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lenora_rose(Extremely obvious trigger warning.)
Okay. The title is slightly hyperbolic, in that many of these are contextual, not universal. But they are things that, when I hear them during a conversation about rape - and especially about date rape, or even just a place where the sad truth is firmly established that the majority of rapes are done by people known to the survivor - tend to make me cringe and make me likely to have a hard time reading the rest of what the person has to say.
I do try to read past my objections; these aren't triggers such as those for which I gave the warning and the courtesy cut above. But I've rarely been pleasantly surprised reading past them. As with "hopes and dreams" being a likely warning flag that a publisher is a scam, too, some are less directly related to the root cause of the objection.
I think it's self evident that I don't speak for all women, for all feminists (of any gender), or for all of any particular given minority into which you choose to put me. I'm speaking for myself. I know many people who may well disagree vehemently with me.
The first thing about all of these statements in a near universal context in which they are spoken. They are mostly, in my experience, spoken by men who are neither rapists nor have been sexually assaulted, but who feel for some reason personally addressed and even attacked by discussions of rape, rapists, and rape prevention. These seem to come out when a man gets defensive of himself, of his male friends, of culture in general.
This is not to say that this is the only time these things are said. Nor that there aren't men who never say these things. (There will be times I failed to write some men and said simply "men" instead. My bad. If you catch one, instead of feeling personally attacked or thinking I am blaming all men for the sins of some, please just let me know. This was written in relative haste). Nor does it mean a woman should feel she is exempt if she has. It is a general noted trend.
Anyhow. This is the list.
1) "I know rape is horrible, worse than death ..."
There are three reasons this one is on the list, and two of them function like a "hopes and dreams" warning flag.
In third place, the person saying these words sometimes (not always) seems to think that asserting that rape is awful is itself a behaviour that should be rewarded, instead of a logical baseline with which every human being should agree. The speaker/writer seems to think that this is an exceptional point, and therefore may well come across as, as the saying goes, asking for cookies for feeling this way.
Thing is, feeling that rape is a horrible thing isn't even necessarily a sign you're a feminist ally. Sure, feminists would agree en masse that rape is horrible, but restrictive religious extremists like the Taliban and Southern Baptists would agree, and in some cases demonstrate, by killing raped women, that they feel rape is worse than death. It's not an assertion that says anything about your general belief in feminism.
In second place, The speaker/writer of the above line virtually always follows the words with the word "But" and any of the other statements on this list. Honestly: I've seen it NOT followed by one of these statements twice that I remember, and in one of those cases, the person describing rape as worse than death was also a rare instance of a woman using the phrase. (The other was in the middle of a contentious discussion of another aspect of feminism, and the 'this makes me an ally' implication was there, but the follow up was actually something quite reasonable.) As soon as I see it, I'm flinching, waiting for the "But" and then the declaration of soemthing else that will make me wince.
But the biggest reason I think this statement should stop being used?
It's wrong.
Not always. I do not wish to erase the experiences of rape survivors who have attempted suicide partly as a result of an assault, or who would have disagreed at the time of their assault, or afterwards. There are experiences of rape that are particularly traumatic and difficult to recover from, especially those on children; and sometimes there are outside circumstances (cultural mores and family pressure) that try and declare it worse than death regardless of what the survivors themselves think.
Right here, right now, if I had to choose between being raped and being killed? I'd choose the rape.
Why? If I die, that's it, that's done. I never again get to see my husband, my son, my mom, my brother, my friends, my family, alive and well. I don't see what sort of a man Joseph grows into. I can't make pottery, write, procrastinate about writing. I can't read books or sing songs. I can't ever even bloody pet my cats.
I'm not giving all that up because of an assault of any kind, sexual or otherwise. Not if I have something to say about it. I'm not letting some fucktard win that much out of me.
(And even the possibility of an afterlife - a part of my faith in which I lack full conviction at the best of times - that possibility is not enough on which to gamble losing everything I currently have.)
If I'm raped, I'll be injured, physically and mentally. I may not be all my family and friends want or need me to be. I'll need work to heal and be back to anything like what I was. But I will be surrounded by the people I care about, who care about me, and the things that matter to me, the skills of my hands and the futures I can envision.
