Sailorman (who occasionally comments on Alas) has an interesting new argument. He believes that the only way anyone should use the word ‘rape’ is to reflect the exact legal definition of where they live:
Anyone who frequents feminist blogs has seen similar claims, and more. Sometimes the claims are much more explicit: “drunk people cannot legally consent.” “Any pressure means it’s rape.” “If you didn’t want to have sex, it’s rape.”
In many states, those are all lies. And it’s doing no favors to those women who hear them.
If only members of the women’s liberation movement had had Sailorman’s wisdom, imagine how much stronger we would have been there. Obviously the feminists who started discussing ‘marital rape’ weren’t doing women any favours. Legally once , and feminists who implied otherwise were treating women like children and telling them what you think they “want to” or “should” hear ” (to paraphrase the oh so wise Sailorman words).
Because it is all our fault (sorry if you’ve heard that before):
If a woman knew, really knew, that a threat of trying to get you fired would not support a rape conviction, would she still give in to the threat? If she knew that scared silence gives much less support for a conviction than a shouted “no!” would she still remain silent?
I actually have no words to express my anger at the first example Sailorman comes up with. I sincerely doubt that a single person who has ever been raped by her boss has considered what the rape laws in her state when she decided how hard she could resist.
I believe that a woman is raped if she’s drunk, if she withdraws her consent part way through sex, or if she wanted to have sex with someone else. The law doesn’t agree with me. I’ve already written about why I define rape in the way I do:
I define rape in the way I do to support the women who are naming their experiences, and reiterate the idea they have the right to say no to sex.
I also define rape in the way I do as a protection against men who have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with them. I believe that one of the few forms of protection women have against rape is gossip – passing on information that we know about men who hurt women.
Women need to know who the men are who don’t notice, or don’t care, that the women they’re sleeping with don’t want to have sex with them. Calling those acts rape is both protection and resistance.
I still believe that, my definition about rape is about women’s experiences, which is more important to me than the law.
Note for Commenters This post is open for feminist and feminist friendly commentators only. Non-feminists, and those I’ve asked not to post in my feminist only threads are not welcome.
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I seriously doubt rape victims are thinking logically about the chances of a rape conviction in court while they are being attacked. They’re probably thinking of more practical things like how to avoid getting further injured or killed.
I’m really glad you responded to this. I saw it on his blog and was appalled and angry to the point of speechlessness.
I’m so glad that legal definitions determine my vocabulary!
And when referencing works of art that show the rape of Persephone, women and only women are now required to say, “The overbearing seduction of Persephone which would be rape and kidnapping if it wasn’t in a mythical era.”
So . . .
if a woman is in a country that practices Sharia and is forced to have sex against her will in front of only three other men, it’s not rape. The law says there have to be four men, so there!
Slaveowners never murdered black people; they “disposed of property.” Isn’t that what the law says?
Well, I’ve talked about the divide between the “legal definition” and the “moral definition” of rape, and how it’s a problem that we don’t have separate terms the way we do for other crimes (e.g., “larceny” as a legal term and “theft” as a non-legal one), because people are far too willing to say that anything that doesn’t fit the legal definition of rape, with all its protections for defendants, doesn’t fit the moral definition, and is in fact not actually wrong (or is wrong on such a trifling level that it might as well not be).
But refusing to call rape (in the “moral” sense) rape is emphatically *not* the solution – it’d be far better to come up with a new phrase to describe the definition under law, and emphasize that definition’s incompleteness.
Thank you for responding to this. I’ve been meaning to comment at Sailorman’s place, but haven’t had the time or energy to put it all into words. And it doesn’t seem enough to say, “You’re just completely missing the point on this one.”
If a woman knew, really knew, that a threat of trying to get you fired would not support a rape conviction, would she still give in to the threat? If she knew that scared silence gives much less support for a conviction than a shouted “no!” would she still remain silent?
If someone were about to rape me, I wouldn’t be worrying so much about how the sequence of events would hold up in court later–although I’d probably have a good idea. I’d be worrying about the rapist. “Sure, he might injure me or kill me, and I don’t think I can fight him off, but at least the jury would be satisfied!”
If a woman ever says she does not want to have sex then a man should never force her to have sex. But a blanket statement that to have sex with a drunk woman is rape is going to far. Much sex between single people, who are not in committed relationships, occurs when alcohol is involved.
Clearly, if a guy ends up alone with a woman who is so drunk she is passed out, this guy should not have sex with her. But most of the time things are not this black and white. What about if both people are pretty drunk, but neither is quite to the level of passing out. So the woman never says no, but her judgment is blurred. So did she get raped?
It is common for young women and young men to wake up after a night of drinking beside someone that in hindsight they really wish that they hadn’t had sex with. If they both regret it, did they rape each other?
Dan, did you follow the link that accompanied the word “drunk” in Maia’s post? Maia is referring to a judge who said that an incident was not rape, not because the victim consented (she did not), but because she was drunk.
Given that context, Maia was not claiming that “to have sex with a drunk woman is rape” in all circumstances. She was, however, rightly objecting to the claim that if a woman is drunk, then she’s responsible for whatever happens to her, and a rapist can use her drunkenness as a mitigating circumstance.
Ampersand,
Yes, I followed the link and the judge sounds like a real dingbat.
Sailorman’s post was deeply disturbing to me for several reasons. One was his claim that if you can’t prove rape in a court of law (either because of jury bias or poorly written statutes) you are a liar if you say you were raped. Second is the idea that all rape victims should be detached enough from what’s being done to them that they can analyze how a jury would react to their reactions and change those reactions in order to please the potential jury.
The final reason is that Sailorman puts all responsibility for what happens in a rape on the rape victim, turning the rapist into someone nearly invisible. From his tone Sailorman could as easily be telling women how they should react when their car hits a patch of black ice. Like black ice, rapists and males are just behaving naturally. This view of rapists doing what comes naturally is supported by Sailorman’s failure to tell men that they should alter their behavior so no woman or girl they have sex with could ever possibly view them as rapists, exploiters or abusers.
Requiring men to stop pushing for sex when there isn’t an eager and willing response is just too extreme for Sailorman. Avoiding rape is women’s work. All men need to think about is how to get away with taking what they want.
O…Kay….
So, let’s say…a woman is in the process of being raped.
She senses there is no way to overwhelm him.
She also figures from the situation that if she resists (i.e. satisfies that jury)
he’s likely to kill her.
A deceased victim with a clear cut case is better than a living woman who chose survival to tell her story and hopefully send the rapist away?
*What?*
And, what about the class of women due to illness, temporary infirmity,impairment or old age…who *cannot* “resist” in the conventional manner….the very people who, by some studies, are more likely to be assaulted because they appear vulnerable….
