Erica,
If you had written this series of posts about nine months ago, I probably would have agreed with a lot of what you said. Over time, though, my opinion has changed drastically (in large part because of this very blog and dicussions in its comment threads), and I’d like to take a moment to write about what made my mind change.
I used to have an idea of male sexuality similar to the one that you seem to have. My theory went that men were biologically “wired’ in a way that is different from the way in which women are “wired”; men, in my way of thinking, were naturally more aggressive, more assertive, less able to control their raging hormones, and more horny. I based this on a lot of things ranging from the fact that I’d never seen a girl play a really aggressive sport like football to the fact that I’d never heard a girl boast about how often she masturbated. The more “masculine” guys I knew, the burly guys who drank a lot and pushed people around and otherwise acted like the “men” on television, were also the ones who were most likely to be accused of rape.
I thought that girls who dressed in a “slutty” way didn’t necessarily deserve to be raped, but they certainly weren’t doing anything to keep it from happening. Another way to put it might be that they weren’t “asking for it,” as the saying goes, but they were raising the subject for the asking. I based this theorum on my own reaction to girls who dressed in “slutty” clothing (I wanted to have sex with them), and my observation that the girls who wore “slutty” clothing were also the girls most likely to say that they’d been raped.
So, the “manly” guys, by my observations, were more likely to be rapists while the “slutty” girls were more likely to be rape victims. Thus, those “manly” men couldn’t help themselves but to rape the women who tempted them. When I factored into my theory that most of those people seemed to be into drinking and taking drugs, I came up with an equation that went a little like: guys who had a lot of testosterone + girls who showed off their bodies + drugs + alcohol = rape.
Then things started to happen… I found myself in the position of being very close friends with a woman who had been raped by her husband. It was an internet friendship, but I was no less effected by it. She spoke to me shortly after he did it and almost none of what she said fit in with my view of rape and rape victims. Eventually a part of my mind fell back on the idea that she’d been drinking, he’d been drinking, and … Something. I don’t know. A fuse was blown the moment she told me that her husband had raped her, but my mind wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge it yet. Just because a significant portion of my mental “house” had ceased to have power, I didn’t think it was necessary to venture into my basement and examine the way things had been strung together.
After that I started meeting more women who had been raped. Curiously enough, almost all of them had been raped while in their late twenties or early thirties, while they were sober, by people they knew and trusted, and when they were in comfortable and safe environments. Many of them were athletic, as well. I stumbled across this weblog (shortly after I stumbled across the entire concept of being a part of the progressive movement after I’d spent so much time being a conservative, but that’s a different topic entirely) and was fairly shortly ripped to shreds by bean (thanks, by the way) for some comments I made, was politely rebutted by Ampersand (also thanks, by the way), and stuck around to find out more about this whole feminism thing. I also started dating a young woman quite seriously.
The most important thing, though, was that I started thinking about myself. Once I had deconstructed the myth of the uncontrolable male, I was able to deconstruct a number of other myths.
The first thing I thought about was that I’d been tempted in the past to kiss a woman or grope a woman or have sex with a woman who didn’t want me to kiss/grope/have sex with her. Because I’d been tempted to commit sexual assault and rape, I reasoned, there must be a part of my male mind that was naturally inclined toward rape.
Um. Uh. What?
I’m also tempted to steal, lie, cheat, hurt, and kill. I don’t get some sort of pass when I do those things, so why would I get a pass if I decided one day to grab a woman’s bottom who didn’t want me touching her there? Because I’m a guy?
Let’s assume for a moment that men really are genetically more inclined to try to force sex with an unwilling partner than are women. Okay. So? People are also inclined to physically assault people who wrong them and defecate whenever they feel the need to. We have a term for not beating up others and not defecating in a hotel lobby because our bowels are full; it’s called being civilized. Children are potty trained, taught to not beat each other up, not to lie, not to steal, not to cheat, and not to interrupt while other people are speaking. I’ve yet to see someone argue that guys should be allowed to urinate in public because people are genetically inclined to urinate when the urge strikes them.
Perhaps, then, sexual urges are different for men, are less controllable than the need to urinate? It doesn’t take too much thought to dismiss this one. When was the last time you saw a man masturbating in the mall corridor? Personally, I’ve never seen it happen but I can guarantee you that there are a very large number of men who have been walking around in the mall and have really wanted to have an orgasm. If it’s not okay to masturbate in public, if the expectation is that men can control their sexual urges long enough to drive home, why is it okay (or at least “understandable”) for men to not control their urges and rape women?
Certainly it has something to do with the woman’s appearance, right? Well, no. If I said that it was a bit more understandable for a man to rape a woman if she was walking around in nothing but a bra and panties, I’d also be saying it was a bit more understandable for a man to masturbate in front of the Victoria’s Secret store display. Because the urge to masturbate and the urge to have sex are the same urge: the urge to have an orgasm. Guys who complain that they “haven’t scored in so long” aren’t having an urge for sex that’s not being fulfilled by their masturbatory habits; they’re wanting companionship, or conquest, or simply a change in the routine.
But hey, even if the masturbatory urge and the sexual urge are two different things, why should the conquering of one urge be considered insurmountable? Toddlers can be potty trained, I don’t see why men can’t learn how to just not have sex if their potential partner doesn’t want to have sex with them.
On a related note: burkhas aren’t exactly the most salacious things in the world, and yet rape is still rampant in parts of the world in which women are required to wear them. So maybe it’s the circumstances the woman puts herself in, or is put in? First of all, those are two different things so I’ll address them in turn.
Take a the proverbial girl wearing a sexy dress in a seedy part of town at midnight. If she gets raped, did she deserve it? No. A sexy woman in a sexy dress at night, or even a stark naked woman drunk in a bar at night, does not deserve to be raped. These situations should not be viewed as extreme circumstances under which the male mind is incapable of controlling itself. Those are not life-or-death situations; people are not insects that will die if they don’t mate so any man who sees a woman in a sexy dress in a seedy part of town and wants to have sex with her is not going to suffer by waiting until he gets home so he can masturbate.
Blueballs? Just to clear that up, just in case it needs clearing up: blueballs is rare, is a result of extremely prolonged stimulation, causes no permanent damage, and the pain caused by it is not alleviated by orgasm (in fact, if I remember correctly, orgasm is impossible).
Okay, so is that woman in the sexy dress doing everything she can to prevent being raped? Yes. Why? Because she shouldn’t have to do anything in order to not be raped. And no, that’s not an unrealistic, utopian view of the world. There is an expectation that people should be able to walk down the street at night without being shot, why is there not an expectation that women should be able to do whatever they want to do without being raped? (Interestingly enough, there’s no feeling that men wearing sexy clothes in seedy parts of town are tempting people to rape them.)
But what’s about your husband who didn’t lock up his bicycles and they ended up stolen? Isn’t he at fault, at least to an extent, for his bikes being stolen? No. Not legally and not morally. Leaving oneself open to attack of any form (theft, assault, etc.) does not make one culpable for said attack.
Morally, the decision to steal your husband’s bike was not a decision your husband made or had a hand in because your husband did not steal the bike. Did he contribute to it through his negligence? Perhaps, but he cannot be faulted for not locking up his bicycle because there was not a guarantee that his bicycle would be stolen.
Legally, your husband isn’t at fault for his bike being stolen because, again, he didn’t steal it. If you left the front door of your house wide open while you were on vacation, it would still be against the law for someone to walk off with your television.
(As I recall, rape is the only law in which mitigating factors between the accused and the victim can result in the charges being dismissed. Even in murder cases where children kill abusive parents, unless it’s in self-defence, the children are, I believe, still convicted of manslaughter.)
But all of this misses the point: a woman wearing a sexy dress is not equivalent to an unlocked bicycle or an open door. It doesn’t matter where she is or what she’s doing or what she’s wearing: there are no acceptable circumstances under which a woman (or a man, for that matter) may have her (or his) body violated against her (or his) will. And yes, I mean that to include circumstances like a super-model giving a lap-dance to a known sex-offender while they’re both on crack and sipping Jack Daniels. If he has sex with her and she says no and resists him, crack, jack, and record be damned: he raped her, and he deserves to be punished for it.
Because men can control their urges. Because women have the right to be women.
I meant this to be rational and well-stated, but I’ve decayed into ranting. There’s a lot more that I’d like to say, especially about the contributions our culture makes toward the high incidence of rape, but I need to take a few no-keyboard minutes first.
…
Just real quick: our society promotes an image of masculinity that encourages men to not control their sexual urges. It creates a mythical other-world in which a lone woman drunkenly dancing in a rural bar is seen as fair game rather than a human being with a right to chose her circumstances. She chose to be in that situation, she should also be able to choose how the situation develops and ends..
What a great post. It’s immensely encouraging to me that a man with those sorts of preconceptions (which are, of course, so common they sometimes seem universal) can encounter feminist thinking and be changed by it to the point that he can express basic (and hard-won) truths so clearly and passionately. Kudos to PDP for writing it and to Amp for giving it this prominence.
No kidding. That is very encouraging to me, because I talk about these issues with men I know — it’s nice to think that something might sink in one day. And PDP, thanks for having an open mind and being willing to question things that our society takes as “common sense” and “just the facts.”
What I liked most was this comment:
The first thing I thought about was that I’d been tempted in the past to kiss a woman or grope a woman or have sex with a woman who didn’t want me to kiss/grope/have sex with her. Because I’d been tempted to commit sexual assault and rape, I reasoned, there must be a part of my male mind that was naturally inclined toward rape.
I’ve always had trouble reconciling the fact that A: rape is wrong and should be punished and B: I’ve been tempted to commit such acts. And PDP’s statement above (and what follows it) really helped me sort it out. It reminds me of a comment by Jhonen Vasquez talking about his comic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.
Man, PDP, that was pretty much everything that I wanted to say in response to Erica’s various posts but was too exhausted/exasperated to type. Thanks.
Great post, Poppies.
Oh, and Poppies is a guy? Who knew?
fantastic, PDP. you’ve given me hope.
The first thing I thought about was that I’d been tempted in the past to kiss a woman or grope a woman or have sex with a woman who didn’t want me to kiss/grope/have sex with her. Because I’d been tempted to commit sexual assault and rape, I reasoned, there must be a part of my male mind that was naturally inclined toward rape.
I’m not sure how to interpret this. I’ve had fantasies about kissing/touching/having sex with women who were not even remotely interested in me, but in these fantasies, the point was that they were interested in me and participating enthusiastically. Is that what you are describing? Or are you actually fantasizing about non-consensual sex?
Personally, I’ve never had fantasies of or temptations toward coercive sex, so I guess my preconceptions tended in the opposite direction, that an inclination toward rape is distinctly unnatural. Whether in high school, college, or adult dating, my friends and I might talk about hooking up or scoring, but never about forcing or raping. Were some of my friends date rapists? Statistically, probably yes, but we never heard about it from them. No one would have bragged about such a thing; it would have been considered shameful, ugly, and frankly just evil. Were some of my friends’ supposedly-consensual hookups that we did hear about actually date rape? Again, statistically, probably yes, but the fact that they presented these as consensual meant that they either had to delude themselves or at least believed that they had to deceive their friends into believing there was consent, because to present an incident of date rape for what it really was would have been intolerable.
Have I really led that sheltered an upbringing? To the other commenters: is it really an almost universal attitude among people you know that it “is … okay (or at least “understandable”) for men to not control their urges and rape women?” If so, this stuns me.
I’m not trying to minimize the incidence of rape. I recognize that it is a terribly prevalent crime and too often unpunished. What’s startling to me is the suggestion that the urge to rape is so commonly held.
—
I have a question. Do most rapists subjectively believe that they have committed rape, or do they delude themselves into believing that the sex was somehow consensual? I’m not saying that the man’s belief about the nature of the encounter is at all relevant as to whether a rape occurred; it’s not. I’m just wondering whether even a typical rapist can tolerate the understanding that he is a rapist, or whether he has to lie even to himself in order to think that the sex was somehow non-coercive.
—
Another thought: Why did you specify a rural bar in the last paragraph? Most of your post has seemed to take the attitude that rape is universal, but the specification of a rural bar suggests that you’re envisioning rape as something that happens elsewhere, among people who are different. Or am I reading too much into that?
I’m not sure how to interpret this. I’ve had fantasies about kissing/touching/having sex with women who were not even remotely interested in me, but in these fantasies, the point was that they were interested in me and participating enthusiastically. Is that what you are describing? Or are you actually fantasizing about non-consensual sex?
What I meant was that the thought had crossed my mind. I suppose, in retrospect, that I should have better deliniated between having a thought about non-consensual sex and fantasizing about it.
I’ve never once fantasized about raping someone, but there have been times where the thought has popped into my head that hey, she doesn’t like me but I could kiss her anyway because I’m bigger and stronger.
In my mind, and since we’re talking about my mind specifically I don’t pretend to speak for anyone else, these thoughts are similar to other quickly-dismissed thoughts like “oh, well, I can’t afford that DVD I really want … but I sure do have some big pockets in these jeans.”
Have I really led that sheltered an upbringing? To the other commenters: is it really an almost universal attitude among people you know that it “is … okay (or at least “understandable”) for men to not control their urges and rape women?” If so, this stuns me.
Perhaps I’ve lead a sheltered upbringing, but there really was a sense among the people I was raised around that, yes, a man raping a woman was a result of her behaviour and his genetics. Usually what this fostered was: a sentiment that men who were convicted of rape and punished for it were treated too harshly, and a sentiment that, for lack of a better phrase, “she had it coming.”
I’m not sure how universal this thinking really is, but it’s something that I’ve encountered a lot in my interactions with people from all over the world.
