• Madonna's fall campaign for Louis Vuitton leaked online, and the star — captured by Steven Meisel and 23 psychedelic Photoshop layers — sort of looks like a marble statue. [Fashionologie]

• Roberto Cavalli's and Gianfranco Ferré's Fall 2009 campaigns are also out. In the sense of "On the Internet," not in the sense of "In the magazines." [FWD]
• 50 Cent's new fragrance deal, for the scent "Power", is unusual in that the star is not simply licensing his name to a company. He actually is a part-owner of Lighthouse Beauty, the business that will release Power. The other partners are a veritable who's-who of the fragrance industry. [WWD]
• Clements Ribeiro is the latest British fashion house to announce its intention to return to London Fashion Week for its 25th anniversary. The husband-and-wife design duo join Burberry, Pringle of Scotland, Jonathan Saunders, and Matthew Williamson, in showing their respective Spring 2010 collections in London. Clements Ribeiro last showed in London in September 2005. [Telegraph]
• Expectant Victoria's Secret superstar Adriana Lima's wedding to Marko Jaric was witnessed only by the couple's lawyers. "It was really romantic," said the model. Lima said she doesn't know the sex of her baby, due in December, and hopes to have a large family. [People]
• eLuxury.com is closing its doors as a retailer today. (Last-minute sale items are an additional 50% off, so if you want Alexander Wang jeans for $375 $75, or a D&G corset dress for $495 $148.50, now's your moment.) Apparently, eLuxury is planning to relaunch itself as a social networking site dedicated to...luxury. Because in this economy, talking about fancy shit online is still free. [WWD]
• Supermodel Angela Lindvall has designed a t-shirt for Edun, Ali Hewson's organic, sustainably-produced fashion line (which is newly owned by luxury mega-company LVMH). The shirt is blue with a white design that Lindvall says "was created from the shadows of trees. Our shadow side is what sometimes pushes us to grow." [Fashionista]
• Style.com traced the influence of Kate Moss's gold lamé Marc Jacobs dress and Stephen Jones turban from the Met Ball through the Resort collections. As if we were ever in any doubt that Ms. Moss's style cuts a long swath. [Style.com]
• Patrick Dempsey's new scent for Avon (?!) is to be appropriately named: Patrick Dempsey 2. [WWD]
• The first rule of working for fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone is: Do not blog about Kelly Cutrone. When the fashion publicist caught one of her summer interns — an NYU student, natch — writing about her online, she took the girl aside and said: "I'm going to sue the fuck out of your family if you don't take it down immediately and your college tuition is going to seem like a pittance after you face my wrath." [The Cut]
• Reebok is launching a maternity division for its NFL line. [WWD]
• Michelle Obama wore Lanvin yesterday, should you care. [The Cut]
• Brooke Burke, her fiancé, and her four kids, ages 1, 2, 7, and 9, are going to do a Skechers ad as one big happy family. No word on how much the clan nets. [WWD]
• Zac Posen did his part for Gen Art at the fashion incubator's fund-raiser Wednesday night. Also? Zac Posen is totally that guy at the art opening who'll say, "I like the Sol LeWitt technique put into something figurative..." [Style.com]
• Escada, the struggling fashion house who earlier this year announced its debt had risen to €187.6 million, and its cash on hand had dwindled to just €24.7 million, is about to launch the €200 million bond-exchange program the company hopes will raise it enough cash to emerge from this recession intact. Bondholders, starting Monday, will be encouraged to exchange their old bonds for new ones, at an early-bird rate of €400 in new bonds per €1,000 in old bonds previously held. (After July 14, the bond exchange will net bondholders €375 per €1,000 in debt.) The exchange will only go forward if 80% of bondholders agree to it, but the company says all the preconditions are set. Its two major shareholders, the billionaire brothers Wolfgang and Michael Herz, who together own 24.9% of Escada, are on board. [WWD]
• Hartmarx has won court approval to be sold to the private equity firm Emerisque Brands. Emerisque bid $128.4 million for the bankrupt men's clothier, and pledged to retain many of the company's 4,000, mostly Chicago-based, workers. Biggest creditor Wells Fargo bank had argued that Hartmarx should be liquidated to cover its $261 million debt. [NYTimes]
• Customs and Border Patrol seized 10,900 pairs of counterfeit Nike shoes off the docks in Los Angeles. The imitation shoes had a face value of $1.8 million. [WWD]

Green's aunt told the court at his sentencing hearing:

"I don't know. We did not send a rapist and murderer to Iraq," Ruth said. "I don't know how he got there, but that's not what we sent."

Laden suggests that, in some way, Green's aunt might be right.

Men, by and large, have a rape switch. All men are capable of rape. Most men are enculturated in a way that reduces rape, and in some societies it is probably true that most violent rape is carried out by individuals who are reasonably labeled as pathological. In other societies, this is not so true. In post war societies such as those described in some of these links, or any society in a state of war, rape becomes routine. The rape switch is flipped to the on position as a matter of course. Most men who were in combat in Viet Nam raped. Similar circumstances have been documented for other wars.

Laden argues not necessarily that society makes men rapists, but that it keeps most men from raping under most circumstances. When taken outside of the bonds of normal society, men become increasingly more likely to rape.