Rarely does an ill thought out definition suggested by a man make me *angry.* This one won.
Sailorman shows more male entitlement than a willingness to learn in most of his comments. I wish he’d check his male privilege on a regular basis.
re Dan’s comment
In a case where both partners are drunk, I think the cutting edge isn’t whether or not she said ‘no’ – it’s whether or not she said ‘yes’. If the other party does not clearly get that message, they need to back the hell off. Both for their own safety and for the safety of the other person.
(I say that as somebody who participated in a lot of drunken sex when I was young and single and my consent at the time was very explicit. And yeah, occasionally I thought “I shoudn’t have done that.” But it was my choice, so you know, no hard feelings.)
I think another important point that’s being overlooked is that most rapes are never even reported. A woman in a rape situation isn’t thinking “how can this be prosecuted in court?” In most cases she doesn’t even want to take it to court. Will understanding the law lead more women to say “no?” Of course not, if most rape victims try to stay clear of the law (and for good reason.) Why should feminist definitions change to fit legal definitions, and not vice versa?
OK I’m confused about something. Why should someone being raped even have to resist at all? What difference does that make to whether it is rape or not?
Span, it seems that Sailorman and many others don’t believe boys and men are rapists if they can take sex without going through a stage where the victim shows stereotypical resistance such as scratching at the rapist’s eyes or screaming non-stop. That a victim truly experienced rape doesn’t matter, the rape must happen in a way that makes the rapist acknowledge that what he’s doing is rape.
As long as he wasn’t traumatized by her response, it ain’t real rape.
To me, one of the most telling problems with Sailorman’s post is that, even if one were to grant that his central claim is true (and I do not think it is true)–i.e., that if women knew rape law in their jurisdictions in detail and acted accordingly, there would be more rape convictions and, ultimately, fewer rapes–nowhere does he even remotely suggest that it is the law that needs to change so that it reflects the multiple realities both of women’s experience of rape and of how, when, where and why men rape in the first place.
That Sailorman turns first to legal definitions is telling. It is a classic, weak debate technique – when one wishes to deny something, use a different definition of the same word. Way back in high school, I used that a few times in L/D. And then I had by ass handed to me by someone who knew how to counter it, much like this post.
Preserve us from good intentions. If the legal definition of rape conflicts with the experience of rape and the moral definition, the correct response is to change the legal definition, not to conform our description of experience to fit warped legalistic terms.
Abyss2hope, you are spot on – Sailorman (and others like him) are not seeing rape as something the victim experiences but as something the perpetrator experiences.
As long as so many men are thinking about rape from that perspective it’s going to be difficult to change any law at all.
Sailorman – I have asked you not to post on my threads marked feminist only – if you want to post a response do it on your own blog. I have saved a copy of this comment in case you don’t have a copy – Maia
OK. So, if I’m reading you right, you’re arguing that the problem with feminist memes about rape is taht we don’t know the legal definition.
Except, I dont’ really think that’s right.
Also, you’re arguing that most women don’t know what the legal definition of rape is, and therefore that feminists have to alter their speech about rape.
I don’t think that’s right either.
So, yes.
Also, I probably shouldn’t be responding to you here, on account of the fact that I think Maia specifically asked you in her note not to respond on this thread (those I’ve asked not to post in my feminist only threads are not welcome).
Maybe I’ll repost this on your blog – if I feel like I want to reply to you in a hostile arena, which I’m not sure I do.
I agree with Sailorman on the point that we do women a disservice by encouraging them to call a sexual act “rape” that will absolutely never be considered rape under any definition, either now or in the future.
For instance, there was a previous thread on Alas about a post at Biting Beaver where a girl was over her boyfriends house and he got her to give in to having sex with him. The boyfriend was emotionally manipulative but I think that instead of telling our daughters that they have been raped we need to work on making them confident enough to tell the boyfriend to “give my ass, I’m leaving because you don’t respect me”. And we need to work on making sure our sons know that it is unnacceptable to continue to try to get a woman to have with you-even if you don’t use physical force-to have sex.
I don’t believe that stretching the label of “what is rape” benefits women because it encourages a victim mentality instead of helping them to assert more control over the situations they find themselves in and to raise their self-esteem.
SmartBlkWoman, while you might not see that BB’s scenario could be rape, I know it can be since giving in while isolated and under emotional and physical pressure is not the same as consenting. The boy or man in that scenario knew she didn’t want to have sex but continued pushing for sex anyway until he got what he wanted. And that makes him a rapist.
She said no and it didn’t matter. In most real life version of BB’s scenario, the “giving in” is done while being physically restrained.
To refuse to see that man as a rapist encourages men to recreate BB’s scenario. To put all responsibility for the girl’s loss of control on the girl excuses the man who sets out to control her.
Isn’t it better to stop BB’s scenario at the source (decision to go after sex whether the partner likes it or not) rather than demanding that all potential victims remain in a constant state of vigilance?
There is a difference between being “isolated” and between being “unable to leave”. If I am at someone’s house who I find physically threatening but who is not stopping me from leaving then I don’t believe that can be construed as physically pressure, particularly if I don’t live there and have somewhere else that I can readily go.
And what exactly do you mean by “physical pressure”? Is that the same as physically stopping someone from leaving, because if you are not physically restraining someone-such as blocking the exit with your body or forcibly holding them-who is trying to exit the premises then I don’t see how that can be construed as rape either.
But again you seem to be fudging the issue: there is a difference between physically restraining someone ( which is rape) and between telling them “either have sex with me or I’m breaking up with you”.
I disagree. I think that to call that man a rapist is to allow women to continue to see themselves as victimized instead of encouraging them to realize that they can leave when someone is trying to get them to do something that they don’t want to do and to help them to see that they are under no pressure to satisfy a man’s sexual urges at the expense of their own feelings; sex is not something that you do for someone else.
I think that by labeling the man as a rapist in situations like this we hinder women from being able to see just how much control they have over the situation.
I also think have to acknowledge that men are raised under patriarchy to think that emotionally manipulating women into having sex scores them points and is not viewed as the despicable act that it is. We need to encourage men to see their actions for what they are and the effect that they have on the women who they coerce; I think that by reflectively calling them rapists we also hinder them from looking critically at their own actions and seeing how they need to change.
I agree that males behavior needs to change but even if the men did change the women are still susceptible to emotional manipulation. The same routine that men use to get sex in isolated houses is the same routine that is used at work, at school, at the health club etc to get women to do what they want them to do. It just so happens that we call in rape when it relates to sex. By instead calling it emotional manipulation-which it is-we can relate it so the same behavior that we see in other social spheres and hopefully effect a larger change in behavior for men and women.