Another thought: Why did you specify a rural bar in the last paragraph? Most of your post has seemed to take the attitude that rape is universal, but the specification of a rural bar suggests that you’re envisioning rape as something that happens elsewhere, among people who are different. Or am I reading too much into that?
Actually, I specified a rural bar in my comment (now post, I suppose) because the woman to whom I was responding in that comment thread, Erica, had specifically mentioned a case in which a woman who was drunk and dancing in a rural bar had been sexually assaulted.
Come to think of it: I’m not sure if you read any of the comments in that thread, but I think that it may help you to understand the rape-is-understandable comments I made because they were specifically addressed to things that Erica had said.
[blushes]
Thank you all for your kind words. Many of your comments on this blog over the past months were directly responsible for my believing what I wrote.
Thanks again. And, yes, I’m a guy. Who blushes. So there.
i need to echo another sentiment, PDP. i’ve been saying it for a long while now, but one thing that bothers me about the rhetoric surrounding rape culture is that the only solution anyone ever offers women is to be more careful.
right. be more careful.
i need to echo another sentiment, PDP. i’ve been saying it for a long while now, but one thing that bothers me about the rhetoric surrounding rape culture is that the only solution anyone ever offers women is to be more careful.
Exactly. Because while women are told to “be more careful,” there isn’t anyone out there seriously saying that murder happens and there isn’t anything to do but “be more careful.”
People shouldn’t have to be more careful about rape because rape shouldn’t happen in the first place.
Oddly enough, that line I just wrote is something I’ve said before to people and had it dismissed as wishful thinking. But, really, if you put a different crime in there and it’s suddenly not so utopic.
“People shouldn’t have to be more careful about child abuse because child abuse shouldn’t happen in the first place.”
“People shouldn’t have to be more careful about assault because assault shouldn’t happen in the first place.”
But when you say “rape”? It’s a “woman’s issue,” it’s a be-more-careful kind of thing instead of an outrage kind of thing.
Tom T. you asked:
Do most rapists subjectively believe that they have committed rape, or do they delude themselves into believing that the sex was somehow consensual?
I don’t know if studies abound on this, but ot would depend on the circumstances. This is a psychological self-delusion thing, and I don’t think that a rapists reflections on his/her crime would be necessarily significantly different than a criminal of other sorts. A person delude themselves into thinking anything, really, if they are so inclined.
Also:
I’ve had fantasies about kissing/touching/having sex with women who were not even remotely interested in me, but in these fantasies, the point was that they were interested in me and participating enthusiastically. Is that what you are describing? Or are you actually fantasizing about non-consensual sex?
I’ll repeat what PDP said and say being tempted on something is not the same as fantasizing, but even if it was, so what? I’ve fantasized about flying to DC and punching Bush in the face, doesn’t mean that I’ll do it. I say let a person fantasize whatever he or she wants in the privacy of their mighty brains, most people are well-adjusted enough not to act on the fantasies that would victimize other people.
PDP: Thank you for clarifying. I understand better what you’re saying. And thank you for pointing out the genesis of the rural bar point; my bad.
—
On the “be more careful” point: I agree that if it’s said dismissively and after the fact, it’s improper and amounts to blaming the victim.
On the other hand, if it’s said beforehand by someone who genuinely cares, the circumstances may be different. If my girlfriend tells me that she parked in the overflow parking today, and to go get it after work in the dark, she walked through the deserted loading area between two buildings that pops out near the liquor store instead of going the long way and walking through the building with the lighted arcade, I’m likely to say, “you could have been attacked; be more careful in the future!” I’m not saying this because I have any intention of blaming her or minimizing the harm to her if she does get attacked, I’m saying it because I care for her, and I don’t want her to be assaulted.
She says similar words of concern to me when I tell her I took the dark subway station by the shelter, instead of the bettter-lit one by the arena. We’re both adults, and we don’t expect the other person to do as we say just because we said it. And neither one of us would ever say, “I told you so,” if the other were harmed. We’re each just trying to remind the other to be thoughtful about our safety.
Also, we’re implicitly reminding the other that we care about them. On that level, it’s like telling someone, “drive safely,” when they leave my home. Of course they weren’t going to drive recklessly but for my fatuous advice, and really all I was really conveying to them was, “you’re my friend and I care about you.”
I agree that it’s unjust that she has to take such precautions on her walk back to her car, but I certainly want her to take them.
nowadays i find it all too easy to despair… bigotry, war, global warming,…
but then i visit alas and i have hope again. thanks pdp, amp and all the rest.
Deep sigh. Fantastic discussion, this.
A recommended read, if you can find it, is Timothy Beneke’s Men on Rape: What They Have to Say About Sexual Violence (St. Martin’s, 1982). It’s a rough read (especially a couple of pretty callous interviews from physicians and law enforcement), but worth contemplating.
About “being more careful”.
I’ve experienced a good amount of male-on-female threats and battery (managed to escape rape, but just barely) both from a long-term family abuser and strangers (including one neighbor who was a Grade 4 sex offender, it turns out). I’ve also studied martial arts as a teenager, and recently started lessons again. I’ve been working with active contemplation of “warrior” ethics especially for a good year now, and those traditions serve numerous social and spiritual needs, including somehow dealing with the possibility of people doing things which should never be done. Self/others’ defense in many cultures centers around the ideas of practicing maximum restraint — especially, not allowing one’s rage at a enemy’s (aka. criminal’s, in this case) acts to escalate a physical conflict to a more dangerous level. And, if one needs to “go to zero” as the Japanese say, to fight back full force, this is only after one’s done everything possible to both stop the criminal offense and maintain the peace.
It’s helped, thinking about these things, because the simultaneous, intrinsic contemplation of the ethics and skills of interpersonal relations, the importance given to the differences between aggression and defense, are also about maintaining that civilization, honoring the rage at the offense while also offering a response that does not require imitating the enemy, or becoming forever lost in and controlled by that rage. “Being more careful” is very much an honorable, perhaps even sacred, act. In those unavoidable situations of risk, honorable people find themselves on the threshhold, the cusp between civilization and anti-social, anti-tribe selfishness and cruelty. Our own ethical base, our acknowledge of what is unacceptable, is what sustains us in those situations. “Being more careful” does not require pretending crimes are inevitable or tacitly acceptable. In fact, it is this very preparation for dealing with the unacceptable that further condemns those acts as beyond and outside what society can accept.
So, I say “be more careful” proudly, carefully and effectively. Burt Konzak once described his daughter deciding not to take the elevator in a creepy building’s basement as an example of “samurai thinking”. Works for me.
I think the complaint was that in context, Erica’s “Be more careful” sounded too much like “It’s your fault if something happens while you’re not being careful enough.”
Oddly enough I think the men have clarified my thoughts.
First, some clarification of some other comments. This whole clothes thing is blown way out of proportion. I was thinking of my young daughter, who looks way too hot for her age. Wait until you’re parents, especially you future fathers, and you’ll be saying too, “you’re not going out dressed like that are you?” “aren’t those shorts a bit too short?” Just you wait.
And actually, I really didn’t mean, on further reflection, that the girl in the rural bar was “responsible” for what happened to her. I meant that the whole situation was just too tragic. In my recollection (which could be wrong after all these years) the boys were so young, and they paid such a heavy price.
Nor was I recommending repression, or revisionist history. I was recommending recovery. What, you want to hate sex for the rest of your life? Never love a man? Never have a family? Mourn for years your lost self? Talk about a ship being stuck in a harbor.
Continuing the primaeval theme before laying down (no pun intended) and surrendering, my first impression of the PDP post was that he was saying that men can’t help themselves, we’re nothing but mammals–why don’t we do it like they do it on the discovery channel (as the rap song goes). This would support, rather than refute, everything I said–surely an unintended message. If that thesis were supportable, then it’s all well and good to say we need to change society, even to change human nature, but in the meantime we have to protect our daughters, and our sons, in the world we live in right now. Everything I was saying, from don’t get stoned to be aware of the impact of how you look, etc., is along the lines of be careful, take precautions so that it doesn’t happen to you. Just like some of the commentators above were saying.
Enemies of those who have been raped? Ouch. Cut my heart out. The victims should be healed, the young should never become victims, neither the girls nor the boys.
I surrender. You win.
Peace.
Dear Ampersand,
Please join with us and bloggers around the world in supporting the Iranian people against a brutal fanatic terrorist clerical regime that continues to support terror and make problems for not only peace but also for American soldiers and others who are trying to assist the Iraqi people!
Join BLOG-IRAN at http://www.activistchat.com/blogiran and help free the Iranian people… LETS BE THE VOICE when everyone else is SILENT!
In Unity & Struggle,
Haleh
In my recollection (which could be wrong after all these years) the boys were so young, and they paid such a heavy price.
If they raped a woman, then they did not pay “such a heavy price” — they paid exactly the price they should have (which far too many rapists don’t have to pay at all, or for far too little time). The one who payed “such a heavy price” (far too heavy a price” was the woman. Perhaps wearing skimpy clothes to a bar isn’t the best thing to do in this culture — but rape is far, far, far too heavy a price to pay for that mistake.
Nor was I recommending repression, or revisionist history. I was recommending recovery. What, you want to hate sex for the rest of your life? Never love a man? Never have a family? Mourn for years your lost self? Talk about a ship being stuck in a harbor.
What are you talking about? For one thing, statistically speaking, women are far better off when they recognize and acknowledge the rape and work on themselves (with the help of a counselor or friends) than when they repress it. Study after study has shown that repressing, ignoring, denying, or in any other way dismissing the rape is the cause of being “stuck in a harbor.” How that plays itself out may vary — some women become incredibly promiscuous, not because they “just love sex” but because they are trying to regain some control over their bodies; other women end up hating sex, hating men, hating themselves. It is only after they acknowledge the rape and work to get over it that they are able to have a healthy life (including sex life).
Continuing the primaeval theme before laying down (no pun intended) and surrendering, my first impression of the PDP post was that he was saying that men can’t help themselves, we’re nothing but mammals–why don’t we do it like they do it on the discovery channel (as the rap song goes). This would support, rather than refute, everything I said–surely an unintended message. If that thesis were supportable, then it’s all well and good to say we need to change society, even to change human nature, but in the meantime we have to protect our daughters, and our sons, in the world we live in right now. Everything I was saying, from don’t get stoned to be aware of the impact of how you look, etc., is along the lines of be careful, take precautions so that it doesn’t happen to you. Just like some of the commentators above were saying.
Then you obviously read PDP wrong. He said no such thing. In fact, he very clearly and openly said that this excuse and rationale was bogus, untrue, ridiculous, and FALSE.
PDP and anyone else-
I agree with the assertion that anyone that takes advantage of vulnerability is in the wrong, morally speaking. If I leave my bike out on the lawn, if I park my car with the window down and the key in the ignition, if I prop an anvil up over my head using an elaborate system of pulleys that will all come crashing down with the simple flip of a switch, it is in my opinion wrong for you to come along and hurt me by taking my bike, stealing my car, or flipping that switch.
I’m not disagreeing with any of that, but I want to make the point that I would never advocate leaving your bike on the lawn, leaving your car window down, etc… I lock my doors, I keep my stuff in places where they’re less likely to be stolen, and I try to avoid parking my cars in high-crime areas. Why? Because I know that I live in a world where there is a reasonable chance that if I leave myself vulnerable, someone will take advantage of it.
Leaving oneself vulnerable can mean lots of different things by the way. It’s all relative. Take walking down the street. That would seem to be something that I can do with being vulnerable. But then add factors into it: It’s right around the time the drunks are getting out of the bars. I’m alone. The street is poorly lit. I don’t know anyone in the neighborhood. There is a visible sign that says “Murder Reduction Zone” (I was filled with darkly-amused horror when I found out that those actually exist, by the way). I am wearing a shirt with glow-in-the-dark writing that says, “Mama’s Boy”…
In the same way that I wouldn’t advocate anyone walking down the street as I described above, I don’t advocate women putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations. Not because women *shouldn’t* be able to do whatever they want, because I think they should (with the usual Golden Rule caveats). But because we do, as you say, live in a world where men (and disappointingly enough, quite a few women) honestly believe that men can’t control themselves if given enough visual/social stimulation.
I want very badly for this to become a world where everyone can be safe all the time. But until it is that way, I won’t advocate wearing whatever you want, acting in whatever way you want, with whoever you want. There are realities that, no matter how repulsive, have yet to go away.
Think about it… Would you take a dip in pig’s blood and jump in a cage with a lion?
Think about it again… This isn’t as dreary as it seems: A lion can’t learn to not be a lion, but maybe someday men can learn that they don’t have to be “men”.
The most important thing to remember in any discussion of “defensive living” is, however, that it doesn’t always work. A major reason seemingly prudent recommendations quickly degenerate into blame assignments is that many of us are living under the illusion that, if we only do enough of just the right things, we will never suffer, or be guilty of the crime of being a victim of crim.
This reminds me of many people’s reactions to illness. Many cling to legends of prevention (if you eat only XYZ, take this supplement, do that exercise, etc.) and patterns of blaiming the ill because they can’t dare contemplate that they one day will fall ill (or be injured) and die, no matter what they do.
