As I read yet another blogger rant about how they know with absolute certainty that many women do lie about being raped, I noticed the implication that those of us who dare to take all allegations of rape seriously are 1) deluded 2) man haters.
Those who habitually align themselves with alleged rapists don’t see sexual exploitation as harming anyone except those charged with sex crimes. How can they if their heroes are those who give a 16-year-old girl alcohol then use her as a child porn movie prop and their villain is the girl who blacked out and testified that she couldn’t remember what happened? They seem to feel justified in doing this because none of the convictions in this case were for the crime of rape.
Just because they can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because I told no one about being raped for two decades doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that I have no right to call myself a rape survivor because my rapist was never charged or convicted.
I could counter specific faulty statements, but I’ll leave that for other posts. I want to get to what I see as a driving force in those who habitually align themselves with alleged rapists.
In any area we are in one of these states:
1) Unconscious incompetent
2) Conscious incompetent
3) Unconscious competent
4) Conscious competent
To move from state 1 to states 3 or 4, you have to go through state 2. But state 1 can be very comfortable while state 2 is the most uncomfortable and sometimes hopeless state.
I believe those who deny the scope of the sexual violence problem most vigorously are trying their best to remain in state 1 (and out of state 2) while they see themselves as being in state 4.
When it comes to sexual violence awareness, state 2 is where those who have exploited others sexually are forced to see themselves as fully responsible for their actions and where they must stop blaming their victims. Most don’t have the courage to do this without the threat of prison.
State 2 is difficult even for those who have never been sexually violent or sexually exploitive. They may have to see that they slandered true victims or stood by as someone they knew committed acts of sexual violence or taught children dangerous rape myths. Or they may have to accept that someone they trusted and loved made a deliberate choice to exploit them sexually.
When we’ve seen ourselves as always on the side of right, it takes courage to see where we’ve been wrong and where we have wronged others. Add a lack of knowledge about what to do to get into state 3 or 4 and it can be terrifying.
Many people retreat to state 1 and subsequently let their fear of state 2 and denial of what they learned there motivate them to increase their attacks on those who would drag them into such a terrible place.
Now on to the belief that all anti-rape activists are man haters.
To stay out of state 2, those in state 1 have to find a powerful reason to explain anti-rape activists’ true motivation since it can’t be that sexual exploitation, assault and abuse are serious problems in our society.
Since most alleged rapists are men, then the true cause for rape hysteria must be a deep desire to persecute men for being themselves.
A few of these ranters have gone so far as to refuse to take any rape charge seriously until victim advocates admit they have helped liars persecute innocent men. To test the irrationality of this request ask yourself if these same people would say something like, “I refuse to take murder seriously until you show me how many people faked their own deaths and made it look like they were murdered.”
It doesn’t compute. You either take a particular type of crime seriously or you don’t.
If you don’t believe certain types of sexual exploitation, sexual abuse and sexual assault should be crimes, then focus on the decisions law makers have made and ask them to decriminalize certain acts and stop attacking victims of these types of crimes because you don’t think they have the right to say they are crime victims.
Note: Also posted on my blog, http://abyss2hope.blogspot.com
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On the other hand, there are also some extremists who wish to equate heterosexual males with mysogyny. It seems that some extremists insist that all women be outraged by male sexual advances which are really just attempts to rape.
Insisting that all hetero men are rapists and every woman should expect to be sexually assaulted by a man in their lifetime, or she isn’t normal promotes a certain psyche.
Alas, what would their motives be?
I know what you mean…did you get the chance to read the question from a reader thread over at my blog. (Maybe that is what insired your post. LOL!!) It’s really bad.
Um, sorry, but I think that’s what Cathy Young attempted to do in the piece you lamblasted her for. She attempted to point out that the current laws for rape and sex crimes don’t differentiate enough for the level of the crimes.
Thus, a young man who is accused of date rape is forced to register as a sexual offender and have it hang over his head for the rest of his life. True, he was convicted, but she had pointed to questionable behavior of the victim (lying to police). In some states, it’s illegal to buy a gal a drink and ask her if she’s interested in sex. In Florida, it’s also illegal to have sex with an intoxicated person. In this case, the convicted felon was guilty of having sex with the gal while both were intoxicated.