I don’t want women to remain in a constant state of vigilance but I do want them to recognize all the various shades of usury when they encounter it.
The more I think about it, the less I understand the idea that women shouldn’t call something rape unless it fits the legal definition.
Not all violent deaths are murder; I can certainly envision (rare) instances where someone could experience the exact same trauma as a “legitimate” rape victim, and yet wouldn’t consider the other person to be culpable in any way. But we still need a name for it- and I get the feeling even “sexual assault” wouldn’t cut it for many when it come to BB’s example. Perhaps we need a name other than rape or even sexual assault – or the legal terms need to change – but we are more likely to create such a name if we call it something than if we fail to name the problem at all.
Secondly, just because someone isn’t legally at fault doesn’t mean that many or most would not consider them morally at fault. We call all kinds of things murder that would never make it to a courtroom even with the best of evidence – at least not under workable laws. Not providing health insurance to workers when one isn’t required by law to do so is certainly not a crime and it’s especially not murder – even if the decision leads to premature death. Many people would consider it a moral failing, however, and even murder in the moral sense of the word.
And that’s all before we even get to the very common scenarios where many here agree that something should legally be considered rape – or some other crime on the sexuall assault spectrum – but currently isn’t.
The very idea of defining rape only by legal means is an affront to victims. As others have pointed out, we do not require that common usage of words like theft, scam, or even abuse to fit an exact legal definition. Why do so when it comes to rape – unless one does not completely consider ignoring lack of consent to be an immoral act? It seems as though many people are only concerned with the breaking of rules or the physical violence and infliction of emotional trauma that usually accompanies disregarding someone’s autonomy when it comes to sex – and not the actual rape itself.
Of course, in the end, we do allow common usage of the word rape even when it doesn’t fit the legal definition – but only when it applies to countries, groups of people, and pretty much everything but an individual who has been sexually assualted. Then the conversation immediately centers around the details of each parties’ behaviour (but usually most especially the victim’s) and how the law applies to them.
While I can see that some of this is understandable confusion arising from two seperate meanings for the same word, I’d like to point out that physicists have been using the word “work” to mean something very specific, and most definitely not the common meaning, for a long time. Yet I’ve never known of any confusion regarding which definition is meant (unless someone is attempting a bad pun). Rape is certainly harder to deal with than other words with multiple definitions, but it’s not the only instance by any means. And I rather think it’s insulting to (potential) victims to assume they can’t tell the difference between legal and common usage definitions.
I think the bulk of the problem is the same issue we always have: the ugly idea that sex is something that men want – and women have. One common definition of rape is the unconsented taking of another’s property – especially when the property is initimate (thoughts/decisions) or vital to one’s being (a village’s fields). All the scenarios that I’ve seen tossed around as being rape morally but not (currently) legally fit this definition in one way or another. I don’t see how argument that they should not be called rape makes sense – unless one has a blurred understanding of consent vs. submission.
Perhaps one might want to ask for clarification in many instances, and whether certain scenarious should be legally considered rape is subject to debate, but to ask people to not use other legitimate definitions of rape – some that have been around for centuries – just because there may be some normal confusion is a bit ridiculous.
SmartBlkWoman:
Yes, there is a difference and in BB’s scenario it wasn’t merely a matter of the boy/man saying something and the girl responding with her consent. If that had been the case it wouldn’t have been rape. That was NOT the case in BB’s scenario.
The area between physical restraint and freely given consent is not a gray area where it’s impossible to know whether a rape (sex crime) occurred or not.
Rape (prosecutable) doesn’t always require physical restraint. The law can recognize how power imbalances (parent-child, therapist-patient, etc) can be used in sex crimes. Those who use manipulation certainly understand the power they have and if they exploit their power to override another person’s resistance and sexual boundaries, it is rape and should be a sex crime.
When somone uses a weapon to circumvent the lack of consent the intent is the same as when someone uses their power and the situation to circumvent the lack of consent. But the second group of rapists know their claim of “it was consensual” will be believed by many, many people. The victims may not have the opinion of the potential jury in mind but many rapists do and commit their crimes accordingly.
Staying in the same location as a man who wants sex is not consent and should never be construed as being consent. Part of the manipulation can be to convince the unwilling person that sex is not the goal, including promises that there will be no more requests for sex, when it is the only goal. So the person who didn’t consent stays but not for sex.
Yet, if sex happens people inject that motivation into the victim.
It is ridiculous that you are attacking Sailorman directly, but not allowing him to respond in this space. How strange that all you got was a lot of “Me too”s and “I agree”s. WTG.
SmartBlkWoman:
There is a huge flaw in this argument. A man can be a rapist and we can still teach potential victims how to spot red flag behaviors. Just as we tell girls and women that a man who grabs them at knifepoint is most likely a rapist, we can tell girls and women that a man who attempts to circumvent their lack of consent is most likely a rapist.
What’s powerless about that?
By calling a rapist a rapist, no matter what tool he uses to rape, some men will decide not to rape.
there is a difference between physically restraining someone ( which is rape) and between telling them “either have sex with me or I’m breaking up with you”.
But aren’t they two symptoms of the same cause: a feeling of entitlement to sex and a willingness to go to any lengths to get it? If we get the word out that rape is unacceptable but don’t challenge the notions of entitlement, how much of an improvement would that be, from the point of view of the women who are still having sex when they don’t want to?
Apparently, in states that have revised their criminal codes such that sex crimes are now various levels of “Criminal Sexual Conduct”, rape doesn’t exist.
If I am at someone’s house who I find physically threatening but who is not stopping me from leaving then I don’t believe that can be construed as physically pressure, particularly if I don’t live there and have somewhere else that I can readily go.
Having been in a similar situation (but it was my house), I cannot disagree more strongly. If you feel physically threatened, even with no overt, unmistakable physical threat made, you may feel you have a better chance of staying alive if you don’t leave. Your statement, to me, seems like blaming the victim (If you didn’t leave, you have only yourself to blame – You made the wrong choice).
I’m not sure how much my experience changed my views on the matter, but one thing is for damned sure – I’m not going to criticize anybody’s decision on how to act when in a situation that may have (or did) lead to rape. You do what you think is best and hope you made the right choice. Whether somebody feels it’s better to stay alive or to not be raped, I’m not going to question the choices that person makes when confronted with a situation in which those choices need to be made.
By the way, from Moderately Insane, apparently:
“there are certainly some folks who think that anything other than “sex which is happy, mutually orgasmic, mutually satisfying, and done while sober, and which occurs between two equally privileged adults” is rape. You know who they are, don’t you? You’ve probably met some, too.”