And, one step on the path toward overcoming this fear lie is to realize that any victim, whether of illness or crime, is us, our own — not some guilty, foolish other we can pretend is not our peer. If the efforts of the individual fail in stopping or avoiding a criminal, that’s where the rest of us come in. And, our role is that of the supportive community. Perhaps we can look for better ways to prevent crimes, to deny criminals the opportunities they continually forage for, but at no time is it moral, helpful or even accurate for us to try to distance ourselves from those crimes by claiming and believing the victims somehow live appreciably differently than we do. And, all of this especially true for rape, for which so many excuses can be created.
the author of haplopia stopped by my blog and commented on the comments i made about PDP’s comments (whew!).
they were too good to pass up and i hope she won’t mind me posting them here:
While training to be a volunteer at a women’s center in Houston I was filled full of statistics on sexual assault. I found it interesting that such a huge percentage of rapes were committed with something other than the penis. Most of the time the rapist cannot achieve an erection. This says it all as far as I am concerned. It’s not about uncontrolled sexual desire. It is about violence, power and humiliation.
The other interesting thought that has stayed with me all these years is about safety. If a woman dances naked on a table in a bar full of men she will only be sexually assaulted if there is a rapist present. Her behavior is not the variable, so let’s stop blaming the victim.
again, haplopia.
i don’t know why the second paragraph didn’t italicize there, but those were haplopia’s words as well.
Kell-
I agree that no matter what you do to try and keep yourself from whatever (disease, rape, violence, theft, flying toilet seats…) there is still a chance that whatever you’re looking to avoid will still happen to you. Above all, I agree that even if everyone lived in a way that minimized the potential for rape, there would still be rape.
The only point I was trying to make is that I am uncomfortable with the idea of people not taking precautions to protect themselves just because they shouldn’t have to. Because even if those precautions don’t stop it from ever happening, they will lessen the chances of it happening to any given individual that practices them.
Unfortunately, most of the precautions that people talk about only really apply to assault-style rape, which (unless I’m wrong, and please correct me if I am) is in the minority. I’ve yet to see any practical advice for trying to minimize the risk of date rape (which is by far more common). That doesn’t mean that there’s no advice out there though, I’m just saying I haven’t seen it.
I think there are some warning signs that can help identify an unsafe space though, and I think it might be useful to remove oneself from a situation that includes those signs. Things I look for when trying to figure out how safe I am(some of which I now realize I should’ve paid more attention to in hindsight):
Saying “no” to sexual activity turns into a discussion or is not well-received.
Inattentiveness to your sexual needs.
Physical or verbal abuse of any kind.
A lack of discussion of, or a discernable interest in not discussing, sex.
The person is only nice to *you* when you’re out with them, and isn’t nice to other people.
You haven’t met (m)any of their friends.
The person appears to space out while you’re talking to them or otherwise shows disinterest in what you feel or think, unless they’re “in the mood”.
I think that, most of all, what can be done is for people to talk more openly and honestly about their sex/romantic practices with their friends and/or family. Keeping things behind closed doors and unanalyzed ensures that you’re less likely to see something as being what it might be: a warning sign. Other people make great sounding boards for figuring out what’s normal and healthy.
I also agree with notion that nothing excuses rape, not what (s)he said, not what (s)he did, not anything. I also agree that what victims need is support, and not a break-down of what they could’ve done to minimize the risk of having what happened to them happen. But I do feel that a complete lack of discussion of how to decrease the chances of being a victim is irresponsible, and not fair to people that it might help.
but one thing that bothers me about the rhetoric surrounding rape culture is that the only solution anyone ever offers women is to be more careful.
This reminds me of a story about Golda Meir. At one point during her tenure as Prime Minister, a series of rapes was occuring in one of the major Israeli cities (I cannot remember which one). The solution proposed to her was to impose a curfew on women. Ms. Meir said that she thought a curfew was a fine idea, but since it was men committing the rapes, the curfew ought to be imposed on them instead. Imagine how quickly the idea of the curfew was dropped.
Yeah, we’re agreeing, here. (Prevention and support are not only not mutually exclusive, they augment each other once the blame game’s out of the way. Anyway…)
I googled for “preventing date rape”, and got about 140 good responses, which I’m taking as good news.
The University of Buffalo’s was great (see the bottom half of the page), and actually echoes a lot of what you’ve suggested.
http://ub-counseling.buffalo.edu/rapeprevent.shtml
It has been said that the average woman does 132 things every day just to protect herself from work. Many of these things have been so ingrained in ourselves that we don’t even realize we’re doing them.
The point is not that women shouldn’t be more cautious, the point is that whether she is extremely cautious and is raped nonetheless, or if a woman isn’t as cautious as she perhaps should or could have been, she did not deserve to be raped, and bears no responsibility for being raped. The sole responsibility lies on the rapist — no one else.
Besides which, the “protect yourself” line can (and often does) get turned into a way to make women a prisoner of her own home. Don’t go out at night (esp. alone), don’t dress “sexy,” — it starts sounding mroe and more like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, et al.
Studies have shown that single women, on average, spend more money than single men. This money goes to electricity bills (leaving lights on all night), alarm systems, taking a cab instead of walking home, etc. At the same time, they often are cost money because of these fears — refusing to participate in late-night study groups, refusing to late night-shift jobs or working late.
There is an article that is rather appropriate here, too — an article that has been around for quite a while (at least since the 80’s), called The Rape of Mr. Smith:
The law discriminates against rape victims in a manner which would not be tolerated by victims of any other crime. In the following example, a holdup victim is asked questions similar in form to those usually asked a victim of rape.
Defense Attorney: Mr. Smith, you were held up at gunpoint on the corner of 16th and Locust?
Mr. Smith: Yes.
Defense Attorney: Did you struggle with the robber?
Mr. Smith: No.
Defense Attorney Why not?
Mr. Smith: He was armed.
Defense Attorney: Then you made a conscious decision to comply with his demands rather than to resist?
Mr. Smith: Yes.
Defense Attorney: Did you scream? Cry out?
Mr. Smith: No. I was afraid.
Defense Attorney: I see. Have you ever been held up before?
Mr. Smith: No.
Defense Attorney: Have you ever given money away?
Mr. Smith: Yes, of course —
Defense Attorney: And did you do so willingly?
Mr. Smith: What are you getting at?
Defense Attorney: Well, let’s put it like this, Mr. Smith. You’ve given away money in the past — in fact, you have quite a reputation for philanthropy. How can we be sure that you weren’t contriving to have your money taken from you by force?
Mr. Smith: Listen, if I wanted —
Defense Attorney: Never mind. What time did this holdup take place, Mr. Smith?
Mr. Smith: About 11 p.m.
Defense Attorney: You were out on the streets at 11 p.m.? Doing what?
Mr. Smith: Just walking.
Defense Attorney: Just walking? You know it’s dangerous being out on the street that late at night. Weren’t you aware that you could have been held up?
Mr. Smith: I hadn’t thought about it.
Defense Attorney: What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?
Mr. Smith: Let’s see. A suit. Yes, a suit.
Defense Attorney: An expensive suit?
Mr. Smith: Well — yes.
Defense Attorney: In other words, Mr. Smith, you were walking around the streets late at night in a suit that practically advertised the fact that you might be a good target for some easy money, isn’t that so? I mean, if we didn’t know better, Mr. Smith, we might even think you were asking for this to happen, mightn’t we?
Mr. Smith: Look, can’t we talk about the past history of the guy who did this to me?
Defense Attorney: I’m afraid not, Mr. Smith. I don’t think you would want to violate his rights, now, would you?
Uh, that’s protect herself from rape, not work [blush]
That Golda Meir story is fantastic. :)
One guy that has some great ideas is Jackson Katz (www.jacksonkatz.com). I saw him speak and was most struck by his point that people talk about “violence against women”, as though the violence somehow happens on its own. It’s a problem that (mostly) men have that predominantly affects women (with exceptions), therefore it should be spoken of as “Men’s violence against women”.
Thanks for the link Kell. Clearly I need to spend more time “googling”. :)
As far as ideas for confronting this problem (essentially, changing our culture’s conception of “man”/masculinity), I’ve been thinking about either joining or, if there isn’t something like it in my area, starting a performance troupe that deals with mysogeny, men being violent towards women, etc… I do improvisational comedy, so I was thinking that it could start off with funny stuff to draw people in and get them comfortable, and then gently lead into the topic that we’re really there to deal with. I noticed that when Jackson Katz spoke, he used a lot of humor to keep people focused, interested, and from shutting him out when he said things that were difficult to hear.
I’d like to take a moment to comment on taking preventative measures regarding rape.
I don’t want anyone to think that any of the comments I made either in my initial post or in this comment thread have been against the idea of prevention and caution, or that I was encouraging women to get naked and run around a bad neighbourhood.
I think it’s very important that women do what they can to prevent rape, within reason (and by “within reason” I mean that women should not allow their lives to be constrained or halted by the threat of rape). Being cautious about the partners they choose to date, the persons they choose to be around, and the places they choose to go are all sensible precautions. I think, though, that the things that people need to realise the most are that: there is only so much that a woman (or man, let us not forget that men are raped) can do to prevent rape, after a certain point there is nothing that a man or woman can do; there are more types of rape than just assault rape; and encouraging women to be more careful is not the only thing, or even the most important thing, that needs to be done.
Let me wander away from my main point for a second and talk about the “drive safely” thing. There’s a difference between telling your loved one that he or she needs to drive safely (or avoid empty, poorly-lit parking lots) and telling women that they should “be more careful” and that being more careful is the only thing that can be done to prevent rape.
When you encourage someone to drive safely, what you’re saying is: “you need to drive carefully because if you don’t you might hit someone or someone might accidentally hit you.” On the other hand, when you encourage someone to “be more careful,” and say that this is really the only thing that can be done to prevent rape, what’s being said is: “you need to be more careful in where you go because someone might deliberately rape you.” To kinda cross-breed those two lines, saying that being more careful is the best, and pretty much only, thing that can be done to prevent rape is akin to saying “you need to drive more carefully or else someone will deliberately run in to you.” When you look at it like that, there’s a big difference between defensive driving and “being more careful” because car accidents are accidental, while rapes are always deliberate. There’s no such thing as an accidental rape.
[And, to my knowledge, there aren’t any drivers out there who say “oh, look, that person’s driving very fast so I’m going to get into a head-on collision with them.” Come to think of it, there are: they’re called people with severe road rage, and they’re viewed as abnormal, unstable, not representative of drivers at large, and are generally serving hard time for their actions.]
There’s a phrase I used a lot in there: “being more careful is the best, and pretty much only, thing that can be done to prevent rape.” It’s that view that to be more careful is the only thing that can be done to prevent rape that’s the problem, not the view that being careful can help prevent rape in the first place. The difference is significant and has a major impact on the way that rape and rape prevention is viewed.
One view, the wrong view, holds that the burden of rape prevention falls on the victim, and this in turn carries a not-so-subtle implication that if indeed she is raped then the rape is somehow her fault for not properly carrying the burden of prevention. The other view, the right view, holds that while women should be cautious (as all people should be cautious in every aspect of their lives, from what foods they eat to where they go) the guilt of rape (and, therefore, the burden of rape prevention) falls not on the victim but on the rapist because the rapist is the only deliberate actor in the rape.
Consider, if you will, the an African-American man in the nineteen-fourties who is walking down the street and passes in front of a whites-only bar. A group of men come out of the bar and beat the passer-by within an inch of his life. To say that this was the black man’s fault would today be considered bigoted because, while the man’s route might not have been the best to take, the view now, and it is the correct one, is that the men who beat him were to blame and that there is something fundamentally wrong with that culture. This same thinking should apply to women and rape.
The best thing to do to prevent rape is to change the culture so that rape is considered as horrendous as it is. In any given town, a murder is guaranteed to be reported but a rape is not as likely to receive attention unless the circumstances are particularly bizarre or brutal. Eighty-seven percent of women are sexually assaulted or raped in their lifetime, and yet there seems to be very little that our culture is doing to change that. A smaller percentage of people get into major car accidents, and yet people are bombarded with pamphlets about drinking and driving, defensive driving, and there are regular news reports about how to stay safe on the road.
To prevent rape best, the culture needs to change. So long as rape is viewed as something that the victim is primarily responsible for preventing and as something that is more-or-less common the incidence of rape isn’t going to decrease. I hate to repeat myself, but it bears repeating, that there is a parallel between the victimization of blacks in the country and the rape of women. Until the last few decades, it was conventional wisdom that blacks who were assaulted, tormented, or killed had done something wrong by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing things that blacks shouldn’t be doing. When that attitude changed, when hurting or killing a black person became culturally unacceptable, the occurance of violence against African-Americans decreased dramatically. In the same way, when our culture understands that rape is wrong, that rapists are deranged, and that it is the perpetrators and not the victims who are guilty of rape, the incidence of rape will go down.
Ouch. Another long one, and bean pretty much beat me to the punch.
But hey, while I’m taking up time and comment space…
bean’s dialogue between Mr. Smith and the Defence Attorney reminded me of a case that happened in my home city a few years ago.
I was in middle school at the time, so I can’t clearly remember everything, but there was a young woman, a college student, I believe, who was abducted while jogging, raped, murdered, and left under a van in an elementary school parking lot. She was abducted in a nice neighbourhood (one of the nicest neighbourhoods in town, actually; I lived in it at the time) and dumped in the same. It made headlines, the memorial was televised, and there were a lot of segements on the news about rape and rape prevention for the next couple weeks.
It didn’t strike me as odd at the time, but in retrospect it upsets me that the prevention segments on the news had all revolved around pretty much saying “don’t go jogging alone at night.” I heard the usual whispers that she should have known better, that she shouldn’t have been doing that, that not even “safe” neighbourhoods were safe, and so forth. I don’t think, though, that if a man had been randomly shot in the same parking lot and his body dumped in the same place, there wouldn’t have been talk that people shouldn’t go jogging alone at night.
That’s the sort of cultural disparity that I’m saying needs to change.
