When I was at University a young Act support called Nick Archer wrote a letter to Salient (the student newspaper). I don’t remember what the context was, I don’t remember what he was responding to. But I remember the letter itself very clearly. Because Nick Archer compared women to pieces of meat. He said that men were lions trying to get women, and if women wore too few clothes then they were responsible for men’s response.
I once ran into Nick Archer walking down a long and isolated road wearing a tight singlet – which was a very stressful experience.
I introduce this to point out that misogynists obviously have quite a limited imagination. Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, the Australian Mufti whose statements about rape, appears to have developed Nick Archer’s thesis a bit more thoroughly before . But they cover exactly the same ground. Because the Sheik has claimed he has been misrepresented I have provided the section in full. While it is possible that he was mistranslated, his reference to being sentanced to jail appears to make it clear that he is referring to non-consensual sex. This translation is from the The Australian:
But in the event of adultery, the responsibility falls 90 per cent of the time with women. Why? Because the woman possesses the weapon of seduction. She is the one who takes her clothes off, cuts them short, acts flirtatious, puts on make-up and powder, and goes on the streets dallying. She is the one wearing a short dress, lifting it up, lowering it down, then a look, then a smile, then a word, then a greeting, then a chat, then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay Jail, then comes a merciless judge who gives you 65years.
But the whole disaster, who started it? The Al-Rafihi scholar says in one of his literary works, he says: If I come across a crime of rape – kidnap and violation of honour – I would discipline the man and teach him a lesson in morals, and I would order the woman be arrested and jailed for life.
Why, Rafihi? He says, because if she hadn’t left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it. If you take a kilo of meat, and you don’t put it in the fridge, or in the pot, or in the kitchen, but you put in on a plate and placed it outside in the yard. Then you have a fight with the neighbour because his cats ate the meat. Then (inaudible). Right or not?
If one puts uncovered meat out in the street, or on the footpath, or in the garden, or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, then the cats come and eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem! If it was covered the cat wouldn’t have. It would have circled around it and circled around it, then given up and gone.
If she was in her room, in her house, wearing her hijab, being chaste, the disasters wouldn’t have happened. The woman possesses the weapon of seduction and temptation. That’s why Satan says about the woman, “You are half a soldier. You are my messenger to achieve my needs. You are the last weapon I would use to smash the head of the finest of men. There are a few men that I use a lot of things with, but they never heed me. But you? Oh, you are my best weapon.”
I only wish Nick Archer’s comments had received the same level of outrage as this man’s did. It’s not particularly reassuring to know that men will defend women’s right not to be treated as objects only when they can use women’s rights to attack other men (hence missing the women not being objects target anyway).
Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty
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…because women are never raped while they are AT home, “being chaste”, by husbands or male relatives.
oh wait. under that system of morality, this is the right of the men in the household, and even then the woman probably did something to deserve it.
have a nice day!
Two observations: 1) substitute “flashy new car” for woman and “carjacker” for rapist. Using the same logic, carjacking is the fault of the folks in Detroit for making their cars so desirable and the victims of carjackings should be punished. After all, what man among us could resist having our way with that shiny new car?
2) I’ve always felt the “desirable women as an ‘attractive nuisance'” theory of rape as implying men are too immature to be given responsibility. The “attractive nuisance” doctrine applies to things like putting fences around swimming pools, which form an irresistable temptation to young children not mature enough to be held responsible for their own actions. Thus, we make pool owners take precautions to ensure young children don’t trespass onto the pool owners’ property and drown in the swimming pool by calling swimming pools an “attractive nuisance.” It is easier to fence in the pool than the children…
However, this sets up an interesting paradox: The “foxy lady” defense implies that many men are too irresponsible and immature to control themselves around women. Doesn’t this imply that men are in general “too emotional” and “lacking in self-control” to be allowed any voice in running businesses, farms, countries, etc.? Shouldn’t we leave these things to the more mature, responsible female gender?
What it really boils down to, of course, is power and control. Societies allowing the “she tempted me” defense use rape against women in the same way the KKK used lynchings against blacks: it demonstrates the perp’s dominance and power while serving as a threat to the victim class to “not get uppity” and remain property. Terrorism, pure and simple.
Whenever I hear about a man saying that it’s the woman’s fault when she’s raped or in adultery, I want to say to him, “So, you’re basically saying that men are too stupid to control themselves.” That certainly doesn’t make men sound superior.
What a terrible view of the world this is. Women are meat and men are animals, unable to control their own impulses! I think these opinions say more about their holders’ views of themselves than they do of their views of women.
If men were automata, brainlessly responding to stimuli like a computer program, then Nick Archer and Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali would be right (do you touch a hot stove, knowing you’ll be burned?). But that kind of world is not the kind we live in, and would be entirely abominable if it was true.
What kind of spiritual vacuosity could produce such a low view of humanity? If we don’t assume that people can control their own actions, then law, philosophy, and all of society is pointless.
Comment deleted by Amp. Please reread the bottom line of Maia’s post: “Comments are only open to feminists and feminist friendly/pro-feminist commenters.”
Addendum to my previous comment: I don’t think Nick and the Sheikh have particular animus against women, any more so than I have animus against the steak I ate last night. They’re narcissists who think they found a flaw in themselves (inability to restrain their desires) and are picking at it, trying to blame someone else for this inability.
Their attitude is “I can’t help acting this way, so the world has to change to suit me!” It’s all about them, and you could replace women with any other group and rape with any other immoral act and they’d make the same arguments.