Anyone met these folk?
Nick
That is what SmartBlackWoman is saying, Because we have allowed the word and act of rape to mean something as an oogling or a boyfriend saying he’ll dump his girlfriend if she doesn’ thave sex with him, we have created a victim culture instead of a impowering culture. In a lot of instances woman actually have a lot of power, (like in an instance where a boyfriend says he’ll dump you if you don’t give him sex), we don’t nuture this power. We leave woman without tools to feel confident in using their power and instead nuture their victimhood if victimized. We don’t nuture a man’s ability to respect a woman or learn that sex is not owed to him. Instead we nuture his rapisthood if he in any way steps out of line with a woman sexually.
I also believe that there has to be some sort of definition and coherance at what rape is. Two parties getting crap drunk at a party and the female waking up and saying she was raped because she either blacked out or regretted the sex is wrong. Most wouldn’t consider the fact that the male party might have had the same reaction to getting drunk, but he is considered the rapist, she is considered a victim.
Mandolin, nope I haven’t met them, but I have met some people who think anyone who doesn’t fit their stereotype of who a rapist is and how that person exerts control over their victim CANNOT be guilty of rape and shouldn’t be considered a criminal under any legal statute.
Apparently there are many people who are fans of sex which is unhappy and not mutual.
Zakia:
Are you saying that the female couldn’t be saying she was raped because she was in fact raped?
I think i have to agree that it s a bit odd to make an example of Sailorman in a forum in which he cannot respond. I understand the point of feminst-only threads, but this seems more extreme.
Abyss – I said what I said. put the entire paragraph in your quote and it should be as clear as day
Zakia:
How does teaching a man that using any form of coercion to get someone to have sex with him means that he is a rapist fail to nurture a man’s ability to respect a woman or learn that sex is not owed to him? Obviously, it is also necessary to teach a positive sexuality as well, but it is essential to also teach the red line of sexuality, particularly since there is plenty in the culture that teaches that the red line is much farther over. And “nurture his rapisthood” is a great phrase, but total nonsense if you are saying that by telling men that coercing sex in any way makes them rapists then they will say “oh what the hell, if I’m going to be considered a rapist just for using intimidation, I may as well just use physical force.” I don’t buy it.
Zakia, your original quote seemed to imply that all women who say they were raped when drunk either can’t remember consenting or they know they weren’t raped. I was trying to determine if that’s what you meant.
I always thought rape was either attacking and having sex by force (stranger rape) or after having been told know in a way the man can easily understand as actually NO, he continues on anyways, using force (aquaintance rape).
In both cases, force or real threat of force (the words “I will kill you” or the branding of a weapon) is needed. A passivity is not NO. Many women are passive in bed, but they are not being raped.
I get so angry when someone has the gall to treat me like a child, and assume because I have had a few drinks in me I am somehow too stupid or immature to make a decision, or to say no clear enough to be understood. I choose to drink, no one else does. I choose to accept a drink from a man or to turn it down, so how is he somehow more responsible than I am? Women are just as capable of chasing after sex as men, and these days they often do. But if she has been drinking, it is rape of the woman? Basically this is saying men are more capable of making rational decisions than women. Nice. I love being treated as an equal. And it is so nice to see the definition of rape so watered down as to be meaningless. Thanks.
Sailorman could also post his response in an open thread on this forum, if he wants. What he can’t do is post on Maia’s “feminist only” threads.
I agree that the outcome in this case is a little odd, but as long as he has the ability to respond, I don’t really see anything wrong with it. I’ve certainly been criticized multiple times in forums I’m not welcome to post on, and I’ve never seen anything wrong with that.
if thats the case it makes sense.
As for the idea that men have to threaten to kill you for it “to be rape,” this is even more strict than the legal definition in most cases. Consent is required, and silence doesnt equal consent, drunkenness doesnt equal consent, on and on. this is not to say taht drunk sex = rape. Nobody really says that. Nobody here is saying that. The argument is, instead, that it is possible to rape a drunk woman, a proposition long regarded as ridiculous when it was assumed that drunkeness was a sign of “looseness” and possible prostitution, which is to say, membership in a class of women who cant be raped and cant consent becuase they exist (in the anti-woman framework I’m describing, not supporting) soley for the purpose of being available to men for sex. The idea that marital rape exists requires a similar transformationof underlying assumptions.
In my experience, rapists dont ask, wait for a no, then threaten to kill you before they go ahead and do what they want.
Again your clouding the issue by trying to make “grabbing someone at knifepoint” the equivalent of asking someone repeatedly to so something they initially didn’t want to do. I am sure you know that in the former there is the threat of physical force and in the latter the person can just walk away; the difference between the two situations is dramatic yet you are attempting to make them out to be the same thing. “Giving in” when you don’t have to is consenting.
It is creating a mentality of powerlessness because are encouraging a woman to believe that a situation in which she has no control ( being held at knifepoint) is the equivalent of a situation in which she does have control ( being able to leave the home of someone who is attempting to get her to have sex). By denying that in the latter situation the woman has the ability to leave you are denying her the right to stop seeing herself as powerless and denying her the chance to realize just how much authority she has over whether or not to have sex; she does not have to sex to keep a boyfriend and losing a boyfriend in lieu of having sex with him under circumstances that make her uncomfortable is completely acceptable.
All “tools” are not the same. A backhoe isn’t the same as a monkey-wrench; a knife held to your throat in a dark alley by a potential rapist is not the equivalent of a boy and girl sitting on the sofa at the boys house and him saying “I’m breaking up with you”.
I don’t believe that they necessarily are the same. How many times have all of us continued to ask someone to do something several times after they had said no in an attempt to get that person to change their minds?
As I said before, when someone asks you to do something 20 times in an obvious attempt to wear you down then that is emotional manipulation and we need to characterize it as such, but by calling it rape we deny agency to the person being asked the question.
The entitlement complex that encourages men to continue to ask women to have sex who are clearly not eager to do so is something that should be worked dealt with but by calling it rape we circumvent the ability of women to realize their own agency.
I think you make my point; the sense of entitlement that causes a man to ask repeatedly for sex is the same sense of entitlement at work in other spheres. By helping women to see the connect between the entitlement complex at work in the bedroom as the same as the entitlement complex in other areas we help them to see the larger picture and to realize their own agency. By calling one act of emotional manipulation rape we disconnect it from what is happening in other venues. The focus needs to be on working on men’s sense of entitlement in all areas and working on women’s sense of agency in all areas also.
I am not blaming the victim. In the comment you quoted I said 1) I don’t live there and 2) I can readily leave. If number 1 and number 2 are true then I have a responsibility to leave the premises.