And, speaking of the threat and reality of rape working to curtail women’s access to…pretty damn near everything, let’s take a look at the incidence of rape and other sexual assault at the U. S. Air Force Academy (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0320236&mode=thread&tid=20). Looks like politics from here (i.e. an extreme and extremist violence-tantrum in response to the Academy going co-ed).
As far as stopping men committing violence against women, I think the focus shouldn’t be so much on rape. I think people know that rape is wrong, and trying to tell them that it’s wrong won’t get you very far because they’ll agree with you and the conversation will be over.
In a class I took, “The Psychology of Good and Evil”, we talked about how it is that a group of people become victims of violence. Part of the deal with that is that you can’t just go up to any old person and do something horrible to them and get away with it. That’s not where it starts. Where it starts is the conviction that a group of people are inferior or bad in some way. An example that stuck with me of this was in Nazi Germany.
Hitler scapegoated the Jews, and got people agreeing that they were the root of Germany’s problems, and that they were sub-human. Once they were dehumanized, they were fair game. Hitler, or folks working for him, went on to dehumanize Gypsies and homosexuals, who in turn became fair game. Hitler then went on to put a whole bunch of people with developmental disabilities into concentration camps. But because he hadn’t dehumanized them, there was a public backlash, and he had to back off and return those people to their homes.
I’m not saying that women have it as badly in America as Jewish people did in Nazi Germany. Please, let’s just not go anywhere near there. My sole point is this: A society won’t condone hurting someone until they’re dehumanized or made to appear inferior. So in order to make it not okay to do horrible things to women, we have to change this society’s view of women.
Further, as has been identified, we conceive of men as being blameless of any wrong-doing, because we conceive of men as cognitively incapable of winning an argument with their wangs under certain situations. So we need to change the conception of men as being blundering idiots that provide wealth, and no wisdom (Surely you noticed that the focus of most popular television shifted from the eighties to the nineties. Instead of celebrating how cool Bart was, we all spent time laughing at how simple and sad Homer is. He’s cast from the mold of the contemporary American conception of the father figure -insensitive, stupid, selfish, and mysogenist. He’s funny to us because he’s real, and that’s creepy.)… to something different. Jackson Katz’s idea is to make it cool to be feminist, by helping typically macho role model types to see the problem, and lead by example.
I’m not sure what else needs doing, but I’ve been getting progressively more and more psyched up to do it, whatever “it” ends up being. A not-so-bad start is to go to http://www.jacksonkatz.com and click on “What Men Can Do”. The only criticism of the list that I have thus far is that it’s a little inappropriately titled. I can’t see any reason why women can’t and shouldn’t do those things too…
I’m so glad that other people have realized the fundamental ignorance that is revealed by telling women to ‘be careful’. I notice this in myriads of world travel advice books- often, the only reference was not to the many programs that promote international woman-to-woman contacts but a short chapter titled “Women Travellers” with nothing but the injunction not just of “be careful,” but more often “Use Common Sense,” as if women specifically must be reminded. It always bothered me.
On the topic of changing cultural attitudes towards women- I work with domestic abuse groups where these women are constantly harassed by people asking things like “If it was so horrible, why didn’t you leave? If my husband ever hurt me, I’d kill him.” More often than not, these already hurt victims become estranged from close family and friends because of this attitude. I have never known how to explain this blame-the-victim mentality until a few weeks ago in a local daycare. A little boy was just torturing a little girl, pulling her hair and throwing things at her. The teacher called the little girl over to her, ignoring the boy, and told her “You know why he’s being so mean to you? Because he LIKES you!”
I can remember being told this time after time, but only then did I realize the essential cruelty of telling children that. Society doesn’t accept when parents hurt children ‘because they love them,’ but somehow men, even very young, are shown that they can show affection as aggression. And little girls are told to be THANKFUL of abuse. So, no wonder many women stay in abusive relationships, no wonder they and those around them emerge so completely confused. Until we are able as a society to examine what children are learning, and what we in turn grow up believing, we can only do so much to stop violence.
To Bean:
What can I say about the heavy price. Maybe projecting from my own experience, as I’ve been accused, I just never felt that degree of vengeance. Little things, yes, I used to steal things from the guys. But I never had vengeful fantasies. One guy I still liked, even after he shared me with his friends. Did I say I was a little, no a lot, nutty (not to mention incredibly slutty). I can’t explain it myself.
I said I wasn’t recommending repression, or revisionist history. I think I was responding to someone who objected when I said I couldn’t sympathize with women who were still crying on TV years later. The point was moving on, because the alternative is much worse.
Those techniques do work for me, whatever the statistics show. I’ve often re-written my own history of times of trauma. When I think about when my babies were babies, I remember how precious they were, and how much I loved them. But in point of fact, I nearly lost my mind, from sleep deprivation and stress. The bad parts get edited out from my memory, the good parts get stronger. Can’t stand to watch those airplanes flying into those buildings for the umpteenth time? Turn off the TV, don’t read about it, do something else. How about obsessively throwing yourself into something else, to escape from the trauma that’s eating you. That works too. Honestly, I don’t really remember a lot of what happened to me long ago, and I’m certainly not going to try. Why make myself uptight with unpleasant thoughts? When I think about it, and I haven’t thought about these things in years, when I met my husband, he really wouldn’t allow me to talk about my past. At the time it made me mad, but in retrospect I think it helped. The more you remember, the more it gets burned into your consciousness, the harder it is to escape. These are tried and true techniques for me at least.
As for obviously reading PDP wrong, I was responding to him saying that he had been tempted to commit sexual assault, even with women who he knew wouldn’t want it. This was about whether boys are wired differently than girls. I doubt there are many women who are tempted to assault men in the way I understood he was saying.
As for being wired differently, and to Maggie, the consensus among parents in my small world was that elementary school was a girls world, especially in the younger grades. The boys can’t sit still, they hit each other, kick each other, punch each other, they can’t focus, they can’t concentrate as well as the girls, and they’re constantly getting in trouble with the female teachers who can’t deal with them. Mothers of boys were constantly complaining. And my own personal experience was that when there is a problem between a boy and a girl, it’s automatically the boy’s fault. Remember, everyone in charge is female. So this girl, who we know very well, who has sat at our dinner table many times, likes to goad my son, and he can’t help himself but to take the bait. One day at school he takes the bait and calls her a “gay-wad” (whatever that is). We get an hysterical call from him at school, the no-nothing principal tells us he was “sexually harassing” this girl, and she’s concerned because bullying has to be nipped in the bud. It was total insanity.
As for victims asking for it, I think we’re back to the problem that there should be 45 different words for rape, because there are that many different situations. Older women who are raped by their husbands are in a pathological relationship. They’re emotionally dysfunctional–maybe as a result of being raped–but there’s a duet going on, it takes two to tango. In some sense, they’re allowing themselves to be victims, which is not the same as “fault.” This all started with Juanita Broderick. It just struck me that a woman who would talk to her son about her sex life is a little nutty in a way you might expect for the kind of person who would have the kind of emotional dysfunctionality which would lead them to be a victim. In my mind, it made her claim more credible, not less. But it’s also relevant to the degree of vengeance which should be extracted from the alleged victimizer. In my mind at least, but I’ve come to appreciate that I’m at the wrong web-blog for that sentiment.
Hoping you will all change the world.
What can I say about the heavy price. Maybe projecting from my own experience, as I’ve been accused, I just never felt that degree of vengeance. Little things, yes, I used to steal things from the guys. But I never had vengeful fantasies. One guy I still liked, even after he shared me with his friends. Did I say I was a little, no a lot, nutty (not to mention incredibly slutty). I can’t explain it myself.
This makes absolutely no sense. You were accused of what? Rape? And since when is prosecuting an illegal act vengeance? It’s not vengeance, and really, I can’t even believe one would think so. Do you also think that prosecuting someone for murdering a person you love is “vengeance?” What about prosecuting someone for beating the shit out of you? What about someone who mugged you? What kind of fucked up world do you have to live in to believe that sending rapists to prison for a crime is vengeance? I suppose the same fucked up world where any woman bears any responsibility for being raped. But I can tell you one thing — it’s a misogynist world, and if you uphold it, then, yes, you are an enemy of rape victims — and of women.
I said I wasn’t recommending repression, or revisionist history. I think I was responding to someone who objected when I said I couldn’t sympathize with women who were still crying on TV years later. The point was moving on, because the alternative is much worse.
Who the fuck are you to dictate how someone recovers from rape and how long that takes? Besides which, what do you really know about this woman? How do you know that she hadn’t tried repressing it, and the “crying on TV years later” was a result of not dealing with it earlier?
Those techniques do work for me, whatever the statistics show.
Fine, great. I hope they continue to work for you. But just because they work for you sure as fuck doesn’t have anything to do with what works for every other woman out there. You are the exception to the rule, not the rule. Would you want someone forcing you to go about a different way of dealing with past rapes? It’s pretty obvious that you’d tell them to fuck off if they tried. So why are you going to try to do the same thing to someone else?
As for obviously reading PDP wrong, I was responding to him saying that he had been tempted to commit sexual assault, even with women who he knew wouldn’t want it. This was about whether boys are wired differently than girls. I doubt there are many women who are tempted to assault men in the way I understood he was saying.
You completely missed his point, didn’t you? You know, the part where he went on to say that he was also tempted to steal and beat people up who got in his way. Besides which, limiting it to sexual assault, you’re right, very few women are tempted to do that — but that has nothing to do with “wiring” — it has to do with being raised with a sense of entitlement.
As for your depiction of schools as a “girls world,” I have no doubt that that’s the way it works in your fucked up world (the one in your mind), because you obviously hate women so much that no matter what, the woman (or girl, as the case may be) is at fault.
I have no doubt that all of this stems from your denial and dismissal of your own rape experiences.
And, again, for the bazzilionth time — women are not responsible, in any way, for being raped, and talking to one’s son about rape is not even close to the same thing as talking to him about sex. Rape is not sex — discussing a rape has absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s “sex life.”
May you have many children, and may they all be boys.
Beating someone up is a guy fantasy. Girls don’t have that fantasy. We’re wired differently.
Elementary school is definitely a girl’s world. I used to say to my husband, I’ve heard that boys run the world, at what age is that supposed to start? Because girls are definitely more advanced than boys at a young age, in multiple ways. Why do you need to think that girls are downtrodden even at the age of 6? We have enough problems, without adding problems that don’t exist.
I understand that your victimization was utterly random, unspeakably brutal, and I’m very sorry. So this doesn’t apply to your experience: In all areas of life, and not just sex, you can do things that allow people to push you around, or not. Victims often allow people to push them around, they have coping deficits or resource deficits or they just don’t know how to stand up to bullies. Learning how to not be a victim is real girl power. Saying we are powerless is not.
I wish I had all your angry energy. I’d be a lot more productive.
“Beating someone up is a guy fantasy. Girls don’t have that fantasy. We’re wired differently.”
I got sent to the principal’s office when I was 8 for beating up a boy I deemed to be a righteous asshole. I’d been daydreaming about doing it since kindergarten. According to Erica’s above statement, I must be a boy. The classmates who helped me, Catherine, Missy, and Cathy, must have been boys, too.
I’ve also had the strong urge to grab and kiss men who didn’t want to kiss me. I didn’t do it, knowing that it would be very unwelcome, but I sure wanted to.
Forgive the tangent, but I’m reminded of a personal experience that occurred when I was 6 or 7. A girl kept goading me at school, until eventually, when she said some insult (I forget what) I responded as my brother would to me at the time, saying, “I know you are but what am I. Stick your butt in cherry pie.” The girl told the teacher, and the teacher was obliged to tell my parents, but she could barely even keep from laughing when she did.
Ahhhhhh, elementary school.
Anyway, on to more relevant matters.
I hate to say it, but I think it’s time we, collectively, put our hands up with Erica. I agree with bean’s assessment that Erica’s view is skewed from her own repression, or whatever, and it would be great to help her get through that, but we can’t do more than she can do for herself. So for the time being, at least, we’ll have to accept that there is an impasse here that really can’t be gotten around.
But maybe this online discussion is of some overall help. I know you can count me along with PDP as someone who’s more enlightened now thanks to the discussions and comment threads on this blog, even if I came into it with a less – er what word would be best? masculocentric? – view of the world the he came in with. And this discussion in particular has made me far more enlightened in regards to rape. It’s been a painful discussion for me at times, but also fascinating and enriching. Thanks everyone involved.
That was a very good post PDP.
I agree one hundred percent with everything you said in that post.
Maggie wrote:
“On the topic of changing cultural attitudes towards women- I work with domestic abuse groups where these women are constantly harassed by people asking things like “If it was so horrible, why didn’t you leave? If my husband ever hurt me, I’d kill him.” More often than not, these already hurt victims become estranged from close family and friends because of this attitude.”
True, plus her abusive husband would have successfully isolated her from friends and family long ago, so she would have been very alone anyway. It’s hard to leave an abusive marriage with no support system. It’s harder to leave if the woman has children. The abuse doesn’t end when she leaves. it escalates, especially with excessive litigation like custody battles.
“I have never known how to explain this blame-the-victim mentality until a few weeks ago in a local daycare. A little boy was just torturing a little girl, pulling her hair and throwing things at her. The teacher called the little girl over to her, ignoring the boy, and told her “You know why he’s being so mean to you? Because he LIKES you!” ”
That “boys will be boys” attitude does boys and men a great deal of harm. I remember a teacher telling me that a boy who picked on me relentlessly in junior high school acted that way because he had a crush on me. This is thirty-some years ago, so the “he’s mean to you because he LIKES you” attitude is very old. It made no sense, but the message was loud and clear — if a boy or man hits you, writes on you with magic marker (one thing this boy did to me), snaps your bra strap and laughs at you in front of classmates (another thing he did), calls you names, and throws rolled up wads of paper at you during class, he’s just expressing his affection for you. I don’t know what’s worse — that girls are told to expect and even hope for that kind of behavior, or that boys are taught to express even their positive feelings through violence and lack of courtesy.