At this point in time, given a choice, alive is an important thing for me to be.
Are there contexts in which this isn't true? Almost certainly. But if you linger to think through all the hypothetical scenarios to find one bad enough that I'd say "I choose death first" just because I said otherwise about the basic garden variety situation? You're probably both overthinking the point and being more than a bit creepy. Also, getting into territory where it stops being an either/or situation and starts turning into at least a risk of "both".
Similarly, if you think this is me suggesting rape isn't a horrible thing, don't be absurd. If I said I'd rather get a leg cut off then an arm, you wouldn't imagine I thought losing a leg was somehow okay. This is the sort of thing for which the phrase "lesser of two evils" was invented.
The next one is closely related.
2) "Her(his) life is ruined forever"
You know, there are a whole huge lot of people (I've seen stats as high as 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 women, and 1 in 6 or 7 men) walking around who've been sexually assaulted. Some repeatedly. Some as children. Watch people in a mall sometime. Count off how many people you see. Get an idea how many of those people that really is.
Do you really think that many people are walking around whose lives have been inutterably destroyed by rape?
There are rape survivors graduating from college or university. Fixing your car. Filing your taxes. There are survivors of sexual assault in line at the fast food kiosk, looking bored and tired like everyone else. There are survivors of sexual assault out on the dance floor at the social. Visiting the museum. Living lives.
Did they have trauma? Yes, most of them. Did some have an especially hard time recovering? Yes. Did some NOT? Also yes.
There are people walking around with battlefield injuries, with abusive parents, or With loved ones tragically dead. There are people struggling with addictions, suffering financial ruin. Are their lives necessarily ruined forever?
"Her life is ruined forever" is the logic that leads to honour killings, to telling a girl she's a chewed up wad of gum. It's bullshit.
What a survivor needs is people who can tell her that there are other things she can be and do, that it's okay to heal. That it's okay if healing takes a long time, or a short time. That they have compassion and comfort available. That it's not a competition of who was worst hurt, and she need not feel as if sympathy for her takes it away from others who've suffered worse.
Above all, what a survivor needs is to be seen as all the other things she is than a survivor. As a cyclist or an accountant or a playwright or a really awesome friend.
3) "But what about thepeople women who lie about being raped?"
Oh, god, this. This is the closest to immediate "kill it with fire".
Firstly, context. This seems to come up in virtually EVERY discussion of rape. It's the default fear of men when it comes to rape. Not that they might harm a sexual partner. Not fear that rape might happen to them. Not fear a rapist might target a member of their family, friends, relations. But that someone might lie about them.
Numbers. I believe the number of reports of rape in which the claimant was found to be lying is something on the order of 3%. That means that roughly speaking, for every 3 cases of someone lying, there are 97 rape survivors who aren't. Let's be generous and say that some of those cases might be fuzzy. let's make it 90 rape survivors for those 3 demonstrably false claims.
That's still a hell of a lot more people who've been raped than who've been falsely accused.
Then why does it seem like that 3% is close to 100% of what men can focus on?
I think the reason is this:
Nobody wants to believe someone they know who doesn't fit the imagined profile of the ebil rapist may have, you know, raped. So it's easier to act like men accused of rape have somehow managed to accidentally get themselves into a situation where they look like they might have done something wrong, only it's somehow innocent, really.
(Or of course the "She wanted it yesterday but regrets it now" which seems to come up so often as an explanation. especially when alcohol is involved, or drugs.)
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. It does. But it happens more rarely than people, especially men, seem to think. And I have seen men say that it's worse than getting raped to be accused of being a rapist. (It reminds me of white people who seem to think being accused of racism is worse than enduring racism.) That the danger of losing a career or being socially ostracized by one set of friends is worse than being betrayed and brutally assaulted by someone you either knew and trusted or hoped to get to know and trust (oh, and also socially ostracized for speaking.)
But this fear really does not deserve the sheer amount of air time men seem to want to give it.
And it does active harm to real rape and sexual assault survivors.
Because it sometimes seems to me like every frigging case I've heard of a survivor talking about a rape, and assault or a near assault, someone says s/he must be lying to get attention, or revenge, or all the obvious great rewards involved in being known publicly as the person who tarnished so-and-so's pristine record. You know, the lost friends and the acquaintances who make sure to give one a firm brush off. The family members who won't speak to you, if it's a family member who did it. The insinuating questions.