But you cannot construe an “overt, umistakable physical threat” to be the same thing as a threat that might only exist in your mind or an unspoken threat that you fear but hasn’t been implied by the other person.
I also want to say that Zakia’s comment in #37 summed up what I believe perfectly, only I think she said it much more elequently than I have. :)
I am not blaming the victim. In the comment you quoted I said 1) I don’t live there and 2) I can readily leave. If number 1 and number 2 are true then I have a responsibility to leave the premises.
I could have readily left my own house. There is no difference. If you feel that your best option is not to try to leave, I’m not going to say that you are at fault. The threat may only exist in your mind, but we use our minds to determine if a threat exists. Maybe we were mistaken, but maybe not. Maybe staying is the best way to survive.
I disagree with you about whether you are blaming the victim or not. The above quote, the last sentence in particular, is what confirms it for me. You do not have “a responsibility to leave the premises.” You have a responsibility to do whatever it is that seems most likely to allow you to survive with as little harm as possible. The potential rapist has a responsibility to not rape, you have a responsibility to do whatever seems right to avoid rape and/or allow you to live. And I really don’t see why it makes a difference whose house it is, the potential rapist’s or mine.
It saddens me that you can’t see what you are doing. If a victim tells you that you are blaming the victim, chances are what you are doing is blaming the victim.
SmartBlkWoman:
But in BB’s scenario and other similar situations the rapist blocks her attempt to walk away and refuses to accept no for an answer. Refusing to accept no is not the same thing as merely asking for sex multiple times. The first ignores lack of consent, the second may be inappropriate but it is not a rape attempt.
Physical force is more than wielding a knife or a gun or threatening to kill someone. Physical force is involved when one person uses their body to control the other person. That could be stepping between the other person and the exit or it could be grabbing an arm or pinning the other person so they can’t move.
When coercion that on the surface isn’t violent is combined with subtle physical force, it can be as effective as a knife at the throat. If the victim doesn’t know how to get away that should never be seen as legal consent. Maybe you would know how to get out of that situation and would recognize the danger in time to escape, but that doesn’t mean everyone in that situation does.
If the only way to not have sex is to escape, how can that sex be anything but nonconsensual?
Charles – if you only pay attention to a child when he does something bad and don’t bother to acknowledge, teach, or encourage good behaviour or when he is doing what is good do you think the child is going to see an alterantive.
We do nothing to boychildren, and men, in nuturing to teach them that sex isn’t owed to them. Our culture tells them not only is it owed to them, but something is wrong with a woman who wouldn’t give it to them. We only care when they rape or find ways to accuse them of rape, or imply a rape, or suggestion of an almost rape. Like I said, if two impaired people can have drunkingly consent to sex and the female can regret the sex or not remember the sex, she can claim rape and is considered a victim of rape and the same impaired man with the same symptons is then called a rapist, something is wrong with what we believe to be rape.
Our goal shouldn’t be that we have to resort to a man or a woman being confused about what rape is by watering the term down to nothing. We should teach or boy children that girls and woman do not owe them sex and they shouldn’t expect sex, or believe girls and women are on this Earth for sex. We should also teach our girl children that in many situations they have a lot of power when it comes to their bodies and sex and also that they don’t owe their bodies to anyone and no one OWNS their bodies.
You certainly do have a responsibility to get yourself out of harms way if at all possible. If you are in a situation, any situation, that makes you uncomfortable and on your on volition you choose to stay when you just as easily could have left and not taken part, you can’t blame anyone else after the fact.
The point I was trying to make was about the girl being at her boyfriends house and she thought about leaving but chose not to when he started pressuring her for sex. I wanted to make it clear that if you have the ability to not stay with someone is pressuring you to do something that you don’t want to then the best choice is to leave, not go ahead and have sex and then call it rape.
Please don’t play the “I’ve-been-a victim-and-that-makes-me-right” card. You may have personal experience on the matter but that does not give you the final word to decide whether or not I am blaming the victim, particularly when you don’t know my own experiences.
And sex that occurs under all those circumstances would be (rightfully) considered rape.
That depends. Do you mean “escape” as is someone is physically stopping you from leaving and/or there is a threat of bodily harm if you try to leave, or do you mean “escape” as in “I’m alone with my boyfriend and my parents would be mad if I came home early and had to confess the truth of where I really was”; there is a big difference between the two.
Even if a woman doesn’t say “no” but she is physically stopped from leaving then it is rape; if the only way she can stop him from asking her to have sex with him is to give in and have sex with him, and that is what she does while knowing that she could have left if she didn’t want to hear the question anymore, then that is not rape.
SmartBlkWoman:
Your use of past tense reflects the reality of many rape victims. At some point she had a chance to leave, but as she’s struggling not to give in to the physical demand for sex that point is in the past.
But many people act as if the chance to leave never goes away and therefore no rape could have happened.
Whether the reduction of options is planned or accidental, the person making the demands has an obligation to not exploit the other person’s vulnerability.
If you are in a situation, any situation, that makes you uncomfortable and on your on volition you choose to stay when you just as easily could have left and not taken part, you can’t blame anyone else after the fact.
What if you feel that staying gives you a better chance of surviving? Why wouldn’t the rapist be to blame if that didn’t allow you to avoid the rape? But this statement is so wrong and so ignorant of many real world situations and so loaded with blaming the victim that it is hard to believe you don’t see it. Look at the last 8 words of that quote. Who are you blaming?
I wanted to make it clear that if you have the ability to not stay with someone is pressuring you to do something that you don’t want to then the best choice is to leave, not go ahead and have sex and then call it rape.
Unless, of course, leaving gets you raped, beaten and killed. But you don’t seem to see that there are many possible consequences to staying and many possible consequences to leaving. Who are you to judge what the best thing to do in a situation you didn’t experience was? And that is what you are doing – judging. And every judgement you have proclaimed re: staying vs leaving is blaming somebody who stays. No matter how much you deny it.
Please don’t play the “I’ve-been-a victim-and-that-makes-me-right” card.
I suppose you could read it that way. However, I didn’t leave and I feel that you are placing the blame for anything that happened to me on my decision that staying gave me the best chance for survival. You are doing so clearly and without question. Rather than a quick, flat denial, you might want to analyze what you have written and my criticism of it to see if there might be any truth or validity to that criticism.
But I’m still curious about this:
In the comment you quoted I said 1) I don’t live there and 2) I can readily leave. If number 1 and number 2 are true then I have a responsibility to leave the premises.
Why do you see a difference between it being where you live and being where you don’t live? I simply have no idea why you see a difference depending on whose home this might happen in.