Cathy’s quotation of the Fox News interview was questionable in her intent, but accurate in her reporting.
Aballfan, if Cathy Young was as accurate about water as she is about feminism, she’d have drowned to death a long time ago.
it’s really hard to take anyone’s argument seriously when they insist on referring to women as “gals”.
xoxo, jared
ms. jared,
I don’t insist on referring to all women as ‘gals’. I do think some women could be called a ‘gal’ just as some men could be called a ‘guy’. I’d much rather buy a gal a drink than a woman who I didn’t feel comfortable calling a ‘gal’.
I am Guy, hear me roar!
many women would prefer to buy their own drinks than receive them from people who think it’s unreasonable for convicted date rapists to have to register as sex offenders.
xoxo, jared
Azbballfan,
If you don’t think those who rape their dates are sex offenders, you are pro-rape.
Azbballfan,
Rape is a violent assault that denies a human being the right to have control over her/his own body. How does being on a “date”, or being with a friend or acquaintance change this? Rape is rape no matter what the circumstance. Any person who commits this crime is a sex offender and should be treated as such.
Actually, I think that many questions about rape that are of the form “Why do/don’t people (think/feel/understand)…” can be properly answered with the statement “Because they aren’t thinking about it from the perspective of the victim,” or “because they are fixated on the thought of the perpetrator.”
Why do people think women lie about rape? Because they don’t see the damage it does to the victim. They don’t think of the pain, the fear, the anger, etc.. So, they’re willing to say “maybe it didn’t really happen.”
You tell me, they’re your strawfeminists.
You tell me, they’re your strawfeminists.
Promoting the fear of hetero behavior by insisting that all men are rapists and all women should expect to be sexually assaulted (or they’re not normal) is an interesting agenda. Certainly more interesting than simple misandry.
I find it interesting that this site seems to be one of the loudest feminist site on the topic. If this is a rape victim support site, or one which is dedicated to promoting its awareness, then just say so. But certainly there are different topics just as relevant to today’s feminists – aren’t there?
I hope you weren’t insinuating that I’m pro rape. I think if you read my post, you’ll see that I just tried to point out an inconsistency with the last paragraph in your this post with a previous post.
I awful for women who’ve been raped and they have all of my sympathy. I think the author of the article was trying to make a point that maybe laws could be created to treat varying levels of assualt differently. Allowing the public’s reaction to various crimes to fit the specifics of the crime.
And yes, I also reserve the right to feel compassion for anyone who committed a crime. Certainly there is a reason for their action. It is fine to punish them, but society also benefits from understanding the root causes.
Maybe it’s a character flaw to want to show compassion to people who are browbeaten and abused.
Azbballfan,
I have no clue where you are coming up with the assertion that I’m saying that all hetero men are rapists. I’ve never said that and never will. You seem to be falling into the trap of assuming I’m a deluded man hater.
And your strawfeminist rides again! It’s not the posters and commenters at Alas that are suggesting women should expect to be sexually assaulted. It’s implicit in all of the things people say to women who are raped (“why were you walking alone?” “why were you out at night?” “why were you with a strange man?”).
So, because rape’s come up a lot recently, the comments made here aren’t valid?
You know, I think this sentence is referring to *rapists*. That definitely puts a check in the rape apologist column.
Oh, come on, you’re too nice. He had rapist apology written all over him with the classic, “But you said all men are rapists!”
True, but the outright apologies are the ones that boggle the mind.
evil_fizz,
I wasn’t referring to rapists in the sympothy for victims of browbeating comment. I was clearly referring to the author who was browbeaten for suggesting that someone consider the feelings of the wrongfully convicted.
I hadn’t heard of the term ‘rape apologist’ so your reference to it made me look it up. The first definition I could find attributed the term to those who argue that individual’s experiences in rape cases should not be included in discussions of rape. I think you’ll find from previous posts of mine that this does not accurately describe me. I find gross overgeneralizations drawn upon populist notions without specific supporting evidence to be boorish.
I have shared a few of my own personal experiences in accusations of rape.