For every actual false accusation there are a whole LOT of rape survivors who are made to feel far worse because the meme is in the air that it's common for people to lie about their assault, and because people say this about them.
It increases the likelihood that a real survivor will not come forward.
it increases the likelihood a real survivor who comes forward will not be believed.
It increases the likelihood that a legitimate case will have a hard time getting to court.
(Often there's an extra misogynistic element, but the recent football case demonstrates that even boys and men who blow the whistle on a sufficiently famous person get the same gantlet.)
The thing is, really, there's a common sense solution to avoiding false accusations of rape that men should embrace.
It's not foolproof, since some of the most notorious false rape accusations involve people who turn out never to have been alone and naked together. But as with all criminal acts, most people unless bent on a specific personal revenge, will bypass more difficult targets in favour of easier ones.
So if you're afraid a woman will turn around in the morning and accuse you of rape? Here's what you do:
Don't put yourself in a situation where your partner's consent is in doubt.
Don't have sex, especially not for the first time, with someone who has expressed less than full enthusiasm for the idea. Don't have sex with a newish partner if one or both of you have been drinking or doing drugs, even if you don't think they seem drunk/stoned, or think you're sober "enough". Don't have sex with anyone whose full consent you are not 100% sure of for any reason. And if they change their mind, or even seem to have lost enthusiasm, stop, if only to check they're okay.
Do that, and you're much less likely to be accused of rape. Also, in many cases, an explicitly enthusiastic partner means better sex.
(Aside on alcohol and drugs. A friend of mine was recently roofied. Being a very experienced drinker, she went home when she felt more woozy than the amount she'd been drinking would account for (and before the creep - she knew who bought her the drink - could make any further move). Her boyfriend, also a mature experienced person, but who hadn't been there at the bar couldn't tell she was further gone than usual. She was speaking coherently, and walking fine. But in the morning she was still feeling effects (and not hangover style), AND the last thing she remembered was him picking her up in the car, and he says they were awake at least a couple of hours after. Note, I don't think he did anything wrong; I say this simply to illustrate how it's not just "teens who don't know how to hold their drinks" who can misunderstand a situation where alcohol and drugs are involved.)
Which leads nicely to:
4) "What about (case of two long term partners doing something with dubious consent)?"
So you and your wife of several years sometimes have sex after you've had some drinks. Sometimes your partner doesn't mind if you just kinda grab them and fondle them before they've expressed interest. You and your boyfriend have been known to wake each other up out of a sound sleep with foreplay. You and your SO do BDSM games in which they scream no and you do it anyhow. To all of you, this just sounds like a fun Saturday night (Well, in the case of wake-up sex, Sunday morning, but there you go).
Doesn't this contradict all the advice about how not to get raped and how not to rape?
Actually, no. Cases like these get brought up all the time whenever people talk about "Yes means yes" campaigns, or "Don't have sex when you're not sure they're capable of real consent."
Thing is, while more rapes are committed by people the target knows, you don't generally get raped by your spouse of seven years out of the blue. You've had at least seven years, and these days likely several years before marriage, in which to figure out each others' tastes and tendencies and what it's okay by them to DO. If they rape you seven years in, it's probably not a first time, and it's probably been preceded by many other abuses and ways to strip you of consent or control. The case I know of where a husband definitely pushed the limits of consent with his spouse, it wasn't a one time thing, or a sudden out of the blue thing, but built up over time.
Generally, people in healthy long term relationships communicate. They talk about what they like to do. What turns them on. They do things they would never risk doing on a first night with a near-stranger. They give each other tacit consent in advance for certain things. It's clear and known what's okay between these people in a way it isn't in a new relationship.
(If my spouse of seven years were to grab me and fondle me as a proposition of sex? Well, my response would depend on the day, but I sometimes wish he'd try it more.)
And this is often MORE true the kinkier the inclination. Just figuring out when and how to bring up a kink involves some expert communication. The BDSM community isn't perfect about consent, but they're a sight better than much of the mainstream in coming up with answers as to how to communicate consent when one of the things that turns one partner on is to lose the ability to consent. And especially how to deal with this with new partners.