I ran into that boy after we graduated from high school. He remembered picking on me and said in retrospect it was a cruel and stupid way for him to behave. He admitted that he did have a crush on me. He thought that was how boys let girls know they liked them without looking like a total dork. He had since learned better ways of expressing himself.
BTW, here’s a link to my blog at typepad. It’s new, so give me a few days to add posts. There’s only one so far. I have a comments section, now. Finally. :D
Hey, flea, in Junior High, I once slammed a bully’s hands in his locker door when he wouldn’t stop harrassing me. Is that a guy or a girl maneuver ? Or am I just some kind of freakish neuter, deep down and stuff… ? :D
PDP wrote:
“Let’s assume for a moment that men really are genetically more inclined to try to force sex with an unwilling partner than are women. Okay. So? People are also inclined to physically assault people who wrong them and defecate whenever they feel the need to. We have a term for not beating up others and not defecating in a hotel lobby because our bowels are full; it’s called being civilized. Children are potty trained, taught to not beat each other up, not to lie, not to steal, not to cheat, and not to interrupt while other people are speaking. I’ve yet to see someone argue that guys should be allowed to urinate in public because people are genetically inclined to urinate when the urge strikes them.”
Amps readers might like to know that this notion that male wanderlust is hard-wired is an old way of thinking that greatly influences neo-conservative ideologues like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe. It’s called the “essentialist” position, meaning biologically hard-wired sex roles, not “essential” as in “important.” It’s one basis for marriage promotions we’ve seen in welfare reform debates. It’s also been used as a means of promoting marriage as a defense against domestic violence and sexual assault. The idea is to “socialize” that ostensibly biologically-ingrained male aggressive behavior; i.e., channel it through an artificial construct like monogomous marriage, thereby “civilizing” the wayward male into focusing all that sexual energy on one woman and their mutual offspring. I wrote an article about the essentialist point of view. It’s available at XY Online, if you want to read it.
So “essentialism” is basically an updated version of what Bram Djikstra called “bio-Sexism” when he disparaged the writers from the first flush of social Darwinism. I’ll have to check out that article later. Thannks. :)
So “essentialism” is basically an updated version of what Bram Djikstra called “bio-Sexism” when he disparaged the writers from the first flush of social Darwinism. I’ll have to check out that article later. Thanks. :)
i have to stick up for flea and trish’s crush here. i, too, have expressed my admiration for someone through questionable means (kicking them in the balls. repeatedly. it was 5th grade) and have had thoughts of acting on unwarranted, unwanted sexual urges. and, yes, i’m female.
what does this mean? i don’t know.
it may account for the unbelievable weirdness that is humanity and it may point at me as a potential rapist.
That’s funny. I always thought that being civilized was about self-control, not about being forced into a situation in which you’re forced to adhere to the standards of civilization. That’s the difference between having a home and living in prison.
I’ve recently been intrigued by the parallels between the treatment of gender and the treatment of ethnic minorities. I find it curious that now the role of the “savage” has been recast not with an ethnic minority but with men. How different is it, really, to think that if a man were just compelled to marry that he’d become civilization than to think that if those African tribes were just forced to act like Westerners they’d soon accept all Western social mores?
Dear AmyS,
Yes, you are freakish. Have you considered sexual reassignment surgery?
Love,
flea
******************
Lauren,
At the risk of exposing who the real righteous asshole was, the boy I beat up didn’t have a crush on me. As it turns out, he was severely mentally ill, and his illness often took the form of violent behavior. He was eventually institutionalized when he tried to kill his father. As far as I know, he’s still in a hospital.
**********************
Trish, if you have a moment, I’d love to talk to you about Typepad. Is it okay to e-mail you about it?
Wow–great post and comments, campers!
One slightly tangential (and much less serious than the rape discussion) addition: Two things that have always confused me (and amused me) about the “men want/need sex more than women because biology says so” argument are (1) I would think that, for the biological essentialists, women’s orgasms are pointless–women don’t have to come to get pregnant–so why do they exist? Why do women have an organ that doesn’t serve any function EXCEPT orgasm? (unlike the penis, which is multi-functional). Seems wasteful, no? (2) Women are rather more likely than men to be multi-orgasmic, which suggests that women are the more highly sexed sex. There’s a great chapter in Dan Savage’s “Skipping Toward Gomorroh” that brings up some of these issues.
carla:
some food for thought. it has recently been discovered that women’s orgasm does have an evolutionary purpose. the muscular contractions help the cervix pull sperm into the body, making conception more likely.
Many fears and questions.
If the “essentialists” believe that men are intrisically roving horndogs (going for brevity, here), why aren’t they arguing against marriage as something unnatural to the species?
Pardon me while I quake in terror, here. Monogamous heterosexuality is in frickin’ crisis. Monogamous people have no way to find each other, and het folk can barely speak to each other, let alone aim for the true love deal. And, in addition to sticking their noses into non-straight lives, the creepy crawling controllers are now trying make het life into even more of a confused hurt, hate and violence fest than it already usually is. Some of the folks in the “marriage movement” (i.e. the folks at Rutgers) are making a lot of sense, but the minute het monogamy is mentioned the ultra-conservo gay basher, women-hating pirana (i.e. “promise keepers”) show up to start devouring the more sensible arguments. A bunch of yahoos trying to piss a perimeter around marriage so they can use it for mysogynist purposes is just too depressing. (Remember the “radical monogamy” movement? No, nobody else does either.) I’m just going to head off to the corner, here, and emit heavy sighs for a while…
Flea, yes, it’s okay to e-mail me. My e-mail address is trishwilson@adelphia.net. It’s on my blog. I like TypePad. It sure beats writing out .html by hand. However, I still can’t figure out why my template is so narrow.
I find all the comments about essentialism very interesting (yeah, I know, I brought it up…). I’m going to write a blog post about it tomorrow and everyone here is invited to come on over (byob). Don’t have time to write it right now. I just put some new posts up a few minutes ago.
Somewhat off topic:
According to this site, there has been exponential growth in the pornography industry in the last decade:
http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/9/162003f.asp
While at the same time, there has been a marked decrease in the number ofrates and attempted rates. If, as has been suggested by some, pornography leads to violence against women, why has an increase in pornography been associated with a decrease in the rape rate?
Oopsy! Forgot my second link!
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/rape.htm
Those could be unrelated facts. Of course there will have been a huge boon in pornography in the last decade because of the internet, which is the ultimate form of privacy when looking for hot naked asian schoolgirls.
If you’ve been reading this blog, you’d know that rape victims would be less likely to answer in the affirmative a question like “were you raped” as opposed to more specific questions involving the actions. (see this post by Ampersand for clarification) So I wouldn’t take that study’s findings on specifically rape at face value.
Damn, I don’t know what happened to the html in my post, but the quotation starts with 41a
Raznor, you raise an interesting question. However, another chart on the DOJ’s website shows that reporting rates for rapes and attempted rapes have, while fluctguating slightly from year-to-year, basically remained the same. Therefore, the reporting rate does not explain the dramatic decrease in the amount of rapes and attempted rapes.
Also, while it is possible the declining rate of rapes is unrelated to the prolifieration of pornography, I find it compelling that the rate rape started dropping just as the internet (which enabled more efficient distribution of pornography) was beginning to boom.
I’m late to post here, because I just discovered this site (more or less) and I read through PDP’s essay and the responses with absolutely bated breath. I just wanted to say that I really applaud PDP’s points and thought they were wonderfully expressed. I also found the responses really challenging.
I’d like to say something about Erica’s “when you are a mother” post but its a little off center and not directed at Erica. Her issues are her issues and they are too deep, clearly, and too painful for her to handle. But the “when you are a mother” thing caught my eye because I see it used so often and so disingenuously (sp?). The claim “I’m a parent” and I’ve seen x with regard to children seems superficially convincing but as several posters pointed out even if all of us haven’t become parents we have all been children and have at least as much experience with the opposite sex in classes and in life as parents have observed in their brief lives as parents. (I, too, had very violent fantasies as a child and longed to grow up to be Conan the Barbarian! Unlike PDP, I’ve never been in a situation where I was bigger and stronger than anyone else so couldn’t even let my violent impulses begin to emerge).
But just because Erica’s points are based on/represented as natural, learned, and from personal experience doesn’t mean that they have to be udnerstood that way. In fact two of her major points: that boys will be boys and that grief/anger should be repressed are also, of course, stalking horses of the right–all the more powerful in that they are kind of underlying themes (or do I mean memes?) that are pushed on parents/ citizens from a variety of what are seen as non-political sources.
I’m a mother of young children too, and though I run with a fairly enlightened crowd I used to hang out on a bulletin board composed of women from all over the country and from all classes and several though not all races. Erica’s lines about the hard wiring of girls and boys and how you “only really understand it” when you have children and her observations about the “women centerdness” of early childhood education are the common currency of that board and of many women’s experiences. You see this “lesson” learned over and over again as women who thought of themselves as feminists or thought of themselves as individuals without sex or gender start raising children in the real world. It can be a shock to them. What is a shock though, to me, is the sameness of the discussion which could go towards something as intereresting as PDP’s essay but never does. The idea that cultures and civilizations civilize, that the social structures around us are structuring something, seems to yield always to a bio-essentialist position. Or rather, women like Erica think it yields to a bio-essentialist position. They have boys, they see boys acting differently from girls, and they ascribe it to hard wired sexual differences. At the same time, they point towards social structures around the boys and fault them for effectively monkeying with a perceived natural condition (in other words, for being effective at all).
The idea that boys are dominated, confined, even harmed by this “all female” world is a constant theme for mothers of boys–as it has been an emergent theme for right wing educators and right-wing users of education-for-political-purposes. Where Erica’s observations intersect with PDP’s essay is on the role of “civilization” (parents, schools, culture) etc… in transforming children into citizens/social beings. In Erica’s model (and it is widely shared) at some unspecified point in the past boys who used to do well in school began to do poorly in school and its largely the fault of unrealistic expectations of women around them (the girls who are the same age but smarter, faster, better) and the teachers who are women and who expect too much. There was a time, they think without examination, that society was congruent with nature, and now its not. The argument begins in the recent past and ignores any factual history: how were boys treated before schools were co-ed? How rapidly were they supposed to progress educationally? Were the expectations of male teachers any different than those of female teachers, etc.. etc…etc… Erica’s experiences as a mother are offered to you as uncontestable because “true”, “universal,” anecdotal/personal and also apolitical–but they are of course highly political.
That is true of her second point, as well. That is: Erica’s personal testimony about the value of repression in her own life is meant to explain her beliefs and to shut down discussion of the role of law, memory, and anger in women’s lives. The idea that talking about something makes it worse is one that is being pushed by the far right and that is appearing more and more often in the mainstream media in accounts of victim’s rights groups, mental health issues, disaster relief and it is moving down from those mass media areas to bulletin boards and to pta discussions.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this but I think what Erica was saying is important because it shows the profound nexus between the “common wisdom” of someone who sees herself as ordinary, average, experienced, and the right wing drive to dominate everyday experience and to make it conform to a political agenda.
Hope that makes more sense when I see it printed out than it is makign sense to me as I type it. I really just wanted to thank Ampersand, PDP, Bean and the others for their wonderful posts.
–aimai
Kate, nice inaugural post.
The thing is, though, the “talking about things only makes them worse” thing is nothing new. Watch 1950’s propaganda film strips (what else can you call them?) about things like, how to eat dinner, and so on, that were spread in schools as a way to ensure absolute conformity.
This reminds me of a psych study a friend of mine did for her thesis a couple years ago. She gave people a very difficult math test, and before the test, she’d play a recording that said either, “studies have shown gender doesn’t make a difference in math scores” or “studies have shown that women have not scored as high as men”. When she played the former recording, men did worse, and women did better, and the latter had the opposite effect. I don’t know how we’re supposed to handle this info, but there it is.
Raznor, you raise an interesting question. However, another chart on the DOJ’s website shows that reporting rates for rapes and attempted rapes have, while fluctguating slightly from year-to-year, basically remained the same. Therefore, the reporting rate does not explain the dramatic decrease in the amount of rapes and attempted rapes.
You and Raznor seem to be talking about two different things. First, I’d wonder (not having time to read either of the links you provided right now) what they were comparing the numbers with. Amp has (numerous times) already showed how one could take two different study results taken at the exact same time and one might be significantly lower than the other — it doesn’t mean that there was a decrease over the course of a minute or hour or however long the time between the studies were taken, it all depends on what questions are asked and how. To use the results of one study and compare them to the results of another study that used a different methodology is incredibly faulty at best.
What Raznor was pointing out about how the questions are asked has nothing to do with the rates of reporting, so I’m not sure why you were bringing that up. But, FWIW, according to a new FBI study, rape jumped 4% in 2002 — most likely due to more women reporting it to law enforcement.
And, btw, I have to wonder about any study that shows that rape rates have declined since the internet (correlation, obviously, but still). According to the FBI: The percentage of [reported] rapes reported flat-lined near 30 percent from 1993 through 1999, spiking above the 45 percent mark in 2000 and dipping slightly in 2001 to about 40 percent.
I don’t see a decrease there.