Laden adds:

"The switch" is a term I first heard from Victoria Brandon, who wrote a term paper for me on this in 1993. The basic idea of a switch would be supported if more or less randomly (though age biased, likely) selected men, put into a certain situation, tended to commit rape on a much larger scale ... or more exactly, a much larger percentage of the men rape under those circumstances ... than would ever be predicted based on anything anyone knows about these men before or after the circumstances prevail.

In other words, when all the young men stay home, they are mostly not going to rape anyone. In contrast, when the same exact men go off to war, an alarming percentage of them rape. Switch off, switch on.

I can see Laden's point, though I think he gets a little lost. Laden is suggesting that the human aversion to violence against humans is something inculcated in us, rather than something innate, and is tied into normal social boundaries. When, in a time of war, those boundaries are eroded and, in particular, when trained to ignore them in order to more effectively kill other humans, all the various aversions to violence are eroded, making men more likely to ignore the social strictures against rape.

My problem with the argument is more likely its corollary: if there is no innate aversion by men to violent, non-consensual sex, then the pleasure derived from or urge to engage in mutually pleasurable, consensual sex is potentially not innate and is rather a learned goal. Given that there is an increasing amount of data that shows that female orgasm may well play a role in conception, I wonder about this theory.

My other concern is that it ignores, to a degree, the role society plays in inculcating and reinforcing rape culture. Laden uses this quote from Sharon Tiffany's and Kathleen Adams' article Anthropology's "Fierce" Yanomami: Narratives of Sexual Politics in the Amazon:

Imagine a society in which one woman in every three is raped, usually by a man she knows, consider the consequences of living in a society where one third of all women are beaten during pregnancy and 35 percent of women using emergency medical facilities are battered . Since we are anthropologists, readers may mistakenly think that these appalling data were collected in an exotic society, an distant world where it is presumed that unpredictable and threatening behavior is commonplaces. Indeed, our friends and colleagues inevitably ask if it is safe for us to travel alone to remote and problematic places which presumably do not enjoy the law and order of civilization.

They are, of course, talking about the United States. It's tough to say that men have a rape switch (or a violence switch) that is off when we live in an incredibly violent society that, at a minimum, tolerates horrific levels of violence against women.

Laden's hypothesis rests on one basic assumption about the definitions of "rape" and "sex."

I really do not think homicide and rape are even remotely the same thing. I do not believe that rape is simply an extension of violence. Yes, it is violent, and yes, understanding either in the context of the other is useful, and yes, they can have similar social meanings (but often they do not). But conflating rape as a form of violence that just happens to involve the sexual act is a very very big mistake. Having said that both are behaviors that I assume are socially controlled and psychologically potentiated. Both are behaviors that are liable to switch-like behavior.

In Laden's definition, rape is fundamentally about the achievement of sexual gratification through non-consensual sexual behavior, mostly heteronormative. That is, certainly, one way to think about it — but it doesn't explain male rapists that rape men; it doesn't explain the use of objects in rape; it doesn't explain rapists that fail to achieve sexual gratification through rape (either through object usage or because of castration); it doesn't explain many varieties of rape that fall outside the standard ideas of stranger- and acquaintance-rape. Laden's explanation for a rape-switch lies in the idea that rape is first and foremost about sexual gratification when, for enough rapists, there isn't any orgasm involved. This is why other theorists define rape as separate from sex and define the sex act as a means to a different end, rather than the end itself. That might be a useful definition for many reasons, including understanding why a guy like Green, given a tremendous amount of power and littler oversight, chose to exercise it in the most brutal and destructive way that likely didn't provide him with simply sexual gratification.

Aunt Says Iraq Tour Changed Ex-soldier [Lexington Herald-Leader]
A Rape In Progress [Greg Laden]
A Rape In Progress, Part II [Greg Laden]
Is There A Rape Switch? [Greg Laden]
"Rape Switch Hypothesis" Still Going Strong: US Rape Stats Evaluated. [Greg Laden]

On Feministe, blogger Lauren has a post in which she links to Martin Schoeller's amazing photographs of female bodybuilders. She writes:

Women are so deeply conditioned to seeing feminine beauty as something fragile that doesn’t take up space, which is why I love seeing representations of femininity that isn’t that of a delicate orchid. It’s interesting to me that many female body builders who work on attaining what are considered masculine traits play up their feminine characteristics, perhaps to counteract the kind of physique that is usually culturally marked male, sometimes to an extreme that appears to be a conscious genderfuck.

It is interesting to see how these women — the bodybuilders — have bikini tops, earrings, lipstick, eyeshadow — all the trappings of "femininity," yet none of them are what the average person would think of feminine.


The truth is, although the Photoshopped images and the bodybuilder photos are extreme examples of muscle development, the human body is capable of such things, whether it be male or female. (And yes, perhaps steroids were involved.) But still: We don't believe that "female" is equivalent to "weak." So why do we think that muscles are "masculine"? These ladies certainly don't think so.

Celebrity Steroids [Worth 1000, via Yeeeah]
Beauty And Power [Feministe]
Женский бодибилдинг в книге Мартина Шоллера \ Photography (Martin Schoeller's Femal Bodybuilders) [eToday]