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Jun. 24th, 2012 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseEspecially after a recent discussion on Facebook, I really feel the need to share this. That discussion was begun by a man who complained that -- well, any way i would phrase it would be unfair. Here's what he said.
"I think rape is horrible. It is one of the worst crimes imaginable. Possibly worse than murder as the damage often lasts a lifetime spreading pain through decades.
Despite this, I think that the current foolishness "I shouldn't ever have to worry if we taught people not to rape" is MORONIC. We do. It's called society. We teach people not to steal and kill too. Guess what? It still happens.
NO ONE is ever immune to ANY crime. Reducing your risk is COMMON SENSE. Pretending that you shouldn't have to isn't ignorance, it's stupidity. You are denying the realities of humanity."
First, I felt that was a rather bad misrepresentation of the recent campaigns to tell men not to rape, or even get into a position that might be "ambiguous", as it sees any attempt to point to the men's part as women refusing to be sensible, rather than women trying to balance the books after decades and longer of being blamed for male behaviour.
The point that protecting yourself against violent crime is just sense is valid, I should say; my argument against it was that the sorts of things women are told to do to protect themselves against rape are NOT equivalent to the sorts of things you're told to avoid burglaries, or even mugging. And it led to a discussion of cases in legislation where the letter of the law gets in the way of the spirit of the law, which was good, and occasionally heartbreaking, though it overemphasized the number of times and ways consenting sex can be prosecuted as rape (An example, though not from that exact discussion, is a person just barely under the age of consent having sex with a classmate just barely over it, in a place without a "Romeo and Juliet" clause) and ignored the number of ways rape cases have been dismissed because they failed to fit some specific legal definition (Other than "the person raped didn't want to be there"). Both have happened in the real world, neither is desirable.
But there was a lot of painful stuff along the way.
For instance, that conversation also included a man who said that women who lie about being raped are worse than rape. And so on in that vein; you know the kind of thing, and I am not repeating him. Him I did not engage at all, because I have nothing to say to him that wouldn't have crossed the bounds of courtesy.
But this article says everything I wished I could say about what society sets up for women by teaching them to avoid rape, by telling them what they can't do. And how if it doesn't fit in a perfect little box it might not count, even if it messes you up for twenty years.
How I became a Rape Victim
A couple of money quotes:
"Society has allowed rapists to define what resistance is: screaming, crying, scratching, pushing, kicking, biting, punching. I didn't resist like that. My resistance was to wriggle a bit, turn my head away when he tried to kiss me, try to stop his hand going into my bra and knickers, push him ineffectually, talk about wanting to get my cab; all things which normal men recognise as not being enthusiastic participation when they are engaging with women, but pretend it's a grey area when they talk about rape. Rapists have managed to get society to believe that what I did was consent....
...I'd been socialised to believe that you just had to put up with men touching you when you didn't want them to. The one time I'd seen a woman react furiously to such treatment, everyone laughed at her and said how over the top she was and how unreasonable, when he didn't mean anything by it. "
And this one, for the (expletive deleted) talking about "Crying rape":
"I even felt guilty about allowing the thought that I'd been raped to cross my mind. Like most of us, I'd absorbed the lie that women "cry rape" (that phrase that means women habitually make false allegations about rape) and that there are millions of wronged innocent men walking around having had their lives ruined by hysterical, man-hating women who imagined that they'd been raped because they're so stupid, or deliberately lied about it out of pure, unbridled malice. The horror that I might be one of those women, made me feel pity for my rapist and shame that I could even think such a thing about the poor man."
And this one almost made me cry, and definitely wanted me to kill the SOB. This is three weeks later.
"When we parted, he kissed me, put his hands down my knickers again, just to show me that he could, and said to me "have a great time at university and don't sleep with anyone you don't want to". When I assured him I wouldn't, he said: "you already have".
I couldn't believe what he was telling me. He was telling me, that he was a rapist. That he knew he was a rapist. It hadn't been him being a bit drunk, not understanding my ineffectual wriggling away, not realising I didn't want to have sex with him; he knew it wasn't the "grey area" of rape myth."
Read the whole thing. I want to keep quoting, but you should read her words directly.
"I think rape is horrible. It is one of the worst crimes imaginable. Possibly worse than murder as the damage often lasts a lifetime spreading pain through decades.
Despite this, I think that the current foolishness "I shouldn't ever have to worry if we taught people not to rape" is MORONIC. We do. It's called society. We teach people not to steal and kill too. Guess what? It still happens.
NO ONE is ever immune to ANY crime. Reducing your risk is COMMON SENSE. Pretending that you shouldn't have to isn't ignorance, it's stupidity. You are denying the realities of humanity."
First, I felt that was a rather bad misrepresentation of the recent campaigns to tell men not to rape, or even get into a position that might be "ambiguous", as it sees any attempt to point to the men's part as women refusing to be sensible, rather than women trying to balance the books after decades and longer of being blamed for male behaviour.