Most of all, I have to ask people who bring these things up in rape prevention: if you and your spouse do something that started with iffy consent, and you both have fun, Who exactly do you think is going to be making the rape accusation or bringing in charges? Why is it that you seem to fear legal repercussions will fall on you if you tread over some line while enjoying happy mutual orgasms? It's nobody's business and no harm is done.
(Unless your spouse IS accusing you of rape every time you do one of these things of dubious consent, in which case you are scum of the earth and should go tell all to a decent police officer.)
The "yes means yes" and "don't ever have sex when..." rules are for when the relationship is new, when people are figuring out whether their new partner is the person they thought they were getting involved with, or merely very good at saying what he thinks his victim will want to hear to get his target alone. For how to deal with the friend's brother you've known for a while, but only in a large social group, or the guy you just met in a bar. In those situations, being conservative and cautious just makes sense, even if your usual inclination is to dive right in.
Someone bringing up something their long-term SO thinks is awesome but which involves bending those rules? Involves deliberately choosing to misunderstand what they're for, and what they're trying to stop.
5) "What about (various fringe cases)?"
A 15 year old and an 18 year old in a state without a Romeo and Juliet Clause. Someone whose mental capacity is literally on the border of where it's considered legally able to consent. Someone who's tipsy but not drunk. All these kinds of things, and other fringe situations, get brought up whenever anyone tries to talk about rape prevention, in a similar way to those practiced between consenting adults who've known one another long enough to start bending the rules.
Except that some of these cases do go to court. Some are legitimately rape when you look at the details. Some may be travesties of justice.
This is a contextual one. It is worth talking about these things, and in fact I'd like to see discussions **devoted to these cases** at times.
But they come up so often in discussions of what I can only call mainstream rape that it's absurd.
And for the same reason people mention things they've done with long term spouses. Someone wants to say, "Look at this situation. Describing it as rape is absurd. So obviously people are too quick to cry rape."
They seem to say it as if they fear someone will look at their own personal practices and cry rape. (To which, I've cited a solution above. Don't do things that leave consent in doubt, and nobody will. Problem solved.)
What it is, though, is rules-lawyering. With an act that has hurt many people and will hurt many more. There's a time and a place, and too often, I've seen them in the wrong time and place.
6) "You know men can be victims too, right?"
This is the most contextual. It is ABSOLUTELY right and appropriate to say if someone is denying that fact. It is thoroughly appropriate to discuss in contexts like pedophilia, where there is, among other things, a theory going about that a number of pre-pubescent-focused pedophiles are more interested in the age (and related lack of strong secondary sexual characteristics) and the opportunity and access than in the specific gender.
It's not just acceptable but **essential** to say in this context, which is all about the times and places where support for male rape victims is even more lacking than is support for female rape victims. (In case it isn't obvious, that article might be badly triggering reading even for people who could stomach reading this.)
Where this is an issue is when people are talking specifically about rapists, not rape survivors. Where 99% or more of perpetrators are male. Their targets can be any gender, any age. When talking about the perpetrators, however, it's a much stronger possibility that one is talking about a man. At this point, bringing in the gender of the *survivors* is actively derailing.
It's usually done by a man who hears people cite the "99% of rapists are men" stat, and starts feeling defensive, because he's not a rapist, and that sounds like it's attacking men. (To which: the statement is that the majority of rapists are men, NOT that the majority of men are rapists. That is a very different proposition, and an incorrect one.) So, to feel better, he decides to remind people that men can be targeted by rapists.
Which, yes, we know. But we were talking about the perpetrator of the crime, not the target. If you aren't a rapist, you do not need to defend yourself from statements about rapists.
(Erasing the existence of female rapists *is* bad, too, BTW, but also a less common tactic for derailing. Though female rapists should feel guilty and defensive, because they have something to feel guilty about. Even if "rapists" under discussion are described with the pronoun "he", if a woman fits in every other respect, she should feel all the shame and remorse suitable to the crime.)
7) "I just think women should take some responsibility too."
(And yes, it is always "women", never "rape victims" or "rape survivors" in general.)
Facepalm.
That is all.
I'm out of words. Ask me to clarify in the comments if you have any doubt why I never want to hear this again.