Raznor,
Thanks for the kind welcome. I know the “talking about things makes it worse” thing is very old. As a political bright line (thought to demarcate one kind of political ideology from another) though, do you think it goes back much before the rise of psychoanalysis? I guess I mean the politicization of the idea? I did not read the book about Teddy Roosevelt and the idea that America needed to be rescued from neurasthenia but I think it might be apposite. I’d be interested to know how long it has stood for something other than itself.
And, of course, I should add that confessional day time tv, victim’s rights, victim mentality and all the other things that get conflated into “part of the problem” are only rhetorically tied to any particular political group or political ideology. I doubt that talking about what’s wrong or not talking about it actually reflects any real world political distinctions any more than gross approximations like red state/blue state reflect actual beliefs on taxation and its goals. –Kate Gilbert
bean, if you look at the DOJ’s chart, it does show a small spike in the rape rates for 2002. However, overall the rape rate has decreased dramatically over the last decade and a quick search of the FBI’s website seems to confirm this. I may post some links later when I have time to look at the FBI’s research in more detail.
As for the reporting rate, I brought it up because that is what Raznor was talking about. The only other explanation is that Raznor was suggesting that thousands of women would suddenly start answering the same questions differently for no apparent reason. Since the questions have stayed the same from year to year, there is no rational explanation for why the rape rate would drop dramatically under consistent polling, especially where the reporting rate has remained more or less constant.
While correlation does not prove causation, it certainly appears that there is a correlation between growth of the pornography business and a decrease in the rape rate.
Except, TBT, that if you look at the numbers in the report you linked to, it reports a rate fall from under 3 women per thousand to just under 1 per thousand. That’s not so much of a fluctuation to suggest that it’s causally related to anything other than statistical anamoly, especially when the question about rape is asked in such a way that it essentially minimizes the chances that a woman who has been raped would answer in the affirmative.
I don’t doubt the total merits of the report in question, but in regards to specifically rape and sexual assault, it’s not an extremely reliable source.
Anyone have a link to one of the hundreds of posts Amp has made about why asking questions a certain way about rape (not to mention other things) will change the results of the study? Perhaps, just perhaps, if Texan read one of those, he’d understand a bit more of what Raznor was saying — but I don’t have time to go searching for one.
Again, this is from the FBI: The percentage of rapes reported flat-lined near 30 percent from 1993 through 1999, spiking above the 45 percent mark in 2000 and dipping slightly in 2001 to about 40 percent. Where in there do you see anything about a decrease of any kind, let alone a “dramatic” decrease? That’s from the FBI’s own studies.
And btw — true fact, there is a correlation between increased ice cream sales and drowning deaths. It’s been proven — look it up. Happens every year.
bean, here is where a see a decrease. From the FBI’s own site:
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/cius2000.htm
This is from the 2000 report, which states:
“Forcible rape, which had been in decline since 1992, increased 0.9 percent.”
So, from 1992-2000, the rape rate declined steadily.
For some reason the 2001 report won’t load int omy browser properly, so I don’t know what the FBI says about the rape rate in 2001. In 2002 the rape rate did increase 4%, but I believe the rate was still much lower than it had been in 1992. I’d call that an overall decrease, wouldn’t you?
Here’s a link to the FBI’s 2002 report:
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel03/12month2002.htm
Here are the numbers for 1982-2001. The decrease is obvious.
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/cius2000.htm
Sorry, wrong link in my last post. Here is the correct link:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_01/xl/01tbl01.xls
Raznor, as I hope you can see from the last link I posted, there has in fact been a dramatic decrese in both the rape rate and the raw number of rapes.
As for the numbers not being reliable, I suppose if you reject both the Dept. of Justice and the FBI’s stats, you aren’t going to believe any stats. It sounds like you already have your mind up as far as what you are going to believe. If so, neither I nor anyone else can ever convince you otherwise.
Does it matter whether there’s an increase. The numbers have gone from bizarrely, outrageously aberrantly unacceptable, to just outrageously aberrantly unacceptable. So what? We’re still well into not-in-my-species must-not-be-allowed-to-continue impossible numbers. WHY ARE SO MANY MEN RAPING WOMEN? WHY DO THOSE MEN CONTINUE TO EXIST? HOW WERE THEY CREATED IN THE FIRST PLACE WHEN RAPE IS SO OBVIOUSLY NON-HUMAN?
I’m too busy to look at the new link you posted at the moment, but I certainly don’t like your tone to come into a discussion late, introduce a tangential argument, and then insulting me when I don’t instantly agree with you. I’m not disagreeing with the DOJ, but the first link you posted contains numbers from a study that wasn’t designed to specifically assess the number of rapes, then taking that and trying to isolate the stats on rape which are buried very deeply in the survey, and the survey doesn’t go into any details on it. That’s the reason why I’m skeptical as to the exact merits of that study in regards to rape. I’m not saying they’re wrong, but before I believe it, I’d like to look at a study that is designed to assess the number of rapes and see if the numbers corelate.
Huh? Where did I insult you, Raznor? So you don’t like my “tone”? Well, I’m sorry about that, but I won’t apologize for insulting you when I clearly never did anything of the sort.
It sounds like you already have your mind up as far as what you are going to believe. If so, neither I nor anyone else can ever convince you otherwise.
ie, you’re an idiot ideologue who is completely out of touch with reality, and there’s no way for you to see the truth, as posessed by me, The Big Texan.
If you can’t bring this above petty ad hominem attacks, then don’t post.
Being kind of thin-skinned aren’t you? That was clearly an “if-then” statement. “If” it applies to you, then fine. If not, then fine as well.
You know what, TBT, I’m done with you. You’re playing a game right now, and it doesn’t serve me in the slightest to play along.
Respond to this if you want, but I won’t respond in kind. Or you can end the game and go back to the original arguments. Or you can do neither. Your choice.
I can actually agree with everyone here, to some extent.
Raznor is right; the “if-then” statement was a fairly obvious Ad Hominem. That it was an “if-then” doesn’t magically make it not Ad Hominem. Rather than defend the ad hominon, the most effective way to move the discussion forward – even if in your opinion Raznor is being thin-skinned – is usually to say “I apologize, I didn’t intend to insult you” (which is true, correct?) and then move on.
More on substance, Raznor is correct to say that neither of the studies you’ve cited are seen by experts as a reliable measure of total rape incidence. It’s not just me that says this – studies by the US Government have shown fairly conclusively that the NCVS methodology systematically undercounts the number of rapes. (I discussed this indirectly in this earlier post, which may have been the past post of mine Raznor and Bean were searching for). And the FBI numbers, of course, reflect only rapes reported to police, not total rapes.
My guess – and it’s just a guess – is that the NCVS and especially the FBI numbers represent “stranger rape” but vastly undermeasure acquaitance rape, date rape and spousal rape.
However, I agree with Big Tex on one point. Although the NCVS doesn’t reliably measure the total incidence of rape, the fact that they ask the same questions year after year does make their results an interesting measure of trends. (The NCVS is the only crime survey done every year). It’s an imperfect measure, of course; but as I’ve argued in the past, when no perfect measures are available, we shouldn’t dismiss the information we can get from the imperfect measures.
My opinion: From the information we have, it does appear that rape trends have been headed downward in recent years – although the information we have is flawed, and so we should use it with caution. It’s possible that what’s going on is a drop in stranger rapes, which may or may not mean that other kinds of rapes are going down.
But I also think Bean is totally right to say that correlation does not prove causation. One thing to keep in mind, for example, is that all violent crime in the US has been going down. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics:
Whatever has caused the drop in rape (which might be just a drop in stranger rape), it’s reasonable to speculate that it might be the same thing that’s been causing a drop in violent crime in general. If so, it seems a little far-fetched that that thing (whatever it is) will turn out to be easy access to internet porn.
Even if porn (or, in Big Tex’s theory, the lack of porn) is a cause of rape, it would be only one of many causal factors. Unless you think porn (or lack of porn) is the only significant cause of rape, it’s a mistake to look at simple correlations between rape and porn, without adjusting for other possible causal factors, to prove anything.
To Kate,
What I’ve learned from this is never to use my real name again, because seeing my name in print makes me feel as if I have to respond. I appreciate your moderate tone, and the absence of any vulgarities directed to my name.
Since your post used me as the basis for your argument, here is my response:
1. Why is androgny (sp?) necessary for the feminist argument, at least as it has been expressed (and not just by you) here? Geez if we were all androgenous (sp?) we would never have lust for the peculiar (as in different) qualities of the opposite sex. Why is saying boys and girls are different an impediment to finding a solution to the problem of sexual assault? Isn’t real power saying I’m a girl, this is who I am, and I’m not going to be a victim of anything? What in the world is the point, politically or otherwise, of denying any differences?
2. Did our elementary teachers “civilize” my son? Perhaps. But the biggest “civilizing” influence on my son without question is his father. Boys need adult males in their lives, and that’s why I think we should have more men teachers. It would also seem that there is a conflict between on the one hand arguing that we are androgenous and on the other suggesting that boys have urges which require civilizing. Incidently, if you were referring to anything I said, you’ve stated it in the reverse: from my personal experience (I have no other) girls start out being ahead of boys, not vice versa. It gets all mixed up in puberty.
3. As for going back to the past, I don’t know much about the history of education in America, the only notion I have is that there used to be corporal punishment, that whacking the boys was an accepted educational technique. I have no wish to return to that. But I also don’t think medicating maleness–ADD and ritilin–is much of an improvement (talk about the Stepford Wives in reverse).
4. Regarding the alleged smugness of my vantage point as a parent, I plead guilty as charged. There’s an old expression that you never understand men until you have a son (and the same for fathers and daughters). Even though we were all children once and we all have relationships with the opposite sex, the parent-child relationship is fundamentally unique.
5. Repression as therapy being right-wing? That’s a new one for me. My grandfather, a WWI veteran reputedly never talked about his experience in the trenches after his return, not once. That’s a form of repression as therapy. Why in the world is that right-wing? Aren’t PTSD patients treated with techniques of avoidance, don’t go to the places or do the things that might instigate disturbing intrusive thoughts. Are the psychologists treating them all right wingers? It seems that there might be a confusion between recovery on an individual level and repressing the notion that there is a sexual assault problem on a societal level. I was never advocating the latter.
6. I suppose I’ve invited the many psychoanalyses of me by my own statements, but really, you can’t psychoanalyze anyone from a distance. Frankly, I regard my own “recovery” as being primarily a matter of pure luck, emanating primarly from the glow which enveloped me when I met my husband, and the many changes which followed. Perhaps I’m too hard on others because I was lucky. But I find it puzzling, whether right-wing, left-wing or any other wing, to seemingly believe that victimhood should be celebrated. Sexual assault is no less a very bad thing even if you “recover.” There’s a sense in which insisting that we are eternal victims carries the risk of being a self-fulfilling prophecy. I just don’t see the value in it.
As far as I can tell, the gist of the entire discussion has been that in order to solve the problem of sexual assault, we should (1) keep anger and victimhood alive (if I may pervert the Jesse Jackson phrase to keep hope alive) (2) never ever under any circumstances acknowledge that victims, in sex or elsewhere, do certain things which increase the liklihood that they will be victims; and (3) vengeance and retribution to the transgressors (incidently I think that’s more of a right-wing, rather than left-wing idea).
Here are some considerably more modest proposals:
1. We need more and better sex education in schools that goes way beyond reproductive biology and talks about restraining urges, treating people with respect and resisting peer pressure.
2. There’s too sudden a transition from the relative lack of freedom in high school to the relative lack of any monitoring in college. Colleges need to take more responsibility.
3. The PR campaign should not be so much about how we’re all suffering victims but more a message to the fathers and other male authority figures to teach our sons decency and restraint.
4. The anti-bullying sensitivity that is now going on post-Columbine would be a really good idea if it was not so silly in practice. These programs need to “get real” since there are common sense techniques to avoid victimization of any kind.
5. Continuing efforts already underway to get a handle on the drug and alcohol problem.
6. To steal a phrase from Carol Mosley Braun we’re all in this boat together. We love our boys just as much as we love our girls. Stop demonizing the boys.
Regards.
Erica,
You are so right about not using my real name! I think I’ll switch back to using my online name, which means “woman” in Nepali, but for the record this is me, Kate.
You sum up your letter with this:
“As far as I can tell, the gist of the entire discussion has been that in order to solve the problem of sexual assault, we should (1) keep anger and victimhood alive (if I may pervert the Jesse Jackson phrase to keep hope alive) (2) never ever under any circumstances acknowledge that victims, in sex or elsewhere, do certain things which increase the liklihood that they will be victims; and (3) vengeance and retribution to the transgressors (incidently I think that’s more of a right-wing, rather than left-wing idea).”
I don’t agree that that is the gist of the entire discussion and I think each person in the discussion may have taken away rather different imporessions. My own take on this is that sexual assault is a fact of life–for children, women, and men. Bringing it out into the open has required a lot of perseverance and a lot of “anger” and a lot of being described as a “victim” but without people willing to do that we would not know the extent of the harm societally speaking. The child victims (for want of a better word) of the Catholic Church in this country are an exellent example of this kind of perseverance. I don’t think, listening to them, however, that you would come up with a one size fits all model of what such a victim wants or needs from the Catholic Church or their rapist to get beyond their own pain and anguish. Individual traumas require individual solutions.
