The internets and I muse at great length on the topic of rape

Every time I think I'm about to put this post away for not having any real direction, someone somewhere posts something either so brilliant that I can't help but be a little jealous that I didn't phrase it that well first, or so fucked up that it makes me mad enough to pull the whole damn thing out again and try to hammer it into a shape. By now that all means it's gotten so huge and unwieldy that there's no longer any point in trying to narrow it down or put it back in its cage. Sigh. The post wins. By now, I must admit I am a little le tired of musing about rape.

Today it was Jeff's link to Belle's inspired post that linked to this two year old response to the hubbub in 2005 over the woman who was raped and killed after leaving a bar in Aruba with three men:

I Am Not My Cock.

And guys, you aren't your cocks either.

You see, as Gillard's oddly obtuse observations demonstrate, there is a widely held belief amongst even liberal men, that male humans are predators. That they are first and foremost nothing but a cock. After that, balls, then eyes, then rage, and somewhere way down the line, they become capable of speech, thought, and memory.

Whatever.

I want to go on record as saying a big, mean Fuck You to every single man who has ever claimed that men are incapable of stopping themselves when pussy is on the line. Here's why:

I have never raped anyone. I have never hurt someone because they wouldn't put out. I have never gang raped someone. I have never died from blue balls. I have never exploded because some sideboob accidentally came into my line of sight. I have never raped anyone. Shockingly, I also think this is a pretty normal state of affairs.

This isn't something I'm proud of. That's because I can't be proud of not raping people anymore than I can be proud of not shitting on myself whenever I laugh. Not being a rapist is the default fucking setting. Far as I know, most men have never raped anyone. I assume this means that rapists are a minority of men, and in a normal world you'd think that not being an evil, violent monster would make one more sympathetic to the victims of rape, who are also not evil violent monsters.

Hell, you'd think that most guys, who like me have never raped anyone would think to themselves "Hey, I don't go around assaulting people. I don't rape women. When a girl says no, or turns me down, I handle it like an adult. And now that I think about it, I think I'm kinda normal. I guess being able to not hurt and murder and rape is the norm. Why, that means rapists are fucking evil freaks. Golly gee willikers, who'd a thunk it!".

(that bold, for once, is not mine.)

Prepare yourselves, because I know this'll be shocking: I have, in my time, left a bar or two with a guy I didn't know. Sometimes I wanted to have sex with him. Sometimes he wanted to have sex with me. Sometimes we were lucky enough to both want to have sex with each other, in which case we'd go ahead and have it.

But sometimes I would just be safely walked home. Sometimes we'd crash a party and hang out with a bunch of strangers. Sometimes we'd sit on a bridge and have a life-altering conversation. Sometimes we'd go watch Wonder Showzen on his couch and start a months-long relationship. Sometimes we'd go and talk politics on my doorstep for an hour and entirely forget that we had been about to make out. Sometimes he'd turn out to be a jerk but I'd end up dating his sweet best friend. Sometimes it was awkward, especially if one of us wanted sex and the other didn't; I never enjoy disappointing someone whose company I'm enjoying. But never have I been raped in that circumstance, nor have I been treated as though I was going back on any sort of understanding.*

The rape apologists want me to believe that every one of those instances should have led to an assault, or if they didn't, it was just one chamber down in the russian roulette of living my life freely. The problem with the world, in their minds, is not that women are routinely painted in a light that encourages violence towards us; it's that women aren't letting the fear of that violence rule our lives. It's that women aren't letting them rule our lives.

Belle had this to say (along with a bunch of other great stuff which, like Jeff said, you really ought to go read):

The second point, that women don’t like sex, is an undercurrent in every discussion of this type. Not even an undercurrent: a foundation stone for the whole creaky apparatus. Now, I think most people take it for granted that on average men want to have sex more than women, that their sex drives are stronger. Various not-totally-implausible sciency things support this, such as the effect of testosterone on male and female sex drives. On the whole, I lazily incline to assent to this view. But the truth is that there’s really no way to assess the truth of it.