I’ve described the difficulty of identifying with a sister who was a victim of sexual misconduct – one who I love and support but have difficulty empathizing with her because her experience is so far removed from anything I’ve can comprehend. I feel pain because when my sister says “you can’t understand how I feel” she’s right.
I’ve also described a situation where a woman allowed the post coital peer pressure of her friends to allow her to wrongfully accuse my roommate of sexual misconduct. I happen to know the account her friends spread to the world was blatantly wrong because I was in the room and witnessed the event. Yet another reason to insist that all sex crimes should be reported and dealt with by the authorities.
To describe me as being on one side of the issue of rape or the other I think confuses the issue. The issue isn’t “you’re either entirely for rape victims and condemning anyone accused of it to hell or you’re promoting rape.” The issue is: “Bad things happen. Let’s try to help those who are hurt and understand what happened so we can help make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Kate,
Please ignore my response to your Strawfeminist comment. I looked up Strawfeminist and now realize I might not understand your reference to it. If your reference is a thinly veiled jab at those with too much spare time on their hands who get a rush out of promoting gross generalizations in the void of real evidence, then I think I get it.
Abyss2hope,
Looking back at my initial post, I can clearly see where you would take my comments as personal. For that, I will apologize. (While still claiming to not be a rape apologist.) I will admit that the cause for my reaction stems from the recent flurry of posts on rape in this site.
That being said, has there been a recent post on the role of feminism in class strugles of modern day American as they compare to say, 1950?
azbballfan, you wrote:
Except that rape is an issue where you are on one side or the other. Not because the lives of men who commit rape should be ignored in dealing with them, either as individuals or as a social/cultural phenomenon, and not because (and this is the implication of your anti-feminist canard about feminism “promoting the fear of hetero behavior”) the women these men rape are somehow suddenly inherently virtuous victims of the evils of patriarchy. Rather, you are on one side or the other because you are either willing to acknowledge the totality of what has been done to a woman who has been raped…and that includes the social, cultural, racial/ethnic, socio-economic, you-name-it aspects of rape…or you are not; and if you are not…as you seem not to be…then, no matter how much you may protest that you are a person of good will, the bottom line is that you are on the side of the rapist.
abyss2hope wrote:
I love the rest of the post, but I’m going to have to quibble here. This four-stage model is from behavioural science, refers specifically to skill acquisition, and you’ve unfortunately switched stages 3 and 4. The progression in acquiring any skill is:
1. unconscious incompetence – doing it wrong but doesn’t know why
2. conscious incompetence – doing it wrong but does know why and can monitor errors
3. conscious competence – adjusted behaviour according to new model and now doing it right
4. unconscious competence – doing it right without having to monitor behaviour – new behaviours have become habituated.
The classic model is shooting basketball hoops.
It’s a bit of a stretch to apply the skill acquisition model to stages of moral-empathic cognitive processes, what my grandmother would have called “building character”, but I see what you mean nonetheless.
Azbballfan:
To view rape in this way is to say rape is somehow random (like having a tire blow out) and not a matter of choice by the rapist (like that hapless driver). Further, if rape is something that just happens to the rapist and the rape victim, there is no way to make sure it doesn’t happen again and as you state,d it implies that all hetero men are potential rapists (a tire can blow out on anybody).
This view of rape means a rejection of the idea that someone is a true victim and instead paints rape victims as simply unlucky–the same way the perpetrator is unlucky.
I am not alone in believing that committing rape or sexual abuse requires one or more deliberate decisions on the part of the perpetrator. It might be as seemingly harmless as: “It’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.”
In her column where she lamented a good son’s fate, Kathleen Parker glossed over the time when these decisions were made and like an illusionist distracted readers with the events before and after the moments where that man made the decisions that ultimately sent him to prison. If you think rape just happens then you might not have noticed the importance of this omission, but as a rape survivor KP’s omission was a glaring one.
On the reason for the recent series of posts on rape and sexual violence, check out my guestblogger intro.
azballfan
A rape culture is basically a culture where the view of sex is more about what one person does with someone elses body (basically what men do with women’s bodies) than about mutual desire and interaction.
