Jezebel reports on a British study which showed people quotes from convicted rapists and from men’s magazines, and asked them to tell which were which, as well as which they agreed with.
The University of Surrey reports on the study, to be published in the British Journal of Psychology. Researchers gave a group of men and women quotes from the British lad mags FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo, as well as excerpts from interviews with actual convicted rapists originally published in the book The Rapist Files. The participants couldn’t reliably identify which statements came from magazines and which from rapists — what’s more, they rated the magazine quotes as slightly more derogatory than the statements made by men serving time for raping women. The researchers also showed both sets of quotes to a separate group of men — the men were more likely to identify with the rapists’ statements than the lad mag excerpts.
I think it would have been useful had the researchers showed the quotes to women as well, to see which statements the women agreed with. (It’s not as if rape culture beliefs are never shared by women.)
One of the study authors said:
There is a fundamental concern that the content of such magazines normalises the treatment of women as sexual objects. We are not killjoys or prudes who think that there should be no sexual information and media for young people. But are teenage boys and young men best prepared for fulfilling love and sex when they normalise views about women that are disturbingly close to those mirrored in the language of sexual offenders?
Here are some of the quotes that were used in the study:
1. There’s a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex . . . The way they dress, they flaunt themselves.
2. Some girls walk around in short-shorts . . . showing their body off . . . It just starts a man thinking that if he gets something like that, what can he do with it?
3. A girl may like anal sex because it makes her feel incredibly naughty and she likes feeling like a dirty slut. If this is the case, you can try all sorts of humiliating acts to help live out her filthy fantasy.
4. Mascara running down the cheeks means they’ve just been crying, and it was probably your fault . . . but you can cheer up the miserable beauty with a bit of the old in and out.
5. What burns me up sometimes about girls is dick-teasers. They lead a man on and then shut him off right there.
6. Filthy talk can be such a turn on for a girl . . . no one wants to be shagged by a mouse . . . A few compliments won’t do any harm either . . . ‘I bet you want it from behind you dirty whore’ . . .
7. You know girls in general are all right. But some of them are bitches . . . The bitches are the type that . . . need to have it stuffed to them hard and heavy.
8. Escorts . . . they know exactly how to turn a man on. I’ve given up on girlfriends. They don’t know how to satisfy me, but escorts do.
9. You’ll find most girls will be reluctant about going to bed with somebody or crawling in the back seat of a car . . . But you can usually seduce them, and they’ll do it willingly.
10. There’s nothing quite like a woman standing in the dock accused of murder in a sex game gone wrong . . . The possibility of murder does bring a certain frisson to the bedroom.
11. Girls ask for it by wearing these mini-skirts and hotpants . . . they’re just displaying their body . . . Whether they realise it or not they’re saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a beautiful body, and it’s yours if you want it.’
12. You do not want to be caught red-handed . . . go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick.
13. Some women are domineering, but I think it’s more or less the man who should put his foot down. The man is supposed to be the man. If he acts the man, the woman won’t be domineering.
14. I think if a law is passed, there should be a dress code . . . When girls dress in those short skirts and things like that, they’re just asking for it.
15. Girls love being tied up . . . it gives them the chance to be the helpless victim.
16. I think girls are like plasticine, if you warm them up you can do anything you want with them.
Answers. 1. Rapist, 2. Rapist, 3. Lad mag, 4. Lad mag, 5. Rapist, 6. Lad mag, 7. Rapist, 8. Lad mag, 9. Rapist, 10. Lad mag, 11. Rapist, 12. Lad mag, 13. Rapist, 14. Rapist, 15. Lad mag, 16. Lad mag
To tell you the truth, I don’t read American “lad mags” — when I was a teenager, all my reading money went to comic books, which preached a different sort of hypermasculinity. Are these sort of sentiments common in the US guy magazines, anyone know?
I went through the list, and my results were clear – determined which was a rapist and which was a lads mag in all but one case (#10). Note that I’m pretty sure “smash her” in #12 is slang for “have sex with her”, not “hit her”; it’s advising men to cheat away from their own home, not to commit domestic violence.
I identified with 0 out of 16 statements.
There are some differences between the sets of quotes. Many of the lads mags quotes are about what a woman “likes”; they can be paraphrased as “you can please a woman by demeaning her”. The rapist quotes do not concern themselves with how to please a woman, just with how likely the man is to get what he wants from her. Women may be “asking for it”, but it’s never about their desires; just about whether they’re giving you permission to do it.
So one possible reason a lot of the men who identify with any of the statements find it easier to identify with the rapists is because the rapists offer a more straightforward misogyny. They offer the view that women can be objectified and controlled. The lad mags offer the view that the man’s role is “to help [the woman] live out her filthy fantasy”; they’re presenting their misogyny as if it’s there to serve the women. I can see why men who are liable to identify with misgynistic views will be more likely to find this pretense unnecessary.
By the way, the original quote says that they did show the quotes to women – they just don’t report on the women’s reactions. Hopefully, the full study will contain that data.
Good news, with stellar numbers like these we won’t have them around much longer. If you think about it, if 0.5% of the UK population are rapists, you’d easily find close to half a million people who are more than eager to read this crud.
First 6 months of 2011, change from a year back:
Regular Magazines:
TV Choice 1,354,761 3.5%
What’s on TV 1,271,675 5.4%
Radio Times 892,997 -4.9%
Lad Mags:
FHM 117,908 -24.1%
Nuts 107,532 -23.9%
Zoo 102,043 -29.9%
Loaded 71,251 -20.9%