What would a world look like in which women who had sex whenever and with whomever they want were never called sluts? Never judged by strangers and friends? What would it be like if girls were never told that they had to be gatekeepers for their bodies, defenders of castle walls that are always under assault by men wanting sex? Not to put too fine a point on it, what would the world be like if there wasn’t the pervasive threat of sexual violence? What if a woman could confidently go anywhere, dressed however she pleased, and not be afraid of rape? [...]

[W]omen do feel lust, and all discussions of this type minimize or ignore this. I’m not giving any feminine secrets away, I’m just saying. Women feel lust for someone they can’t have but must see anyway, and feel all the side of their body exposed to the one they want burned with lambent fire. They masturbate in angry frustration. They get horny and decide they want to have sex with someone and don’t particularly care who. They look around the elevator and rank all the prospects for a hypothetical fuck. That’s because women are actually a type of human being. You can look it up in Wikipedia.

Yesterday, it was Jill’s amazing post which included some really squicky comments from the thread following an article written in response to an earlier post:

If a woman goes into a bar, wearing sexy clothes and drinks alot, and later gets raped - did she ask for it?”

I started out with “Are you really going to sit there and take the position that the woman’s choice of behavior and where she chose to behave that way had absolutely nothing to do with the consequences she later encountered?”

If a man would go into a poor section of town, and make a big display of waving around a wad of $100 bills, simply to lord over people the fact that he had something they wanted and didn’t have, and someone decided to take them from him, are you really going to claim that his actions had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what happened to him afterward? Would you at least agree that she engaged in behavior that a person of average intelligence would regard as ‘high risk’ and if she had not taken that risk, her experiences would likely have been different?

To which Jill says:

There is a difference between a woman and a wad of $100 bills, although you probably wouldn’t know it if you internalized these kinds of arguments. That difference, of course, is that one is a human being and the other is a set of valuable objects. And therein lies the problem with the rape apologist “keep yourself safe” suggestions: They are premised on the very idea that a woman, by simple virtue of being a woman, is an object that someone else wants to take. But as a general rule, women cannot escape their own skin. You can put your stack of $100 bills in your wallet, and if some dude at a bar punches you in the face and takes it out of your pocket, he’s a violent criminal and you are, without a doubt, a victim. […]

For those people who view women’s bodies as commodities, like $100 bills or wallets, to be “taken” by someone who “wants” that object, it makes sense to rely on protective arguments and suggestions. For them, rape is not a crime of violence, but one of passion and of giving in to temptation. Women, like $100 bills, are vulnerable precisely because people want them in a positive way. Thieves aren’t interested in hurting $100 bills, they’re simply interested in having them and having the things that they can buy. But rapists are very interested in hurting women. They may also be interested in sexual gratification, but that gratification is coming from injuring someone else, not from sex itself. Men are not so animalistic that, at the very presence of an erection, they absolutely must put it in someone, even if doing so means physically hurting someone else. But that is what the sex-as-commodity crowd would have you believe: That sex is something women possess and men want, and if some men see sex (also known as “women”) then they will take it.

Damn. I stand and I clap. But back to the assholes:

Blaming men– It’s like blaming the untrained dog for crapping on the floor. It might make you feel better, but it aint never in a million years gonna change things. Not until every last man is locked behind bars will women be totally safe to get drunk at any party. [See also: I Am Not My Cock] Obviously that is what some people want… for every woman to end up in a single parent home with a child or two on a basket of drugs. All because she’s taught to blame the man for everything that goes wrong.

All women need to be taught a very simple lesson:

girl, if you go get drunk at a party, and you expect some random person to be looking out for you, you best expect to be disappointed. You make sure beforehand what you expect your friends to do for you. You think about the consequences before you take that next drink. Think while you still can. Or learn the hard way. Up to you.

What really bothers me about the whole rape thing is that it’s a loss for everybody. Women seem to forget that. And all this anger and rage gets directed at people who otherwise could have been friends.

Huh. What really bothers me about this whole rape thing is the rape. "A very simple lesson,” indeed: You’d better stay in your place, or else. Stay at home, alone, draped from head to toe in sackcloth, with closed windows, a really strong lock, and the power to both read minds and foresee the future. If a woman fails in any of those endeavors and is raped, it will be described as her own fault.