Any time a man or woman thinks about sex in a way that considers womens desire as redundant (like describing prostitution as “sex” for example) they help perpetuate a culture where men can disregard women’s rejection and lack of participation in what they’re doing to our bodies without calling it rape in their own minds.
I would also like to add that since a very common reaction when someone doesn’t respect your boundaries, and for example continue with sex after you’ve tried to push them away and/or said no, is to freeze from shock – unless you were actually in the bed yourself I wonder how you can be certain that your room-mate did not rape the girl you described.
The entire problem is that a majority of men don’t seem to consider women’s desire as necessary for them to enjoy sex. Thus the nagging for sex, the idea that girls should put up with sex and the view that women participating in sexual acts for money is a turn on.
tigtog,
Thanks for info on the origin of the four stage-model. The reason I flipped #3 & #4 in my analogy was that many people, male and female, avoid abusive sexual habits and thought patterns without giving it a second thought and without a clue that others aren’t doing the same.
Sometimes, women avoid those situations through sheer dumb luck as well. But nobody should have to rely on luck to be safe. :/
There sure are some people quick to judge.
Richard, your post completely ignores the context and intent of mine. Your insistence of a universal polarized view of the world is mind numbing. The only question I have is, in this world, who is the “Decider?” Let me know so I can sleep at night.
Abyss,
You misinterpreted the phrase you pulled out of my post and used it out of context. The intentially vague language was used right after giving two very different examples of victims in rape cases. One where a sexual assault occured and another where a very personal assualt occured in a false claim of rape.
I understand the need to rush to the aid of a victim and give them your complete and unfettered support. However there is evidence here that there are people who feel the same urge to rush to judgment of my own text without considering the context of how they are written. I wonder if similar treatment is given to those who are accused.
Abyss2hope – the link to the guest blogger intro isn’t working.
B – good points to which I will add that men aren’t the only one’s who nag for sex. My ex nagged all the time, but I won’t so far as to call her a rapist (her lawyer, maybe).
I’ve fixed the broken link.
Azbballfan:
I don’t think you do understand this at all since you seem to equate support of victims with the demonization of men.
Far be it from me to tell people how to moderate, but what the hell is azbballfan still being allowed to post for?
What context can justify your view?
In a case of rape there are two sides, the victim(s) and the perpetrator(s). That’s pretty black and white. In a court case there might be a third side – the accused, who might, or might not, be the perpetrator(s), but when we are talking the actual rape, there is only two sides.
If you start defending the one side, the perpetrator’s, then you are by definition against the other side. If your default stance is to believe the perpetrator, then your default stance is to dis-believe the victim. If your default stance is to find excuses for the perpetrator, then your default stance is to find reasons for the rape to have happened.
Note, I am not talking about defeding people who are accused of rape, but of people who have commited rape.
Excuses like “she shouldn’t have been together with strange men”, “she shouldn’t be so drunk”, “she shouldn’t be walking alone at night”, “she had sex with someone else that night” are defenses of the perpetrator of the rape. The man who actually did the sexual assault. The man who choose to do what he did.
No matter what the woman did, there is no excuse for that.
She could walk drunk and naked down the street in a dangerous neighbourhood, with several strangers, at night, and it still wouldn’t make one bit of difference – it’s rape, and someone committed it.
If you try to defend the rape in any way, you are a rapist apologist.
If your default stance is to believe that there is more to the story, or that the woman is making up a story, you are a rapist apologist.
If you opinion is that a rape victim is in any way to blame for being raped, you are a rapist apologist.
I can find no excuse for rape, and never will be able to find any excuse for rape.
azbballfan, you wrote to me that I “completely ignore[d] the context and intent” of your post and that I have a “universal polarized view of the world.” You then wrote to Abyss that she “misinterpreted […] the intentionally vague language” [the same language I critiqued in my post] you used about “bad things” happening to people. What you’re doing is playing the game of justifying/defending yourself by asserting after you have been criticized that “that’s not really what I meant,” which is not only not a fair way to argue, but is also suggestive of an unwillingness to look carefully at the language you use and/or to make sure that you use that language carefully so that you are not misinterpreted/misunderstood…which is, in turn, suggestive, on a purely textual basis (I of course have no knowledge of you as a person; all any of us know of you is through the words you post to this discussion), of someone who is more interested in sabotaging a debate than in actually having one.