No one denies that in particular cases an individual might have done things to decrease the liklihood that they would be a victim in any particular case. For example, I would never deny that a man who walked down a street near a construction site was partially responsible if a brick fell from the construction site and killed him. Its clear that if he hadn’t walked down that street at that exact minute, he would still be alive. However, even if he were able to forsee the future and change his pattern of walking, that doesn’t guarantee he will never die (or never be killed in an accident). “preventing” rape is rather like that. You might argue that any individual woman can decrease her chance of being raped by any individual man by refusing to be in the same room with him, or going armed to her encounter with him but over time her watchfulness can’t compensate for all the potential rapists and potentially dangerous situations in the world. Lest you take this to mean that I see every man as a potential rapist, let me hasten to disagree. However your argument kind of assumes either that a) every man is a potential rapist so care can/should be taken against all men at all times or b) potential rapists are obvious so can can and should be taken against the obvious ones. 3) I’m not interested in vengeance and retribution and I didn’t see all that much of it in the thread.
I’ll stick to your last points, your “Modest proposals” but I’m not sure they are that apposite to the rape discussion.
I think.
I’d be the first to agree with 1, 2,5 and 6 and I agree in many ways with 3. In fact, I thought that was actually the whole point of PDP’s essay which was structurally equivalent to arguments that white racism must be combated by talking about race and racism among whites and not by interracial dialogue as such. I’m totally behind the efforts of men as fathers, brothers, sons and friends to confront one another about their sexism and their violence towards others. I don’t think its necessary to see that as a rebuttal of some kind to seeing ourselves as “all suffering victims” but I don’t recognize that as a particularly real description of any political movement, much less feminismso I don’t think it needs much rebuttal. I think each person should be offered whatever kind of therapeutic model they find helpful, and not judged and found wanting for choosing one model over another.
The point about your grandfather is well taken, in fact, I’d argue just the same that repression vs. expression for people’s suffering is supra-political, may be cultural. HOwever, my argument is that it is being turned into a kind of political shorthand. I base that on the upsurge in media coverage for articles and books on the subject that are written from a politicized perspective: linking discussion of trauma to a “weak” “feminized” and politically left ideology while attempting to link repression of trauma to a “strong” and supposedly worthwhile rightist agenda. An example of that on the race issue seems to me to be Shelby Steele’s recent piece so aptly charicatured on BusyBusyBusy as (apologies for getting it wrong and not linking)” If racial discrimination occurs in a state but no government agency is there to heed it, it does not hurt a soul.” If I stopped knowing how many women were raped, would I feel safer? Yeah. Would I *be* safer? no. If one took your other arguments about repression seriously and every woman repressed her own experiences of rape/violence then we other women would have little to go on to protect ourselves but rumor. This is in fact the situation in many other countries where information on sexuality of all kinds is withheld from women and its the case when my old University refused to print statistics on violence against students if the act had happened on public (not university) land. How did that help me know how dangerous my campus was when a woman was kidnapped right in front of my dorm, raped, and dropped back out there hours later? From the standpoint of information for future students that fact disappeared/was not recorded. Minimally, victims rights groups help create a new kind of social and institutional memory which might create an environment in which care could be taken to avoid victimization.
As for your point about anti bullying training, I don’t know anything about the individual programs but since several studies have come out (once it became a topic of discussion and investigation) arguing that bullying begins early and harms both bullier and bullied I think that having such programs and refining them over time is better than simply teaching “common sense techniues to avoid victimization of any kind.” I’m not even sure what those would be that would be different from and more effective than a school wide program to identify and work with bullies/bullied. I mean, running away is a a “common sense technique” but it doesn’t really do much for the problem as a whole and it would go against #3 above “teaching our sons (and daughters) decency and restraint.”
I agree with you absolutely that the medication of boys is wrong and that schools and parents need to be vigilant and creative to make sure that doesn’t happen as the result of structural flaws in the educational system. My own experience as a parent and with parents of boys who are being medicated (a way, way, higher incidence than I would ever have imagined possible) is that despite anecdotal charges that parents and teachers leap to medicating problem boys on the contrary each medicating parent describes themself as resisting diagnosis and treatment for years before giving in because the home situation as well as the school situation had become impossible. That is not to argue that the school situation is not at fault or that schools are not pressuring kids to be compliant with arbitrary standards of good behavior. However over several years of reading these parents accounts of their children’s behavior I’ve got to say that the behavior is really aberrant compared to a a)normal girl and b)normal boy. I’d like to see some serious studies of child behavior and brain function and I’d like to see all this add/adhd stuff put on a real scientific footing so it could be evaluated. If the children are being improperly medicated for societally induced stress (schools not structured properly for all learning styles) then the schools should be altered. I’ms ure we will be able to fund better schools with all the money that we are willing to pour into them (Not!). If there is a rising incidence of some actual pathology, like the rise in autism, then I’d like to see some real data on that and some serious attention paid to pre-natal health. I’m not expecting to see any government agency or private agency really promote that at this point.
Sorry for the armchair psychoanalyses in my first post, that was very bad manners on my part and I do apologize.
Aimai
First on a personal note, Erica, using a pseudonym doesn’t help much. As you can guess, Raznor’s not my real name, but when someone addresses me here I feel it, for good or ill. Also, I should apologize for my own psychoanalysis as well. But moving on.
Amp, thank you for that post. Ever the diplomat. Why aren’t you president anyway? I’ll make the flyers. TBT, if you want to continue discussing the topic of the studies you introduced, I am still interested in it. Although any reference to the small personal squibble save an apology will be fully ignored by me, although I don’t require an apology if you’d rather just fully ignore it.
Anyway, now onto the substance of Erica’s post.
I have many minor disagreements with the details of your post and one major disagreement with the theme of your post. It’s 1:00am right now, so I’ll ignore the minor disagreements and get right to the point, since that will be pretty substantive in and of itself
On Victimhood:
I should say, to begin, I love Johnny the Homicidal Maniac comics. One reason is that they contain, as with all of Jhonen Vasquez’s works, such intelligent social commentary. And there is one story arc that is pretty pertinent to this discussion. What follows is a synopsis of said arc, and I do apologize for that.
There is a point in the comic series where Johnny goes on a date with Devi. They really like each other, but Johnny, in order to preserve the moment, attempts to kill Devi. Devi ends up beating the crap out of Johnny and running away. Later when we see Devi again, she is constantly afraid, and hasn’t left her apartment since her date. Then, in one comic, Johnny calls her with a recorded message, apologizing and promising to forget her. Johnny is to the side listening in, and we know he meant to be fully sincere in his sentiments. But Devi won’t have any of it. “I’m the one who will make me happy,” she yells into the receiver. And she tells him that she no longer cares if he comes back and tries to kill her, she is through living in fear. And she angrily hangs up, leaving Johnny humorously traumatized. But, we’re to assume, she finally goes outside.
Which brings us to our discussion on living in victimhood. You claim that if we ignore prevention, we just live in a society of victims. I say the opposite is true. The thing is, rape, like any violent crime in a civilized world, is like lightning, if lightning came without the clouds and rain. It’s not likely going to someone happen at any given moment, but there’s no way to be completely safe from it. So what should one do about it?
Hypothetically, let’s say two women both go to a bar every Saturday for fun, and one Saturday they are both raped. Both are traumatized, and after some time, one woman decides that she will not go out on Saturday for fear of the same or a similar or worse thing happening to her. The other is no less traumatized by her experience, but she decides that she still enjoys going to the bar, and dammit won’t let her fears get in the way of what she likes to do. Now which of these women would you say is living the life of a victim?
As for the idea of vengeance – here’s the thing, Erica, no one here is implying that all men are rapists. But all people are potential rapists, in that all people have the ability to rape. There are two things that would prevent a reasonable person from raping someone: a feeling of empathy for the potential victim or a fear of reprisal. Empathy is a much better tool for preventing rape, since it is ever-present in a person. It can also be taught, by instilling in people from a young age the same sympathy for a rape victim as for assault or murder. This doesn’t amount to saying to men, “Men are rapists, and you should all be ashamed of your gender” it’s saying “rape is a serious crime, and you should all feel sympathy for the victims”. (as a sidenote: the reason why I really don’t trust sex ed courses to do this, is because my own seventh grade sex ed class (one filled with 13 year old boys for the love of Mike) emphasized the former as opposed to the latter.)
But the thing with empathy is you can’t assume everyone will possess it. And like you, I don’t believe in vengeance as an ends in and of itself. But without strict penalties on rapists, we would have no deterrence for rape save for trusting in the general compassion of all humanity. And I do believe that people are generally good, but there are still cruel people who pop up, and as a society, we cannot allow them all to go undeterred.
In any case, that’s my general spiel. I have spent half an hour on this, so forgive me though I haven’t addressed every point I may have wanted to. Also forgive the length, if you’re not too much into the reading thing. (then why are you here at Alas, A Blog anyway?)
Well, after a long time of gobbling up Alas, A blog in the safety of my shyness, I’m now jumping in… There’s so much to say but I’ll stick to one point only for this one post. I’m struck by the allusions to psychoanalysis in some of the posts. Being quite familiar with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, I did have some thoughts on the subject that I’d like to share. Repression may be understood as “belonging” to a right-wing mentality not just for the reasons so eloquently discussed above but also because of the notion at the core of right wing ideology of “doing things the old-fashioned way.” Introspection and working through your feelings in a clinical setting has been equated with being progressive, elitist, “weak,” “touchy-feely”… a victim. The old-fashioned way (and thus the right wing connotations) is to chuck it up: don’t dwell, don’t be a baby, get over it. It’s worked well for generations, the argument goes. Well, the truth is that it hasn’t. A myriad of dysfunctions and lacks in our society proves the shortcomings of this approach.
The thing about repression is that it only gives the ILLUSION of having conquered the trauma. Trauma is a sneaky thing: it will pervade your life and dictate your perspective and choices, whether you’re aware of it or not. As opposed to what “popular wisdom” says, people who “are still dwelling on it”, offering themselves up as victims in TV shows and the like, are not an illustration of what happens to those who address the trauma to get over it. Of course, every individual follows a different process but a repressed trauma will manifest itself in a consistent pattern. In very simplified terms, one can be assured that the traumatized person who relies on repression will create an internal split, “disowning” the part of herself or himself that has been “victimized”. Only by dissociating can this traumatized person survive the violence. Repression solidifies this split, plunging the dissociated parts further into the unconcious. This doesn’t mean that the split-off part will rest in peace; quite the contrary, it will infuse the thoughts, emotions and actions of the person in the most insidious way. Only by bringing this part to conciousness can integration occur. The trauma will still be there, will always be there, but by being aware of it, one can stop it from driving your life. And it will drive your life: from your choice of partner, friends, work, to substance abuse or any other kind of compulsive behavior, to projection as a defense mechanism (often creating a sense of anger, bitterness, mistrust in others). In less abstract terms, a traumatized person who’s repressing the trauma will most likely (unconsciously) identify with the attacker, feeling that the “victim” part of themselves deserved the violence. Empathy for another “victim” would prove hard to experience since it threatens this precarious system of internal management. Acknowledging somebody else’s pain comes dangerously close to acknowledging one’s own; the raw power of unprocessed pain is intolerable and must remain split off. More often than not, the consequences of repression is the repetition of a pattern of violence against oneself or others (unconsciously but with very real results) Repression of trauma (whether it’s rape, war in the case of veterans, or any other violence) does not heal the person; too often it re-traumatizes them in a regular basis albeit in “hidden”, insidious ways. This is also the reason why some people who were abused as children grow up the be abusers themselves. The identification with the abuser continues unabated in both self-destructive and abusive patterns of behavior. Only awareness and integration can break the cycle. The process of healing is different for each person but it should always address the importance of internal integration.
I may be too naive or at least too much of an optimist but I hold on to my hope that by not doing things the “old-fashioned way,” by rejecting repression and embracing self-awareness and integration, we could contribute to breaking the cycle of violence. This of course doesn’t preclude the need for political and social change but certainly strikes me as a crucial foundation for it.
one theme I should like to comment on:
“be careful” is, in fact, good advice for everyone under all circumstances, be it clubbing, driving, or walking across the street. the problem is that some people treat this as an anti-rape panecea. it isn’t, and to do so is insulting. a mugging victim should have been more careful, and not flashed a rolex while walking down that alley, but if the mugger was a decent human being, then it would be clear that that stealing is wrong, and they would not do so. by the same reasoning, a woman shouldn’t get blind drunk to reduce her ability to resist, nor should she hang out in bars that offer Roofie Coladas, but that doesn’t mean that should she chose to get blind drunk in the wrong place, that a decent human being would, rather than force sexual behaviors, go on about their day obeying the law. a man, any man, is a human being who makes choices, not a force of nature, and a rape victim, no matter how drunk, “slutily dressed” or “in the wrong place” she may be, is analogous to the man with the rolex in the alley, not to someone who goes golfing in the rain and is struck by lightning. in a rape, it is POSSIBLE (not manditory) that the victim chose to be in harms way, but much more significantly is is MANDITORY that the rapist chose to be that harm they were in the way of.
one other point that I’d like to breifly address is what exactly “the heavy price” a rapist is expected to pay should be. I, for one, believe imprisonment is obviously needed, but for how long? is 5 years enough? 10? until the victim recovers? life? being one who believes in redemption, life (or “XX years to life”) seems excessive and counterproductive, but simply saying “when their rehabilitated” doesn’t quite work either, thanks to the rather uneven handling of state parole systems.
just looking for some people’s opinions on that.
karpad, nice Family Guy reference there. I woulndn’t know what an effective imprisonment would be. It’s easy to say such and such an imprisonment is “too little” or “too much” but really I don’t know how to go from the theory, that “criminals need to be punished, if for nothing else, practical societal reasons” to the institution of that theory into the society itself. Fortunately, I don’t have to, it’s not my job.
I liked pato’s post, too. I enjoy it when I get to read a psychological perspective from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, as opposed to 22 year old college math majors like myself.