Okay. The title is slightly hyperbolic, in that many of these are contextual, not universal. But they are things that, when I hear them during a conversation about rape - and especially about date rape, or even just a place where the sad truth is firmly established that the majority of rapes are done by people known to the survivor - tend to make me cringe and make me likely to have a hard time reading the rest of what the person has to say.
I do try to read past my objections; these aren't triggers such as those for which I gave the warning and the courtesy cut above. But I've rarely been pleasantly surprised reading past them. As with "hopes and dreams" being a likely warning flag that a publisher is a scam, too, some are less directly related to the root cause of the objection.
I think it's self evident that I don't speak for all women, for all feminists (of any gender), or for all of any particular given minority into which you choose to put me. I'm speaking for myself. I know many people who may well disagree vehemently with me.
The first thing about all of these statements in a near universal context in which they are spoken. They are mostly, in my experience, spoken by men who are neither rapists nor have been sexually assaulted, but who feel for some reason personally addressed and even attacked by discussions of rape, rapists, and rape prevention. These seem to come out when a man gets defensive of himself, of his male friends, of culture in general.
This is not to say that this is the only time these things are said. Nor that there aren't men who never say these things. (There will be times I failed to write some men and said simply "men" instead. My bad. If you catch one, instead of feeling personally attacked or thinking I am blaming all men for the sins of some, please just let me know. This was written in relative haste). Nor does it mean a woman should feel she is exempt if she has. It is a general noted trend.
Anyhow. This is the list.
1) "I know rape is horrible, worse than death ..."
There are three reasons this one is on the list, and two of them function like a "hopes and dreams" warning flag.
In third place, the person saying these words sometimes (not always) seems to think that asserting that rape is awful is itself a behaviour that should be rewarded, instead of a logical baseline with which every human being should agree. The speaker/writer seems to think that this is an exceptional point, and therefore may well come across as, as the saying goes, asking for cookies for feeling this way.
Thing is, feeling that rape is a horrible thing isn't even necessarily a sign you're a feminist ally. Sure, feminists would agree en masse that rape is horrible, but restrictive religious extremists like the Taliban and Southern Baptists would agree, and in some cases demonstrate, by killing raped women, that they feel rape is worse than death. It's not an assertion that says anything about your general belief in feminism.
In second place, The speaker/writer of the above line virtually always follows the words with the word "But" and any of the other statements on this list. Honestly: I've seen it NOT followed by one of these statements twice that I remember, and in one of those cases, the person describing rape as worse than death was also a rare instance of a woman using the phrase. (The other was in the middle of a contentious discussion of another aspect of feminism, and the 'this makes me an ally' implication was there, but the follow up was actually something quite reasonable.) As soon as I see it, I'm flinching, waiting for the "But" and then the declaration of soemthing else that will make me wince.
But the biggest reason I think this statement should stop being used?
It's wrong.
Not always. I do not wish to erase the experiences of rape survivors who have attempted suicide partly as a result of an assault, or who would have disagreed at the time of their assault, or afterwards. There are experiences of rape that are particularly traumatic and difficult to recover from, especially those on children; and sometimes there are outside circumstances (cultural mores and family pressure) that try and declare it worse than death regardless of what the survivors themselves think.
Right here, right now, if I had to choose between being raped and being killed? I'd choose the rape.
Why? If I die, that's it, that's done. I never again get to see my husband, my son, my mom, my brother, my friends, my family, alive and well. I don't see what sort of a man Joseph grows into. I can't make pottery, write, procrastinate about writing. I can't read books or sing songs. I can't ever even bloody pet my cats.
I'm not giving all that up because of an assault of any kind, sexual or otherwise. Not if I have something to say about it. I'm not letting some fucktard win that much out of me.
(And even the possibility of an afterlife - a part of my faith in which I lack full conviction at the best of times - that possibility is not enough on which to gamble losing everything I currently have.)
If I'm raped, I'll be injured, physically and mentally. I may not be all my family and friends want or need me to be. I'll need work to heal and be back to anything like what I was. But I will be surrounded by the people I care about, who care about me, and the things that matter to me, the skills of my hands and the futures I can envision.