The point that protecting yourself against violent crime is just sense is valid, I should say; my argument against it was that the sorts of things women are told to do to protect themselves against rape are NOT equivalent to the sorts of things you're told to avoid burglaries, or even mugging. And it led to a discussion of cases in legislation where the letter of the law gets in the way of the spirit of the law, which was good, and occasionally heartbreaking, though it overemphasized the number of times and ways consenting sex can be prosecuted as rape (An example, though not from that exact discussion, is a person just barely under the age of consent having sex with a classmate just barely over it, in a place without a "Romeo and Juliet" clause) and ignored the number of ways rape cases have been dismissed because they failed to fit some specific legal definition (Other than "the person raped didn't want to be there"). Both have happened in the real world, neither is desirable.
But there was a lot of painful stuff along the way.
For instance, that conversation also included a man who said that women who lie about being raped are worse than rape. And so on in that vein; you know the kind of thing, and I am not repeating him. Him I did not engage at all, because I have nothing to say to him that wouldn't have crossed the bounds of courtesy.
But this article says everything I wished I could say about what society sets up for women by teaching them to avoid rape, by telling them what they can't do. And how if it doesn't fit in a perfect little box it might not count, even if it messes you up for twenty years.
How I became a Rape Victim
A couple of money quotes:
"Society has allowed rapists to define what resistance is: screaming, crying, scratching, pushing, kicking, biting, punching. I didn't resist like that. My resistance was to wriggle a bit, turn my head away when he tried to kiss me, try to stop his hand going into my bra and knickers, push him ineffectually, talk about wanting to get my cab; all things which normal men recognise as not being enthusiastic participation when they are engaging with women, but pretend it's a grey area when they talk about rape. Rapists have managed to get society to believe that what I did was consent....
...I'd been socialised to believe that you just had to put up with men touching you when you didn't want them to. The one time I'd seen a woman react furiously to such treatment, everyone laughed at her and said how over the top she was and how unreasonable, when he didn't mean anything by it. "
And this one, for the (expletive deleted) talking about "Crying rape":
"I even felt guilty about allowing the thought that I'd been raped to cross my mind. Like most of us, I'd absorbed the lie that women "cry rape" (that phrase that means women habitually make false allegations about rape) and that there are millions of wronged innocent men walking around having had their lives ruined by hysterical, man-hating women who imagined that they'd been raped because they're so stupid, or deliberately lied about it out of pure, unbridled malice. The horror that I might be one of those women, made me feel pity for my rapist and shame that I could even think such a thing about the poor man."
And this one almost made me cry, and definitely wanted me to kill the SOB. This is three weeks later.
"When we parted, he kissed me, put his hands down my knickers again, just to show me that he could, and said to me "have a great time at university and don't sleep with anyone you don't want to". When I assured him I wouldn't, he said: "you already have".
I couldn't believe what he was telling me. He was telling me, that he was a rapist. That he knew he was a rapist. It hadn't been him being a bit drunk, not understanding my ineffectual wriggling away, not realising I didn't want to have sex with him; he knew it wasn't the "grey area" of rape myth."
Read the whole thing. I want to keep quoting, but you should read her words directly.
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no subject
Date: 2012-06-24 08:46 pm (UTC)That's a far kinder response than mine, which would have been something more along the lines of, "You're an idiot."
A lot of people, men and women, don't even understand what rape is. Forget telling men not to rape; try changing what we teach them about consent and sex as a competition and all the other crap that plays into rape myths. There are plenty of rapists out there who would be genuinely shocked to know that what they did was, in fact, rape.
Not to mention efforts toward bystander intervention, toward overcoming the long-standing pressure to look away and not get involved. Teaching people, particularly men, to speak out and call each other on their behaviors, on their refusal to respect boundaries, on so much more.
Nobody is telling women not to protect themselves. But a lot of us are getting pretty fed up with, "Oh, women should just do more to protect themselves" being the default -- often the only response to such a widespread crime.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-25 05:13 am (UTC)I said: I think "It's not about sex" is a bit too simplistic a view. It's a good way to explain to someone why rape does not equal "Just had rough sex", but it's like explaining how the earth goes around the sun to a child. You don't give them details of orbital mechanics, you give them the quick simple explanation and later they get the nuances. Because I do think sex is involved; someone wants sexual gratification, and looks to the object that woke his (usually his) sexual urges to satisfy them - and to hell if s/he doesn't want it. We actually raise our men to think the way sex works is that men see an object of desire and should pursue it with everything they've got until it gives in. It's the plot of far too many romantic comedies, which make it look happy and successful, not creepy. Sensible men tend to go "Pursue it with everything they've got that's honourable", but some men, and not even evil men, think "Everything they've got" doesn't need limits.
Saying it's not about sex, too, builds a dividing line; those guys who just want power, rape. But I just want sex, I don't rape. It makes the image of rapists always look like leering evil, like the stranger in the bushes or the smarmy guy in the bar, not the clean charmer. It makes it easy to say, "But he's a nice guy. He wouldn't..."
Rereading, though, my desire not to spit venom in a friend's home space made me WAAAAY too mild when I pointed out how scary this quote from a friend of said friend was:"Unfortunately the law does specifically mention mental incapacity as being one of the elements of the crime of rape. I disagree with it..." (He meant incapacity due to alcohol in context, but the more times I reread that, which I almost passed over the first time, the more it terrifies me that nobody else called him on it.)