Ew, yeah, SO sick of the “women are sexy looking steaks and all evil is their fault because of Eve” thing. The whole time I was reading this post, all I could think of was the book The Pornography of Meat by Carol J. Adams. It helps to explain directly how and why women and animals are lumped together into a group seperate from other humans (men) and then oppressed and consumed. So I thought I’d recommend it here.
To carry that fucking fool’s analogy further – cats are known to rip up packages to get at what’s inside.
And if you carry the analogy even farther – I don’t think we could convince four other non-food-stealing tom cats to tell on the one cat (Caroline, one of ms_xeno’s former hm’s cats, did tell on the other cats for misbehaving, though.)
Fundamentalist religion of any kind is evil. It puts its followers at odds with both societal and scientific progress, whether it”s a Muslim cleric saying that women who don’t wear a burqa or hijab ask to be raped, or Christians who want to ban the use of embryonic stem cells for research into curing degenerative diseases.
I agree with the posters who have pointed out that this “The Devil Made Me Do It” type of rationalization for rape makes men out to be dull-witted beasts unable to control themselves. I’ve noticed that many conservatives really do subscribe to this very dark view of men as ravening monsters. Then, of course, these same conservatives turn around and say that feminists ” hate men.” Which, of course, is BS. I maintain that feminists, by expecting men to behave like decent human beings, are the ones who hold men in high regard.
A biologist named Robert Sussman has written a book, Man the Hunted, which maintains that rather than fierce and manly hunters, we evolved as prey animals – lunch on two feet to leopards and the like. Sussman traces the “myth of man the killer” to the Judeo-Christian concept of original sin. I wonder if this same concept of original sin, as well as Eve the Temptress, lies behind the rape myths so many conservatives subscribe to. Even nonbelievers who cloak their misogyny behind evo-psychological rationalizations (“Darwin made me do it!”) ultimately derive this viewpoint from original sin and the myth of Eve, as we do live in a Christian-based culture in the US, much of Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Even if we’re nominally secular, the foundation of these cultures are Christian.
I generally think that Christianity (and religion in general) is an excuse, not a cause, for these kinds of opinions. If people want to be lazy and blame other people for their shortcomings, they’ll find a way to do it–religion is just a very easy way. I doubt pre-Christian societies were any less misogynist as a rule, or that people in those societies were any less likely to hold views like Mike Archer’s.
Bean – ACT is our extreme right wing party – politically they’re Reganite Republicans without the religion, but they’re much smaller – they used to get about 5% of the vote, now they get less than 2%. I should have put that in.
I had to sneer when I heard that guy’s comment. It made me think wow woman are meat and men are less than animals. Wow I thought men were the strong ones.
it looks like men in that culture feel that they are the dominate ones, but undeservedly tho, simply because they are stronger and can force their views on woman. Maybe if they would let the truly mature ones (both men and woman) run the country and maybe they can get somewhere.
So it is the woman’s responsiblity to control men. that is a new thought. I didn’t know men were that easily led. Maybe they need to take classes on self control and being human first. Then woman wouldn’t have to dress like walking tents.
And are men that afraid of woman they need to oppress them? I read that people who are afraid of something try to keep it suppressed as much as possible, so rather than showing their moral superiority over woman their idea of how woman should act shows they are afraid of woman.
Cowards.
RR
Their arguments fail on so many levels, but the one I like best is this.
If men can’t restrain themselves because women are so overpoweringly sexy, why don’t we have widespread daylight rapes on every block? Why do they wait for dark, pull a woman into a hiding place, and then run like heck?
Obviously men have discipline and self control, so they must be choosing not to exercise it when they choose to rape.
Actually, Roberta, the “women are responsible for the virtue of men” schtick has been around for some time. Off the top of my head, it goes back at least as far as Rousseau.
I have mentioned this book before on this blog, but a really interesting one to look at in light of this cleric’s comments is Timothy Beneke’s Men on Rape, especially the introduction.
Another interesting, though perhaps slightly tangential, read would be Rachel Biale’s Women & Jewish Law, which gives a really thorough treatment to the idea in Judaism that women are supposed to be that which circumscribes the wild and potentially uncontrollable force of male sexuality. If I remember correctly, there is also an interesting, but brief, comparison to the view of women’s sexuality in I-don’t-remember-which-sect of Christianity, where it is women’s sexuality that is perceived as wild, chaotic, etc. and it is male sexuality that is supposed to accomplish the circumscription. It would be interesting to add to these two a third book dealing with Islam, but I don’t know any off the top of my head.
I live in Australia and am fairly sure he references a particularly vicious (comparatively speaking, I mean) gang rape that occurred in a Sydney public toilet (by, yes, Muslim men) that was in the news a little while ago.
There is massive public outcry, and outcry from the Muslims in that particular community and over Australia (his mosque is one that reaches the most of Australia’s Muslims), yet what I love is those who defend him: “he’s just an old man, leave him alone”.
I also love that in his eyes, and in many people’s eyes, women are such objects that they are, quite literally, meat, incapable of moving or controlling themselves. And yet, when society makes women vulnerable and makes them such objects, it’s still women’s fault if they are victimised.
I’d love to have his comments turned about on him: if this analogy follows (and it doesn’t, even forgetting the sheer hatred in that speech), then his fellows must be alley cats, mangy, irresponsible and vile.
Incidentally, he has also claimed to have been ‘misinterpreted’, just as the Pope was misinterpreted when he made inflammatory comments. It was right up until that comment that the Sheik insisted that these were an attack upon Islam, etc, etc – yet he is willing to say the opposite if it is for his own benefit.