At this point in time, given a choice, alive is an important thing for me to be.
Are there contexts in which this isn't true? Almost certainly. But if you linger to think through all the hypothetical scenarios to find one bad enough that I'd say "I choose death first" just because I said otherwise about the basic garden variety situation? You're probably both overthinking the point and being more than a bit creepy. Also, getting into territory where it stops being an either/or situation and starts turning into at least a risk of "both".
Similarly, if you think this is me suggesting rape isn't a horrible thing, don't be absurd. If I said I'd rather get a leg cut off then an arm, you wouldn't imagine I thought losing a leg was somehow okay. This is the sort of thing for which the phrase "lesser of two evils" was invented.
The next one is closely related.
2) "Her(his) life is ruined forever"
You know, there are a whole huge lot of people (I've seen stats as high as 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 women, and 1 in 6 or 7 men) walking around who've been sexually assaulted. Some repeatedly. Some as children. Watch people in a mall sometime. Count off how many people you see. Get an idea how many of those people that really is.
Do you really think that many people are walking around whose lives have been inutterably destroyed by rape?
There are rape survivors graduating from college or university. Fixing your car. Filing your taxes. There are survivors of sexual assault in line at the fast food kiosk, looking bored and tired like everyone else. There are survivors of sexual assault out on the dance floor at the social. Visiting the museum. Living lives.
Did they have trauma? Yes, most of them. Did some have an especially hard time recovering? Yes. Did some NOT? Also yes.
There are people walking around with battlefield injuries, with abusive parents, or With loved ones tragically dead. There are people struggling with addictions, suffering financial ruin. Are their lives necessarily ruined forever?
"Her life is ruined forever" is the logic that leads to honour killings, to telling a girl she's a chewed up wad of gum. It's bullshit.
What a survivor needs is people who can tell her that there are other things she can be and do, that it's okay to heal. That it's okay if healing takes a long time, or a short time. That they have compassion and comfort available. That it's not a competition of who was worst hurt, and she need not feel as if sympathy for her takes it away from others who've suffered worse.
Above all, what a survivor needs is to be seen as all the other things she is than a survivor. As a cyclist or an accountant or a playwright or a really awesome friend.
3) "But what about the
Oh, god, this. This is the closest to immediate "kill it with fire".
Firstly, context. This seems to come up in virtually EVERY discussion of rape. It's the default fear of men when it comes to rape. Not that they might harm a sexual partner. Not fear that rape might happen to them. Not fear a rapist might target a member of their family, friends, relations. But that someone might lie about them.
Numbers. I believe the number of reports of rape in which the claimant was found to be lying is something on the order of 3%. That means that roughly speaking, for every 3 cases of someone lying, there are 97 rape survivors who aren't. Let's be generous and say that some of those cases might be fuzzy. let's make it 90 rape survivors for those 3 demonstrably false claims.
That's still a hell of a lot more people who've been raped than who've been falsely accused.
Then why does it seem like that 3% is close to 100% of what men can focus on?
I think the reason is this:
Nobody wants to believe someone they know who doesn't fit the imagined profile of the ebil rapist may have, you know, raped. So it's easier to act like men accused of rape have somehow managed to accidentally get themselves into a situation where they look like they might have done something wrong, only it's somehow innocent, really.
(Or of course the "She wanted it yesterday but regrets it now" which seems to come up so often as an explanation. especially when alcohol is involved, or drugs.)
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. It does. But it happens more rarely than people, especially men, seem to think. And I have seen men say that it's worse than getting raped to be accused of being a rapist. (It reminds me of white people who seem to think being accused of racism is worse than enduring racism.) That the danger of losing a career or being socially ostracized by one set of friends is worse than being betrayed and brutally assaulted by someone you either knew and trusted or hoped to get to know and trust (oh, and also socially ostracized for speaking.)
But this fear really does not deserve the sheer amount of air time men seem to want to give it.
And it does active harm to real rape and sexual assault survivors.
Because it sometimes seems to me like every frigging case I've heard of a survivor talking about a rape, and assault or a near assault, someone says s/he must be lying to get attention, or revenge, or all the obvious great rewards involved in being known publicly as the person who tarnished so-and-so's pristine record. You know, the lost friends and the acquaintances who make sure to give one a firm brush off. The family members who won't speak to you, if it's a family member who did it. The insinuating questions.