Let me make that last point again in a slightly different way: Everything I write in response to you…anything anyone writes in response to you on this blog…is in response to your words; it is not, nor can it be, a personal judgment; and your words give the impression (at least to me) that you are more interested in splitting legal and argumentative hairs than you are in really understanding the nature of rape from either the rapist’s or his victim’s point of view, and the bottom-line result of that is, no matter how good your intentions may be, that you end up serving the interests of the rapist and the rape culture that produced him, along with the rest of us men who benefit from rape culture whether we want to or not, more than the interests of women who are raped and/or who have to live in fear of rape.
I was, for example, initially sympathetic to your use of the story…and I am assuming that your understanding of the story is accurate because I don’t yet have any reason to assume otherwise…about the woman who accused a man she’d had sex with of rape after the fact because of pressure from her friends. No matter how real date rape might be, the rhetoric of date rape is a rhetoric and, as such, can take on a life of its own and be used in all sorts of ways that divorce it from the reality of rape. I have some personal experience with this, and though it is a very different experience from your friend’s.
I stopped being sympathetic to your use of the story when it became clear that you were using it not to understand the underlying social, cultural and political dynamics of rape and rape culture (because I don’t think anyone would disagree that, if the woman really did accuse the man of rape after the fact for the precise reasons you give, he was innocent and that she did something wrong), but rather to focus on the unfair difficulties men face when confronted with date-rape rhetoric. That focus, and whether you like it or no your words place the focus there, puts you on the side if not of individual rapists, then certainly on the side of rape culture. (And I should add that I believe you when you say you have great concern for individual women who have been raped, but that concern does not, in and of itself, constitute real opposition to a rape culture.)
Oops! For some reason the link I included in my last post isn’t working–what happened to the preview feature?. So here it is again.
Richard,
Your experience (however you label it) shows how sexual assault has a ripple effect. Your girlfriend learned how to be sexual from rapists and she used those rape skills on you.
The rape culture = paying it forward in a very harmful way.
abyss2hope: it seems like an abuse of the skill acquisition model to arbitrarily flip stages 3 and 4 just because it fits your analogy better, and I am concerned about the lack of rigor thus reflected, but I don’t think the model is essential to your larger point about developing sexual violence awareness.
There’s a huge amount of cognitive dissonance about sexual violence, and the result is injustice as victims are either intimidated into silence, or not believed, and rapists walk free.
I agree that even though you are innocent until proven guilty in the case of rape the victim should be helped more than the accused. Since the chance an alleged rape victim would lie about the rape is very low the police should focus on helping her more than helping the accused. This by no means should convict the accused of rape but should shift the compassion to the alleged victim. Also, everyone seems to be forgetting many abused individuals become abusers. I’m not saying all rapists were abused but if they were that childhood trauma shouldn’t be shoved aside. Rape is definitely not something to take lightly but after the accused has been convicted then if treatment can help the convicted rapist to stop raping then treatment should be an option. I absolutely hate when people (last person was my Women’s Studies college professor) say on one hand those victims of abuse should be helped and not locked up and then rapists ,no matter if they were abused and if the abuse played a large part in their becoming rapists, should be locked up or worse. Childhood trauma is one of the best predictors of future violence and law breaking behavior. This shouldn’t be overlooked and seems to always be overlooked.
Also, I think all incoming college freshman and high school seniors should be forced to take a rape education class. Many of my friends don’t think getting a girl drunk to where she can’t say no or yes and then having sex with her is rape. Or that if a girl is passed out and they have sex with her it is rape. Somewhere along the line they weren’t taught what constitutes rape past holding someone down. Education would eliminate some of the rapes IMO but there still is a cultural problem. And changing the mindset of every potential rapist seems to be the only solution.
azbballfan:
*Yawn*.
Azbballfan, cite either one person on this blog, or one feminist of note anywhere who has ever said anything which, taken in context implies that all hetero men are rapists or that all hetero sex is rape.