She was walking late at night - on a street no less? She was drinking - with other people around? You could tell that she had a female body under her clothes? She went out to dinner with him? She was alone with him? She was a stripper? She let her boyfriend tie her up after giving him strict and explicit explanations of her boundaries?

You mean she thought for a second that she could just go about her life as though she were a human being man? What the hell is wrong with her?

Of course, if the subject doesn’t happen to be rape, what women get is: You don’t want to go to dinner with me/ let me buy you a drink/show me your room/act out this fantasy of mine/dress up a little?

Why won’t you give me a smile/talk to me at this bus stop late at night/respond to my catcalls/allow me to grab your ass without getting kicked in the shin?

What the hell is wrong with you?

When a woman doesn't participate in society in exactly the way men want, she's treated as fair game to be torn to shreds on any number of pretexts. When a woman does do the things men expect of her, she's apparently fair game to be raped. Note that there's no room in there for a woman to just go about her business in the way she chooses. Well, fine. I guess I'll just get me to a nunnery.

Jill continues:

The reality of sexual assault and abuse has very little to do with our conversations about it. Yes, women are raped by violent strangers, but more often they are abused by someone they know. And that’s why the argument of “Why teach men not to rape? Criminals are going to be criminals” is silly. Crime is a complicated social phenomenon — especially violent crimes which target a specific portion of the population. Honor killings in Jordan are very culturally specific, and spring from a greater cultural consensus that women’s sexuality should be controlled, and a misuse of that sexuality is cause of great shame — shame that is so overwhelming, it can justify murder. Rape in our culture comes from a variety of factors, but primary among them is a sense of male entitlement to women’s bodies; the dehumanization of women; the social consensus that it is ok to control some aspects of women’s reproductive and sexual organs; and the emphasis on an aggressive male sexuality and a passive female one. These things are not static. Men — and women — can change. Cultural values can shift.

As though she lived in Jill's brain and were continuing the thought, Belle says:

Secondly, and I think this point is often underrated, just consider the vast, soul-crushing apparatus that has been constructed over the years for the purposes of restraining or subjugating female sexuality. Like, all of human society, right? Think of the arguments made in traditional societies about why women have to be kept separate from men, have to cover their bodies, have to be kept relatively ignorant. Sure, part of it is premised on the first point: men are vile brutes who are incapable of putting even modest restraint on their appetites. But I often think this is something of a dodge, because men don’t really, at some level, think as badly of themselves as this line implies. And so…

Who builds a wall a mile high, topped with razor-wire and extravagantly electrified? Who but a man very afraid of something terrifying and powerful on the other side?

And...back to Jill:

In other words, “protect yourself from rape” suggestions conveniently ignore the fact that it’s not about “choice of behavior” at all. It’s about living in a female or otherwise transgressive body, and doing just about anything with that body. According to rape apology, if you are a person whose body is not normative (i.e., not male), the very act of going out in public with that body is where you went wrong.

This gets to the core of why all of this boils down to hatred of women. Every time someone blames the victim, they're saying she deserved to be raped because she's female. I [heart] you too, world.


Last week, it was the way-overheated debate I got sucked into over the false rape allegation myth - which I meant to not have, and with which we cultivated the driftiest thread ever. The guy who had drawn me into the discussion was intent on arguing that, when the stakes are on the one hand a prison sentence and on the other a voluntary public attack on one’s character and history, the odds of a rapist saying “she wanted it” should be considered roughly equal to the odds of a woman making a malicious accusation:

It’s funny, actually, that the feminist argument that a woman who claims rape should always be believed buys into the patriarchal notions of the “moral purity” of women so much, and yet doesn’t seem to realize it (or doesn’t care)! LOL Women are incapable of lying, of being deceptive, of being manipulative, of being cruel, of desiring to hurt or damage someone, of seeking attention or sympathy, of trying to cover for an unexpected, embarrassing, and inconvenient pregnancy or some other situation, of suffering from mental illness (unless, of course, a woman is charged with murder–then the mental illness excuse is trotted out as a matter of course), of making bad choices, of seeking revenge, of being vindictive, of fighting for leverage in an ugly way in a divorce or custody proceeding, of having impure or dubious motivations, of using others to vicariously fight their battles for them, of using coercive tactics, of feigning vulnerability and weakness and victimhood for their own gain or some other motivation, and on and on and on. NOPE. Not at all. There’s never been a single woman in existence who’s ever exhibited even one of those traits or qualities, let alone more than one of them simultaneously! Women are, of course, just slightly under the angels, but pure and perfect nevertheless. So of course it makes perfect sense to absolutely and unwaveringly believe everything they have to say in all contexts.