For every actual false accusation there are a whole LOT of rape survivors who are made to feel far worse because the meme is in the air that it's common for people to lie about their assault, and because people say this about them.
It increases the likelihood that a real survivor will not come forward.
it increases the likelihood a real survivor who comes forward will not be believed.
It increases the likelihood that a legitimate case will have a hard time getting to court.
(Often there's an extra misogynistic element, but the recent football case demonstrates that even boys and men who blow the whistle on a sufficiently famous person get the same gantlet.)
The thing is, really, there's a common sense solution to avoiding false accusations of rape that men should embrace.
It's not foolproof, since some of the most notorious false rape accusations involve people who turn out never to have been alone and naked together. But as with all criminal acts, most people unless bent on a specific personal revenge, will bypass more difficult targets in favour of easier ones.
So if you're afraid a woman will turn around in the morning and accuse you of rape? Here's what you do:
Don't put yourself in a situation where your partner's consent is in doubt.
Don't have sex, especially not for the first time, with someone who has expressed less than full enthusiasm for the idea. Don't have sex with a newish partner if one or both of you have been drinking or doing drugs, even if you don't think they seem drunk/stoned, or think you're sober "enough". Don't have sex with anyone whose full consent you are not 100% sure of for any reason. And if they change their mind, or even seem to have lost enthusiasm, stop, if only to check they're okay.
Do that, and you're much less likely to be accused of rape. Also, in many cases, an explicitly enthusiastic partner means better sex.
(Aside on alcohol and drugs. A friend of mine was recently roofied. Being a very experienced drinker, she went home when she felt more woozy than the amount she'd been drinking would account for (and before the creep - she knew who bought her the drink - could make any further move). Her boyfriend, also a mature experienced person, but who hadn't been there at the bar couldn't tell she was further gone than usual. She was speaking coherently, and walking fine. But in the morning she was still feeling effects (and not hangover style), AND the last thing she remembered was him picking her up in the car, and he says they were awake at least a couple of hours after. Note, I don't think he did anything wrong; I say this simply to illustrate how it's not just "teens who don't know how to hold their drinks" who can misunderstand a situation where alcohol and drugs are involved.)
Which leads nicely to:
4) "What about (case of two long term partners doing something with dubious consent)?"
So you and your wife of several years sometimes have sex after you've had some drinks. Sometimes your partner doesn't mind if you just kinda grab them and fondle them before they've expressed interest. You and your boyfriend have been known to wake each other up out of a sound sleep with foreplay. You and your SO do BDSM games in which they scream no and you do it anyhow. To all of you, this just sounds like a fun Saturday night (Well, in the case of wake-up sex, Sunday morning, but there you go).
Doesn't this contradict all the advice about how not to get raped and how not to rape?
Actually, no. Cases like these get brought up all the time whenever people talk about "Yes means yes" campaigns, or "Don't have sex when you're not sure they're capable of real consent."
Thing is, while more rapes are committed by people the target knows, you don't generally get raped by your spouse of seven years out of the blue. You've had at least seven years, and these days likely several years before marriage, in which to figure out each others' tastes and tendencies and what it's okay by them to DO. If they rape you seven years in, it's probably not a first time, and it's probably been preceded by many other abuses and ways to strip you of consent or control. The case I know of where a husband definitely pushed the limits of consent with his spouse, it wasn't a one time thing, or a sudden out of the blue thing, but built up over time.
Generally, people in healthy long term relationships communicate. They talk about what they like to do. What turns them on. They do things they would never risk doing on a first night with a near-stranger. They give each other tacit consent in advance for certain things. It's clear and known what's okay between these people in a way it isn't in a new relationship.
(If my spouse of seven years were to grab me and fondle me as a proposition of sex? Well, my response would depend on the day, but I sometimes wish he'd try it more.)
And this is often MORE true the kinkier the inclination. Just figuring out when and how to bring up a kink involves some expert communication. The BDSM community isn't perfect about consent, but they're a sight better than much of the mainstream in coming up with answers as to how to communicate consent when one of the things that turns one partner on is to lose the ability to consent. And especially how to deal with this with new partners.