Of course, I still think that you are flat out wrong. You don’t have a responsibility to leave the premises. You have a responsibility to try to survive unharmed. If you think that staying rather than leaving gives you the best chance, that is what you should do. You in no way have a responsibility to leave the premises (unless, of course, you feel that is your best option in that particular case). Anybody who says otherwise is wrong and hasn’t thought through the myriad of situations that occur.
Zakia,
We are in agreement that people need to be taught a positive sexuality that isn’t about boys getting sex from girls and I think we are in agreement about pretty much everything else. The only point we seem to disagree on is this:
Rape is the term for the unacceptable act of forcing yourself on someone sexually. It is the embodiment of treating sex as something that you can take from someone else. To me, it seems perfectly appropriate to call using non-violent pressure to coerce someone to have sex rape. To you, this is watering down the definition of rape and confusing people about what rape is. Our goals (for wanting to call this rape, or for not wanting to call it rape) are the same: to decrease the frequency with which people (men) use non-violent coercive pressure to get their partners (women) to have sex, to increase the agency (or awareness thereof) of people (women) in such situations.
Here is why I think that calling coercing sex through non-violent pressure rape serves our mutual goals:
Rape is the bright line in sexual interactions. It is the form of sexual interaction that is societally forbidden. No one wants to be a rapist, no one wants their friends to think they are a rapist, no one wants to be raped. If you realize that someone is trying to rape you, planning to rape you, then you have a huge degree of leeway in your response, far more leeway than you do if someone is just being a jerk or annoying.
Calling coercion through non-violent pressure rape puts coercive non-violent pressure on the far side of that bright line. It helps to teach both men and women that it is really not okay to act like that, and that if someone acts like that, their behavior is unacceptable, sufficiently unacceptable that they have abrogated the normal social rules. Realizing that someone else’s behavior towards you has crossed a line like that, realizing that someone who is trying to non-violently coerce you into having sex is someone who is behaving completely unacceptably – someone who is trying to rape you – gives you greater freedom and greater agency to act. The social constraints that would normally make ‘being difficult’ or ‘making a scene’ hard to do are lifted somewhat. If you can call what you were defending yourself against rape, then you have more agency, not less.
Likewise, a man or boy who has learned that coercively but non-violently pressuring a woman into having sex is rape will be far less likely to do so, and a man or boy who does so will be less likely to do it again if they find that afterwards they are now viewed as a rapist by those around them.
Obviously, moving the bright line of what is rape is only part of the equation. We desperately need to change the positive model of sexuality to one of mutuality and active consent, but doing so does also involve progressively moving the predatory model of sexuality outside of what is considered acceptable, bit by bit into the completely unacceptable, into the definition of rape.
The practical definition of rape, what actions constitute rape and which ones done, changes over time. It isn’t immutable. If we all (or most of us) agree to call coercing sex through non-violent pressure rape, then that is what rape is. Maybe we need to give it a specific name, just as we did with marital rape and date rape before (two categories which would once mostly have not been considered rape), maybe we don’t (we don’t have a particular name for raping prostitutes, something that is still mostly not considered real rape).
Charles agreed, but for Instance. Nicole had a post on here before about her near rape experience(which was an intoxicated man trying to penetrate her after his condom slipped of), however the post was title “my rape story”. The individual, drunk, got his senses together enough to stop and leave. But he was still seen as a rapist and she a victim, even though she herself says no rape occured.
An attractive woman being oogled by a man that finds her attractive has not been raped and that man is not a rapist.
When I’m tring to sleep and my husband is groping me because he’s horney and I tell him to cut it out and he makes another attempt and gets rejected again and then flips over and puts his back towards me with an attitude and whining is just horny and being a brat. He is not a rapist in the mind to rape me.,
A young man claiming to leave his girlfriend if she doesn’ t have sex with him is not a rapist. He is a young man that is horney and has no tools to deal or he is just a manipulative jerk and she is a girl that has no tools to say See Ya! They both reinforce each others behaviour.
My boyfriend in highschool telling me that Everyone is doing it and I’m lame for wanting to hold onto my virginity is not a rapist. He was being a jerk trying to get sex. And he still didn’t get any. And it was over and done with. And to this day we are friends, older and wise, and he looks back and has high respect for the fact I didn’t give in. But even if I gave in. I wouldn’t running around screaming he raped me. Just that I made a bad decision and he was a jackass. I had power in that situation and used it.
Usually non-violent cohercive rape goes hand in hand with emotional abuse. Emotional abuse has the specific purpose of rending a person mentally powerless. Rape is when someone is powerless and the potential rapist knows that person is powerless and he can get sex from them either by means of physical force of psychological force.
I just feel like accusing someone of rape can be devestating to both parties and shouldn’t be thrown around to mean every sexual encounter that doesn’t fit an ideal.
( I think it was a woman named Nicole)
Bean –
I may have simplified the experience and there was potential there for a rape to have occured, but one didn’t and the man wasn’t a rapist.
regarding a husband
Even in an instance if the groping kept occuring and I couldn’t get any sleep and gave in, again to me thats not rape. Thats me having power and not using it. I could leave and get on the futon, make him leave and get on the futon, etc, smack him upside his head, whatever. Now if I tried to get up and leave and he physically restrained me, held me down on the bed, or followed me and continued to persue it. Thats a different story. If he said something like I’ll divorce you and take the kids, thats a different story, if he withheld money from me or access to resources thats another story.
“still believe that, my definition about rape is about women’s experiences, which is more important to me than the law.”
“I believe that a woman is raped if she’s drunk,”
This is from the original post and it is troubling to me. The first statments leaves almost anything open to to being rape.
The first, experience is open to something that is one’s own mind. Rape is a moral and criminal act that involves one person with power or perceived power commititting and act of sexual intercourse against a person without power or perceived to be without power physically or mentally. And experience could be anything that someone, in their own mind, makes it what they want it to be. That is not okay to me in terms of accusing someone of rape or being a rapist. Just because a woman was not mutually satisfied, regretted the sex, or gave into some mild form of being coherced does not mean automatically a rape occurred. Just because a woman feels a man is leering at her or oogling her does not mean he is a rapist and wants to rape her. Just because a husband one night is annoying and begging you for sex because he’s horny does not mean he is a rapist. There are also, unfortunately, women who HAVE been raped but do not perceive they have been raped or they way they are working out their experience is that they have not been raped.
The second doesn’t make any sense, drunk sex does not always mean a rape occurs. People put expectations on a drunken man that they wouldn’t put on a drunken woman. He is so suppose to be drunkas her but coherant enough to have heard or requested a clear “yes I will have sex with you” from a drunk incoherant woman, but even if she says yes he is still a rapist because her yes was under the influence, and he being drunk and incoherant himself is suppose to somehow work that out?