But more on the prevention and be careful thing, one thing I forgot to mention in my longer post above is the main reason I brought up the Devi story arc in the JTHM comics – is that most rapes occur when the victim trusts the perpetrator. How would this be at all preventable? Not trusting anyone ever again? That sort of mentality is what I think leads to a Devi-like mindset that keeps a person from ever leaving into the world.
As for the idea of going to clubs and getting drunk, you know, it’s really overestimating the prevalence of rape. Sure, lots of women get raped, too many, but that’s no reason for individual women to be afraid every time they leave the house. Lots of young women I know like to go to bars or parties, drink, and flirt. And except for rare occasions this does not result in nonconsensual sex.
And really, why is it written that being a man, if I like to go partying and clubbing I’m fine, but if I were a woman it would be needlessly dangerous? I’ve been molested at a bar too, but nobody calls me a fool when I don’t let that one instance define my social life.
Aimai,
I think I owe the courtesy of a reply especially since you seem like a nice person, but I don’t know that I have anything new to say.
Boy, hmmm, I don’t see rape as utterly random like a brick falling from a building, but that’s how I got into all this trouble here. As stated before, I think in part there are neutral factors like drugs and alcohol. But in another part, its not that all men are potential rapists. Its rather that people, especially but not only inexperienced young people, will sometimes take advantage in sex if presented with the opportunity. The opportunity is often, though far from always (every generalization is only partially true) presented by girls and women who are having problems. These kinds of problems were previously referred to, rather recklessly, as “nutty and slutty” then interpreted by others as being the same as “she asked for it” or “it’s the victim’s fault” and unleashed a wave of fury that culiminated (sort of), but did not end with, the PDP post.
Since I don’t think its utterly random (often) I think there are things you can do to lower the risk. They basically have to do with getting through adolescence in one piece, not getting all screwed up (like I did). There’s no road map to be sure but there are things, I think, that can help.
On the other hand since so many folks here seem to have never been involved in the sordid side of things, maybe there’s a lot less to worry about than I thought.
Thanks for the explanation about victims needing to be public. So that’s why everyone was so angry (why didn’t they just say so!). But I’m not sure still that I see the connection between the necessity for public knowledge and the apparent necessity that the individual victim is not supposed to recover (with apologies to Pato, whose post I’d really have to study to absorb).
I get it that angry energy can be motivating to be an activist and to change things. But that seems to be somewhat different than for example reviewing and renewing unpleasant memories and thereby putting yourself at risk for depression. .
On ADD, I don’t think I know any ADD boys now, but there were a few in the earlier grades–enough for me to call the prevalence startling. I can’t say I knew them or their families well, but the boys never seemed that abnormal to me, but then again maybe that was the medication effect. And as I understood the nature of the problem (from what I can’t recall) it seemed pretty typical young boy behavior, only perhaps more so: can’t sit still, physical aggression, can’t concentrate or focus (come to think of it that might describe all the boys in my son’s first grade class, if I could remember them all). There were no ADD girls, only boys.
I don’t feel like I knew the families well enough to have an opinion on why they medicated their sons. On a different level, the problem may be related to the fact that there is really no insurance coverage for mental health type issues, and throwing pills at people is the least expensive and most expedient solution. We’re also growing a new generation of drug addicts–if you have a problem take a pill–but that’s an entirely different subject.
To Raznor, did I say that if we ignore prevention we live in a society of victims? I wasn’t aware of having said that. I mean that it’s far better to have never been raped (or to have any other bad thing happen to you) then to suffer the damage and have all the consequences. And I don’t think its anything like being struck by lightening, but there’s that same subject of randomness coming up again. And who could possibly disagree that we need to do our best to raise our children and instill decency and restraint.
And on the subject of vengeance and retribution, I have no grand solutions. It was discussed in the context of the case in New Bedford, where the woman was the only female in a bar in the middle of nowhere on a rural highway, late at night, dancing to the jukebox to an audience of drunk guys. My impression at the time was that the boys were ordinary kids who did a very bad thing due to peer pressure, alcohol, and a woman who put herself in a position where she could be easily taken advantage of. The boys (as I can recall) were all in their late teens and early 20s and went to prison for like 20 years. I don’t know what the right sentence would be, or what factors should be itemized as measurements, it was just a gut feeling that given the circumstances of the crime, combined with who the defendants appeared to be, and their youth, that it was too harsh. Incidently, I don’t know what anyone else’s definition of utterly random might be, but I wouldn’t include a lone female in a rural bar late at night dancing to an audience of drunk guys. To me, there’s nothing random about that at all, but that’s probably just a product of my own sordid past.
Thanks for the kind apologies, but it’s OK, none were really necessary.
Regards.
First of all, re: the rural bar example, it’s true that you don’t know what the exact details in question were. But do you know who assumably (is that word at all?) did? The jury that delivered the verdict and the judge who gave the sentence. That’s the thing with our legal system. Different situations call for different actions, so we have trials to sort it out. It’s imperfect, but a certain level of trust should be given to the judges and juries to decide on the appropriate action to be taken with a certain accused criminal. (John Ashcroft would apparently disagree, but that’s a different discussion altogether)
well, not going out and getting plastered has less to do with solid rape prevention than just simple common sense.
drinking is fine, but drinking to excess makes you a target for all sorts of misfortune (rape, robbery, drunk driving accidents, and other bad stuff.)
it’s just generally a good idea. in all things moderation.
for a far fetched analogy: if you find a treasure map, by all means follow it to the big X. but be prepared for decendants/ghosts of the pirates involved. it may be a longshot and unlikely, but nothing ruins a good quest like being forced to walk the plank.
similarly, rape, muggings and the like won’t happen every time you get drunk, or to every person who gets drunk, but it happens more than enough that one should take precautions while drinking to prevent them, ne?
Wow. I just found this blog (and this thread) and am blown away by both the intelligence of many of the posts and the civility insisted upon by the group as a whole. How refreshing!
I have to agree that rape (like murder, child abuse, assault, etc.) is not the fault of the victim but of the criminal. And yes, whether they meant to be or not, rapists (even date-rapists) are criminals. They have broken the law. We have a system to deal with that. It would be great if the system also got to the root of the problem and attempted to help the criminal, but that is a utopian hope and not much more.
I would like to clarify something I was surprised did not come up much in these posts; rape is NOT usually a sexual crime. It is a violent crime. (I don’t really know where date-rape fits in there, and if someone would help me understand the nature of that beast, I would appreciate it.) Most of the time, rape is perpetrated by someone the victim knows. How can you “prevent” an assault by family members or acquaintances without isolating yourself or living in fear? I believe that prevention is more effective if we recognize that there are many socio-cultural and media messages that glorify violence towards women and address them. They glorify violence towards men, too, and that should be equally unacceptable, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. Obviously, it would be more effective to teach people that no means no – even if everything leading up to that no was a yes. (Okay, if that didn’t make sense, fire away…)
On the subject the nature of boys and school, I am of two minds (or more, but my schizophrenia will become evident on its own). I have two sons, both in elementary school. One of them is, in fact, ADD and has always been sweet-natured and usually polite; he just can’t pay attention or shift gears as well as most kids. Like many boys, mine have trouble sitting still for long periods of time, but so far it has not resulted in violent or disruptive behavior on their parts. Why? I am going to guess that part of it is because I don’t allow violent or disruptive behavior at home, in restaurants or anywhere else they are in my presence or under my influence. My husband does not condone it, either, and he was abused badly as a child – but he chose not to perpetrate that ill on his kids. Another reason is that such behavior is not tolerated in my children’s school and if it is discovered, parents are called into conference. We are lucky in that, I know. Are the kids still mean to each other? Sure. Kids are like that and will find a way. Grown ups are too….we just get a little more subtle about it.
In my yard, the neighborhood kids can play fight and wrestle and run and jump on (or off of) things. They have wooden swords that they like to play with and they very quickly learned that when you play violently, someone can get hurt. Often. They modify their play to minimize the hurt and the only time I stop it is when someone intentionally hurts someone else, either physically or by being cruel. I stop it regardless of gender, because girls can get as rambunctious as boys when they feel like it. So what is my point? That if there is a time and place for that kind of energy, where aggressive behavior is acknowledged and vented – but there are still rules of conduct – then there is less chance that it will come out in inappropriate places. And if someone does choose to act badly, even in the heat of the moment, there are CONSEQUENCES to such behavior.
Now, I am not saying that my kids won’t ever do anything bad. But it is my job as a parent to teach them that if and when they do something that breaks the rules, there will be retribution – a word I prefer to vengeance, btw. Why, if we are willing to suspend someone for having a fight in the hallways of school, should we not be willing to imprison someone for assaulting another person – regardles of the gender of the victim or nature of the assault?
It occurs to me that most of this has been said. I apologize if this ramble seems repetitive (or reductive) but I thank you for the space to add my thoughts.
Good inaugural post, Reba. Let me be the first to welcome you to Alas.
Obviously, it would be more effective to teach people that no means no – even if everything leading up to that no was a yes. (Okay, if that didn’t make sense, fire away…)
It made perfect sense to me. It reminds me of the whole deal going on with Kobe Bryant and the recent case in California in which a woman consented to sexual relations and then withdrew that consent (this applies to the California case; I’m not very up-to-speed on Kobe Bryant).
Anyway, again, good thoughts and welcome ta board. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself…)
that does apply to the recent case in california, Pink, but as I understand it, not the Bryant Case.
personally, I’d avoid the bryant case entirely; it’s noteworthy not because of the case law behind it, but the celebrity nature of the defendant. the credibility of everyone commenting on the case on the news is questionable, anyway, so I for one will wait for the dust to settle.
and Welcome Reba. and yes, the folk here are surprisingly civil for online political discussions. eventually, you realize you don’t need to outline a scathing retort full of verbal vitriol in your notes. it’s kinda eerie when no one calls you a moron for disagreeing with them…
personally, I’d avoid the bryant case entirely; it’s noteworthy not because of the case law behind it, but the celebrity nature of the defendant. the credibility of everyone commenting on the case on the news is questionable, anyway, so I for one will wait for the dust to settle.
I agree with this, which is why I’m not “up-to-speed” on the whole situation. I had just overheard some talking heads on MSNBC speaking extensively about the California case and how it related to “new developments” in the Kobe Bryant case.
it’s kinda eerie when no one calls you a moron for disagreeing with them…
Actually, what’s weirder for me is being able to disagree and get a serious response rather than being dismissed outright as a “troll” or “brownshirt” or whatever.
I like it here for that very reason.
Regarding the trends in rape statistics, has it occured to anyone else that the observed decline is just a demographic blip? Demographers have been saying that violent crime rates and some property crime rates (i.e., murder, burglary) are going down because the population is aging. So there are fewer people around who are in the age bracket that commits the majority of such crimes (say, 15-35, give or take) as a percentage of the total population…crime rates go down as a result, even if reporting rates remain constant. Just thought I’d toss that thought out there.
I’ve been reading this blog for a few weeks now, this is my first post…let me say, what interesting threads of discussion here! It’s well worth the time sitting down and reading (more than you can say for most newspapers, hah hah!).
Interesting thought, chemparrot. The problem I see with it is that the population is increasing, which would indicate that as people age out of the demographic most likely to commit crimes, more people are aging into that demographic. But that’s abject speculation, with no evidence to back it. I’m sure the US Census Bureau would be a good source to confirm or deny this claim. I’d look it up, but I’ve read maybe 150 pages or more of Clausewitz in the past three days. My brain is threatening to escape from my skull if I do any research at this point.
Actually, Raznor, there has been a decline in the number of people in the age-group most likely to commit crimes — so chemparrot is right. As the next generation (which is much larger than the one before it) comes of age, the crime rate, in all likelihood, will again rise.
This has been pretty common speculation from criminologists for a while now.
Okay, interesting. So I guess the other question that I would ask in order to confirm this (and if it’s common speculation among criminologists, maybe it’s been answered) would be has there been a change in the percentage of people within the – what do you call it, criminal age group? – who have committed crimes?
I’m far from an expert in this area, but from what I’ve heard (admittedly, not a hell of a lot), the percentage of those in the “prime group” who have committed crimes has not significantly changed.
So does this mean that in a few years, when the crime rate goes back up, that we’ll hear an endless number of people sound off on the evils of this generation and how things weren’t like that in their generation?
I’m sure the mainstream right will blame the left for further secularizing and demoralizing society with their heathen ways, while the mainstream left will blame the right for being blood-thirsty imperialists. In the process of all this, of course, the pundits will forget that there are people on the right who aren’t imperial theocrats and there there are people on the left who are just as disgusted with some of the “heathen ways” the left is so often associated with (like Hollywood’s obsession with sex and violence, for instance).
And, of course, the crime rate increase has to be blamed on someone rather than fixed. So instead of making sure that fewer people are raped, murdered, assaulted, burgled the pundits will try to make sure that Bush or Clinton gets blamed.
Are all countries this stupid, or is it just mine?
Sorry about that outburst. It’s been a downright shitty day.
wow, what a great web page. this is the kind of thinking that most peopl should have but unforutnately a lot of people don’t. you are right, just because a woman (older or younger) dresses in slutty clothing doesn’t mean she deserves 2 be raped. it’s girls way of thinking, girls want to be sexy and they want to be hot but they also want respect. they want attention too, and they even enjoy it but i don’t think they want ppl to violate them and force them to have sex. i dont’ know why women have that urge, to dress that way and to turn people on, but it’s true and teh way i see it the women who look down on women like that are just not as honest. anyway, thank you so much for such a great webpage, it realy is true and universal.
I don’t think none of she asked it. But others around her love a man like Clinton. And when Clinton is gone, we have grope-nator as Mr. CA.
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