Most of all, I have to ask people who bring these things up in rape prevention: if you and your spouse do something that started with iffy consent, and you both have fun, Who exactly do you think is going to be making the rape accusation or bringing in charges? Why is it that you seem to fear legal repercussions will fall on you if you tread over some line while enjoying happy mutual orgasms? It's nobody's business and no harm is done.
(Unless your spouse IS accusing you of rape every time you do one of these things of dubious consent, in which case you are scum of the earth and should go tell all to a decent police officer.)
The "yes means yes" and "don't ever have sex when..." rules are for when the relationship is new, when people are figuring out whether their new partner is the person they thought they were getting involved with, or merely very good at saying what he thinks his victim will want to hear to get his target alone. For how to deal with the friend's brother you've known for a while, but only in a large social group, or the guy you just met in a bar. In those situations, being conservative and cautious just makes sense, even if your usual inclination is to dive right in.
Someone bringing up something their long-term SO thinks is awesome but which involves bending those rules? Involves deliberately choosing to misunderstand what they're for, and what they're trying to stop.
5) "What about (various fringe cases)?"
A 15 year old and an 18 year old in a state without a Romeo and Juliet Clause. Someone whose mental capacity is literally on the border of where it's considered legally able to consent. Someone who's tipsy but not drunk. All these kinds of things, and other fringe situations, get brought up whenever anyone tries to talk about rape prevention, in a similar way to those practiced between consenting adults who've known one another long enough to start bending the rules.
Except that some of these cases do go to court. Some are legitimately rape when you look at the details. Some may be travesties of justice.
This is a contextual one. It is worth talking about these things, and in fact I'd like to see discussions **devoted to these cases** at times.
But they come up so often in discussions of what I can only call mainstream rape that it's absurd.
And for the same reason people mention things they've done with long term spouses. Someone wants to say, "Look at this situation. Describing it as rape is absurd. So obviously people are too quick to cry rape."
They seem to say it as if they fear someone will look at their own personal practices and cry rape. (To which, I've cited a solution above. Don't do things that leave consent in doubt, and nobody will. Problem solved.)
What it is, though, is rules-lawyering. With an act that has hurt many people and will hurt many more. There's a time and a place, and too often, I've seen them in the wrong time and place.
6) "You know men can be victims too, right?"
This is the most contextual. It is ABSOLUTELY right and appropriate to say if someone is denying that fact. It is thoroughly appropriate to discuss in contexts like pedophilia, where there is, among other things, a theory going about that a number of pre-pubescent-focused pedophiles are more interested in the age (and related lack of strong secondary sexual characteristics) and the opportunity and access than in the specific gender.
It's not just acceptable but **essential** to say in this context, which is all about the times and places where support for male rape victims is even more lacking than is support for female rape victims. (In case it isn't obvious, that article might be badly triggering reading even for people who could stomach reading this.)
Where this is an issue is when people are talking specifically about rapists, not rape survivors. Where 99% or more of perpetrators are male. Their targets can be any gender, any age. When talking about the perpetrators, however, it's a much stronger possibility that one is talking about a man. At this point, bringing in the gender of the *survivors* is actively derailing.
It's usually done by a man who hears people cite the "99% of rapists are men" stat, and starts feeling defensive, because he's not a rapist, and that sounds like it's attacking men. (To which: the statement is that the majority of rapists are men, NOT that the majority of men are rapists. That is a very different proposition, and an incorrect one.) So, to feel better, he decides to remind people that men can be targeted by rapists.
Which, yes, we know. But we were talking about the perpetrator of the crime, not the target. If you aren't a rapist, you do not need to defend yourself from statements about rapists.
(Erasing the existence of female rapists *is* bad, too, BTW, but also a less common tactic for derailing. Though female rapists should feel guilty and defensive, because they have something to feel guilty about. Even if "rapists" under discussion are described with the pronoun "he", if a woman fits in every other respect, she should feel all the shame and remorse suitable to the crime.)
7) "I just think women should take some responsibility too."
(And yes, it is always "women", never "rape victims" or "rape survivors" in general.)
Facepalm.
That is all.
I'm out of words. Ask me to clarify in the comments if you have any doubt why I never want to hear this again.