Seriously, I feel like I have to tell my sons to either get written contracted consent from a woman before having sex with her and include a sobriety test along with it. Otherwise don’t have sex until your married and even then get written consent everytime you initiate the act with your wife because any potential sexually encounter with a woman, if it does not happen they way she wants it or the act no longer appeals to her, she can say, based on her experience, that she was raped
Zakia:
I’ve never called every sexual encounter that doesn’t fit an ideal rape. What I do call for is for all people to work toward treating everyone’s sexual boundaries with respect and that everyone has the right to have their sexual boundaries respected, no matter their sexual history. All those who initiate sexual contact have a duty to make sure their actions are truly welcome.
If a sexual boundary holds at the first attempt to break through, repeated attempts to break that boundary are not innocent actions.
If someone freezes at unwanted sexual contact, ignorance of that pattern is no excuse for taking inaction as consent. The person who freezes may have a long and painful history of sexual abuse and endured that abuse by detaching. Excusing those who harm others while thinking only of themselves is something I won’t do.
If a driver hits a pedestrian while chatting on the cell phone and injures that other person without realizing it was a human they hit and then continues on without a thought, it doesn’t matter that the driver wasn’t intending to harm that other person. The bottom line is their negligence resulted in another person’s injury.
Ignorance and carelessness don’t change the fact that someone is a hit and run driver.
But when it comes to sexual interaction, it is too often only about the driver and not about those harmed by other people’s actions. And those who speak out about the number of people hurt are called radicals who say all sex is rape.
If we understand that it is acceptable to have systems (laws and awareness) to get drivers to stop injuring pedestrians why is it so unacceptable to ask people to stop ignoring the impact of their sexualized activity?
If people are harming others, often those who liked them and trusted them, wouldn’t it be better for everyone if those who harm learn how to stop hurting others and learn to interact in a positive manner?
Zakia:
You are misunderstanding what I believe Maia was trying to say. The definition of rape needs to be about the harm done and the impact of someone’s actions on another person. So the definition of rape is about the harm done not the rapist’s judgments of his own actions (she wasn’t a virgin, she didn’t hit me, etc).
So what your sons need to be attuned to is to only take sexual actions when they know for certain that their actions are not harming the other person in any way. But isn’t that something all of us should be trying to do?
To simply ask is this legal is self-centered and self-absorbed.
I can’t follow the logic of comparing this to a hit and run driver because a person is actually hit by a car and the driver actually hit them and drove off.
If a driver swerves to miss a pedestrian he/she might have hit, no one will call him/her a hit and run driver and say that person was hit by a hit and run driver. They will say he/she is a jerk that wasn’t paying attention.
Well we could beat this to death. Maybe I just don’ t have the ‘correct’ view of rape or what is rape.
Abyss – I wouldn’t even trust that, because what my son might believe and what his girlfriend/Wife might believe can be two total different things. Because it is about her experience and how she felt and not his. As a heterosexual man, he will always been seen as a potential sexual predator and seen as having a predatory nature when it comes to initiating sex.
It all seems wishy washy and confusing, I think rape is a serious accusation along the lines of child molestation and can ruin a person. This discussion is starting to confuse me about what rape is suppose to be.
Nicole had a post on here before about her near rape experience(which was an intoxicated man trying to penetrate her after his condom slipped of), however the post was title “my rape story”. The individual, drunk, got his senses together enough to stop and leave. But he was still seen as a rapist and she a victim, even though she herself says no rape occured.
It was attempted rape. Seriously, a man is trying to stick his dick into someone who is saying “Would you stop that” and physically blocking him, that’s about as unequivocal as you can get. And yes, after trying several times, he stopped; that’s why it was attempted rape and not rape.
Zakia:
If that’s true, it is because of the number of men who are taught it is okay to prey on girls and women and because of the number who take what they’ve learned and commit rape and other forms of sexual exploitation and because of the number of girls and women who are told it is solely their responsibility to prevent rape and who are blamed when their defenses are breached.
Sex should be about both participants and it can be — with good communication skills and a healthy respect for how our actions impact others and with a willingness to stop what we are doing if there is any possibility that our actions hurt someone else.
From my own experience I can remember the shock and delight in having a man who refused to do anything until he was assured I fully consented to his actions and was a partner in what we were doing. The process was slower because of his approach since my boundaries had been trampled by rape and by others who exploited the damage left over from rape. I wasn’t just a body to be used, I was a person to be respected and savored.
Accusations of rape are serious because rape is serious and that is why it is so important that boys and men ensure that they always have the other person’s full consent before sexual contact.
The same is true of girls and women when they are initiating sex. They must be willing to stop and to respect the other person even if that person is vulnerable and exploitable.
The woman in BB’s scenario, or any woman in any scenario where she has unwanted sex in the absence of explicit physical coercion, may or may not choose the word rape to name her experience, and we might argue about whether or not she should be encouraged to name her experience rape, and that gets us into questions of legal vs. moral vs. political definitions of rape; it gets us into questions of how a word’s connotations might shape the way men and women see themselves in relation to sex, sexuality and each other, etc. and so on.
I would hope, though, at the very least, that we would all agree that this woman should see herself as having been violated. Not only were boundaries she tried to establish not respected, but in BB’s scenario a level of trust beyond the physical she tried to establish was violated as well. The result of this violation was that she opened her body to a man she did not originally want to allow into her body. True, she was not physically forced to do so (though she may have feared she would be physically forced if she refused any longer) and, true, she could have tried to leave (though, rationally or irrationally, she may have feared that what would happen to her if she left would be more serious, including the possibility of his use of force , than if she stayed); and those truths might, conceivably, lead her to separate the emotional and psychological violation inherent in the boyfriend’s badgering her for sex from the physical act of sex itself–certainly i t has led people in this discussion to make that separation, though they have tended to use the word manipulation where I am using the word violation.
Personally, I think this distinction is specious because it assumes that when the woman opened her legs that act took place in a context radically other, or at least that it can be judged in a context radically other, to the one established by the emotional and psychological violations the boyfriend had already committed. What I want to say here, though, has less to do with the woman and her experience than with the man and, not his experience or how he defines his experience or how he feels about what he did, but specifically what he did, the acts he committed. Not to draw a direct line from the act of continuing to badger a woman for sex after she has repeatedly said no, which I am calling a violation of trust, to the act of entering her body, even though he can’t not have known that she didn’t really want him to enter her in the first place is, I think, to be wilfully blind to the reality of what happened. (Just think of how enormously self-centered that man would have to be to think that a woman who has actively said no to his explicit and repeated requests for sex will switch suddenly to an enthusiastic and desirous participant in the heartbeat it takes for her, finally, to say yes.) Even if she does not see it as a rape, what he did is entirely consistent with rape.