Straw, man. Man, straw. I'm sure you'll be very close.

But let me ask you this: In a classic he said/she said scenario, aren’t we talking about intimates (whether it be friends, boyfriend/girlfriend, romantic or life partners, or spouses) who are quite obviously undergoing a nasty and messy relationship crisis? One that will undoubtedly lead to them not have a relationship in the future? One that has been building and developing for some time in most cases? (Let’s face it, beautiful, ideal, loving, caring, sharing, equal, happy relationships don’t tend to cruise along all happy go lucky only to mysteriously crash into a brick wall and fall apart with a rape. In a great majority of cases, the relationship will have been rocky and tempestuous to at least some degree before a rape occurs, or before a rape allegation is made.) Given all that, and considering that a woman who makes a rape allegation does so for one reason only (she is so full of hatred and rage at the man she’s accused that she wants to see him locked in a cage for years or even decades), isn’t it reasonable and fair to treat her claims with open-minded skepticism and subject them to rigorous scrutiny? [...]

[bold totally mine. And I'm about to borrow heavily from my own comments]

It's funny how most of our criminal law is based on the idea of justice, but the only reasons to prosecute the crimes that happen mostly to women must be irrational and hateful.

I understand that it’s natural to want to put ourselves in the shoes of the participants in any situation we discuss, but it seems to be especially easy for men who can’t imagine themselves ever raping anyone (and good on y'all for it, don’t get me wrong) to have a harder time envisioning a scenario where the man truly isn’t concerned with whether or not his partner is consenting. I think that when talking about acquaintance rape, a lot of people are envisioning instances in which they themselves could have communicated better about sex, and fail to ask themselves whether or not any of their former partners ended up at the police station the next day. I get all that.

But I still can't wrap my head around making the leap from there to automatically doubting the word of rape victims. When someone reports that her wallet has been stolen, no one's immediate instinct is to say that she probably wanted to give the thief the wallet, being such a charitable person and all. But that’s exactly the absurdity of the notion that someone would go through the trauma and humiliation of having her personal life paraded before the courts just because she didn't like the sex. Once upon a time, an accusation might have been plausibly framed as a shamefaced reaction to a regrettable hookup - but Hester Prynne died a really long time ago, guys. It seems more than obvious that if someone is distraught enough to call it rape, it wasn't a simple miscommunication.

He continues:

So am I to interpret [my prior comment] to mean that you’d support ideas like the current British proposal to reverse legal presumption in rape cases, so that a rape accuser’s claim would be considered presumptively true (and thus a defendant would be presumed guilty), and a defendant would have the burden of proving his innocence with “incontrovertible evidence” that he DID obtain consent? (Please see my earlier comments in re how silly such an idea is. Like, what the hell would constitute incontrovertible evidence? A signed, dated, notarized consent form? A date-stamped videotape of the sex act? Signed affidavits from volunteer witnesses to the sex act that it was indeed consensual?)

I'm not sure what, apart from the statement that it was rape, we could require as "incontrovertible evidence" of lack of consent. A signed affidavit stating in advance that the accuser would never have sex with her attacker? In that case, I guess we can add ‘psychic’ to the qualities of the Platonic Rape Victim (I thought after the Duke case put ‘eyes in the back of her head’ on the list we’d get a break for a while).

This sort of argument seems to be mostly based on the idea that women are the gatekeepers and that men aren't just allowed to, but are supposed to go as far as they can until forced to stop (presumably by threat of a jail sentence). When it's up to the victim to prove non-consent, then the burden of not getting raped is necessarily on the victim. In this view, of course, a woman can only be raped through her own negligence, and men are absolved of any and all responsibility to consider her consent.

Well isn’t that handy?


*Not all of those only describe one guy [ex: doorstep and best friend, same dude], but the point still stands.