Marilyn French’s “All men are rapists” doesn’t count, because those were the words of a fictional character in a novel.
Dworkin/Mackinnon/whoever-it-is-today’s “All sex is rape” doesn’t count, because they have denied saying it, and there is no evidence that they ever did.
Mackinnon’s “All heterosexual intercourse is rape” doesn’t count because this is a misattribution. The phrase appears in the book “Professing Feminism…” by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, who are critics of Mackinnon. They claim that this is her view, but they don’t claim to be quoting her.
What MacKinnon has said (this is from page 82 in Feminism Unmodified; unfortunately, I don’t have the name of the chapter because the book is in storage and so I am quoting from an essay I wrote a long time ago):
Okay, there was more I wanted to say about the MacKinnon quote, but I got pulled away to get my son ready for school. I will try to get back to it later.
That quote doesn’t stand for either of the propositions that antifeminists love to pin on feminists.
Daran–
Quickly, since I am running off to teach: Of course not, but the MacKinnon quote I posted…and/or the sentiment behind it…is, I think, often, and often wilfully, mistaken for “all heterosexual intercourse is rape,” etc. The reason I posted it was that I think MacKinnon’s focus on a woman’s sense of her own reality–“Did I feel violated?”–gets at part of what’s behind the insistence that women frequently lie about being raped: not simply the inability or unwillingness to trust women’s perceptions of their own experience, but the refusal to consider that, for women, their experience is (or should be) central to their perceptions…and so anything a woman has to say about how she feels about any particular act of intercourse in which she has engaged is automatically suspect, even if she says she enjoyed it thoroughly. (There is a much longer discussion behind this last statement of mine, but I don’t have the time to go into it here.)
In post #40, Richard’s point is exactly the reason why the concept of somehow tailoring laws to “treat varying levels of assault differently,” or even worse, “allowing the public’s reaction to various crimes to fit the specifics of the crime” (see post #13) don’t work: they are about the law, or the public, deciding what does & doesn’t constitute a violation.
On the other hand, the law does require definitions and standards. It gets trickier in assault, murder, rape, etc. where people interact with each other as opposed to property–you have to talk about intent, aggravation, etc. I’d hate to see a rape standard in which a woman (or man) had to prove some sufficient level of traumatization in order for it to count as a rape.
Richard, I’m sorry but I don’t understand your last comment at all.
Addressing the question posed in the original post and speaking from my perspective as a white trans man in his 50’s, I believe a person cannot grow up in America without internalising a tendency to disbelieve a rape victim. Sexism, in all its ubiquitous, reprehensible complexity, ensures this. Some of the mechanisms and consequences have been discussed (or are apparent) in the original post and in previous comments.
Why do I believe in this tendency? Because even though I’m a critically-thinking, dyed-in-the-wool feminist, I notice an inexplicable propensity in myself to doubt rape accusations. I catch myself parsing the details of rapes for hints of internal inconsistencies, unlikely occurrences, “impossibilities,” outright lies, or “mistakes” committed by the victim. I rarely if ever do this with accounts of murder, kidnapping, hijacking, assault or other crimes in the news. Yet I consistently, unconsciously do it with rape.
I believe it’s important to acknowledge this tendency, in the same way it’s important for white people to acknowledge their internalised racism, and proceed from there to root out our prejudices and address the ways they bear on specific situations.
One more point. Regarding:
I just want to say that our culture raises men and women so differently that what azbballfan thought he saw could be quite different from what was happening from the woman’s’ perspective. Our prejudices distort what we see. A black man reaching into his coat pocket for a wallet can be perceived by a nervous policeman to be reaching for a gun, with devastating consequences. Likewise, as a previous commenter said, a woman freezing with panic can be perceived by her assailants to be consenting.
I think the problem is that the definition of “rape” has become so incredibly broad that almost anything can be construed as rape. Certainly, only the most extreme would disagree that forcing a person to engage in a sexual act (i.e. masturbation, masturbation of another, any kind of penetration) is rape. But beyond that, the definition gets dicey.
Also, there are more and more cases where it is proved that an allegation of rape is false. Surely you aren’t saying that these cases are so rare as to be insignificant?