Donkey Kong Country 2 which also had a female character. Other games such as Mario and Super Ghouls n' Ghost did not interest me as much and I grew bored and never mastered them. Perhaps having a gender option in video games would encourage females to play more.

Jesus Comes to Town.

In the spirit of Jennifer Miller, "The Lady with a Beard", and the recent holiday festivities on the infamous "Row", a community of fraternities and sororities, I decided to attend a frat party dressed up as Jesus. My costume consisted of a white sheet, a rope, a makeshift cross, gladiator sandals, and of course, a beard. Along with my loose, long brown hair, the image of Jesus came alive.

Most females attending a frat party would not feel comfortable with dressing up as a male, let alone Jesus. However, I took the initiative to be a little different. At first I felt a little self conscious standing in the girls line (I was after all wearing a beard looking like a homeless person) but eventually the feelings subsided and I felt comfortable walking around in a beard and a toga. Below is a timeline of my experience:

11:15 PM: I begin to walk over to The Row. I get some awkward glances, high fives, laughter and confused looks from passerbys.

11:30 PM: Standing in line to get into the party. Every girl is dressed in white and most are giving me confused looks. A couple chuckle and some stare. I begin to feel a bit self conscious.

11:35 PM: After walking into the party, I was attacked by two males who proceeded to try and dance with me after complimenting my beard. They petted my beard and appreciated my boldness.

11:40 PM: Guy yells " Take off the beard. You look better without it."

11:50 PM: Male proceeds to try and dance with me. I stop him and tell him, "No thank you." I'm still wearing a beard.

12:15 AM: Guy #458 tries to dance with me again. This time he tries to grab my womanly parts. He gets elbowed. I'm still wearing a beard.

12:23 AM: I walk out the door and head home.

What is to be learned from this experience? People's heads will definitely turn at the sight of something different. My friend in New York received a picture of me dressed up as Jesus and showed her friends. Their reactions ranged from, "I was not expecting a girl!" to "Wow that's sexy." Crossing the gender expectations created an environment where unexpected reactions are bound to occur due to society's lack of exposure.

And in the words of Oscar Wilde, "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

Revolution!!

Hugh Hefner to all men is not a normal man. He lives in a big mansion in beverly hills surrounded by what society call beautiful women. Him and other celebrities are currently living the life with a sexual revolution. For the normal Joe this is not natural or is it? From a young age we have been conditioning to think that sex is bad and steer away from our sexual desires. It being from the church or television and movies. How do men and women in the media differ they don't care. Many rock stars live the lifestyle of having many women. Even some while being in a committed relationship for years. The reality is that as men and women we all have desires but are conditioned by society to hold them back. If we go deeper in the picture of this problem we can see how women can not be accepted to have multiple partners. It a man is seen to have multiple partners he is look up to. If a women on the other hand has multiple partners she is deemed a horrendous name. The complexity of how men and women differ in society is shocking. It reminds me of the Chinese women outside marriage paradigm. If a women is not married by a certain age she is "labeled left over". Why put this restriction at what age women need to marry. Why cant we all just be equal.

Special Friendships

Our discussion this past week about “special friendships” between nuns in convents reminded me the film, the Longest Yard (2005), starring Adam Sandler.  The Longest Yard is an American comedy film about convicts in a prison who form a football team and challenge the prison guards to a game of football.  The movie clip shown is of male inmates who are dressed up drag and act as the cheerleaders for the inmates’ football team.  Towards the end of the clip, the two characters (one a cheerleader and other a football player) seen getting into a little argument had a relationship with one another.  

In class, it was mentioned that it is uncommon to see “special friendships” between men.  However, the Longest Yard shows this type of relationship.  Nicholas Turturro who plays the football player/inmate of Brucie and Tracy Morgan who plays the cheerleader have a “special relationship” while in prison.  Their secret relationship grew from the desire for human affection after being isolated in an all-male prison.  This movie clip is a suitable representation of similar acts that may be occurring in prisons today.  There is a possibility that men are forming these “special relationships” because of their longing for affection and the lack of excitement of prison life.  

Restrooms at USC

After watching the film, The Aggressives, with one of the aggressives being forced to leave a women's restroom because the woman in the restroom thought her to be a man, I was happy to see that USC offers an "Other" restroom. I saw the restroom in the basement of Bridge Hall, as there were three restrooms available down there. One was labelled for women with a circle, and another was labelled with a triangle for men. However, there was another with that was labelled with both a circle and triangle intertwined with one another. I assumed that this symbol was meant for "other". As after her experience in the women's restroom, the aggressive never entered the women's restroom ever again, I was glad to see progress in society with having other restrooms available, which would make people such as the aggressives more comfortable using the restroom. This would not only make "aggressive's" lives better but also many other people dealing with "restroom problems". Such people would, for example, be people dealing with transmutations, hermaphrodites, transgenders, and many others.

Although this step of creating a restroom available to anyone seems like a small step, it is actually a giant step to take and demonstrates the progress society has made in accepting all types of people. Even though the restroom was a one-stalled restroom and people would not have encountered other people in there anyways, it would still make people feel comfortable than being succumbed to having to choose their gender as either male or female. In the future, I hope that USC takes an ever bigger step with creating such restrooms in not only the halls but also residential buildings, such as dorm rooms.