This whole discussion also makes me think of a discussion I read a long time ago about the issues that arise in dealing with sexual abuse when the acts of abuse actually feel/felt good to the person being abused, when the abuser is actively concerned with his or her victim’s pleasure. There is no physical force; the abused person often feels like he or she is consenting to what happened; and the sex happens entirely through manipulation. Would anyone doubt that abuse had taken place, say, if we are talking about a father and his 16 year old daughter, a 34 year old uncle and his 16 year old neice? Why is it so hard to see the abuse, the violation, when we are talking about a boyfriend and his girlfriend?
As long as the opportunity to leave is available is cannot be considered raped, even if her thoughts were a bit muddled about what she wanted to do it is still not rape. If retroactively she comes to the realization that she could have left but couldn’t manage to get her thoughts straight about the situation until after the fact, that does not make it rape either. Hindsight is 20/20 but that still doesn’t make it rape.
If the chance to leave doesn’t close until after the woman has already had sex, then that doesn’t retroactively make the sex an incidence of rape.
If you feel that staying gives you a better chance of surviving when there is no obvious threat to make you stay then who is to say that the threat is not only in your mind ? This is why there must be some manifest form of coercion to make an act constitute rape. If your are not forcible being held against your will ( and the person has not explicitly said or implied that you can’t go) then how do you know that the person won’t allow you to leave if you don’t ask? How does anyone know what you are thinking and feeling unless you tell them?
How does “you can’t blame anyone else after the fact” get translated into meaning “you are to blame?” The other person is wrong for continuing to pressure you but I refuse to accept any reasoning that says women are not agents; they are objects to be acted upon and can’t control themselves or think clearly.
You may have made the right decision or you may have made the wrong one, I wasn’t there so I trust your judgement about what the nature of the scenario was. The only thing I am trying to say is that if it wasn’t rape, then don’t call it that.
I used that example because that is the situation that the girl in BB’s scenario found herself in. She was at someone else’s home ( her boyfriend) who wasn’t stopping her from leaving his house.
If it’s your house that is all the better to just kick the person out.
Having sex without someone under conditions you don’t want to have sex under is very harmful.
And if you don’t feel that it was your best option to leave, only because you failed to think it through, that does not make it rape.
SmartBlkWoman:
With this definition many stranger rapes aren’t real rapes either since rape victims might see missed options for escape once they are out of the situation.
If the girl or woman didn’t consent of her free will, it’s rape irregardless of your opinion of her possible methods of escape and to say otherwise is to tell men that they can take sex without consent if their intended target remains in range.
“If she’s there, she’s yours” sends a very dangerous message to men and to women.
You create a feeling of powerlessness when you deny the woman her perception of the situation. If she thinks it isn’t safe to leave, then it doesn’t matter what you think. You want her to realize how much authority she has over whether or not to have sex? Why can you not acknowledge that this hypothetical woman is smart enough to know the difference between “circumstances that make her uncomfortable” and rape?
I don’t think you have been paying attention to anything that I’ve been saying and I’m tired of repeated the same thing over and over. I give up.
I’m giving you the same message I just gave Abyss2Hope. You haven’t critically read anything I’ve written and responding to the same comment 20 times written in different wording isn’t helping you.
I guess whatever as a woman thinketh, so it is. You’re right, I’m wrong, have a nice night.
Kaeth,
So if a woman is over the house of man she picked up at a bar, she agrees to go home with him, but once there decides she made a bad decision, but instead of saying nevermind I don’t want to do this and leaves, she decides to stay and have sex with him because either she felt intimidated by being with him in his own house, or felt guilty or bad for changing her mind. Or she is in fear of his reaction to being denied. He initiates sex, she says hmm “I don’t know”, he whines “aw come on, it’ll be great” or something lame like that and she says okay. She then regrets the sex, feels awful about it, and feels violated even because she just had sex with someone she didn’t really want to and felt she couldn’t refuse when there was NOTHING on his end making her feel that way and now she feels like she was raped. He didn’t force himself on her, he didn’t prevent her from leaving, he did nothing but maybe make a little whiny comment. You mean to tell me this man is now branded a rapist and she is a rape victim if the woman feels thats what happened?!
What “makes it rape” is the lack of consent. The fact that the woman didn’t get out of the situation for whatever reason doesn’t really address the lack of consent, which is the real issue. The comments here about ‘getting out’ are uncomfortably reminiscent of the old requirement that a woman resist to the utmost or it isn’t really rape at all.
And if you don’t feel that it was your best option to leave, only because you failed to think it through, that does not make it rape.
All I can say about this quote is, “Holy fucking shit!” You really have no idea of the kinds of situations that occur. Not leaving was my best option. I thought it through at the time and, in hindsight, I can never know whether it would have been better to leave or to stay.
Your not making any sense. Are you saying that it is better to be raped, beaten, and killed while complacently going along with the program than it is to be raped, beaten and killed while attempting to leave? I’m not following you.
No, that is not what I am saying. I am saying that by staying I may be raped, but by attempting to leave I may be raped and beaten or killed. For me, it’s best to avoid being beaten and killed if I fell rape is unavoidable. It may well be that by staying I get raped but by leaving I get raped, beaten and killed. I will not judge whether someone was raped or not based upon the victim’s decision on whether to stay or to attempt to leave.
If it’s your house that is all the better to just kick the person out.
Of course it is if you can. But, you know, it may be that you are unable to kick the person out. What then? What if you are unable to kick the person out and, in your judgement, the consequences are less if you stay rather than attempt to leave? Well, according to what you’ve written, if you stay because you feel that either attempting to kick the person our or attempting to leave will lead to worse results then it isn’t rape. That is despicable, ignorant and blaming the victim.
I don’t think you have been paying attention to anything that I’ve been saying and I’m tired of repeated the same thing over and over.
Rather than give up, why don’t you look at why multiple people feel you are victim blaming and wrong in your opinion of what constitutes rape based on the victims decisions. Maybe, instead of repeating the same thing over and over (and, believe me, we get what you are saying), you try to understand the reaction to your comments.
The comments here about ‘getting out’ are uncomfortably reminiscent of the old requirement that a woman resist to the utmost or it isn’t really rape at all.
Actually, mythago, I think that they are the old requirement verbatim.
It all seems wishy washy and confusing, I think rape is a serious accusation along the lines of child molestation and can ruin a person. This discussion is starting to confuse me about what rape is suppose to be.
Good. Because it should.
Far too often we think of rape as something only monsters are capable of. Like with every other crime, the truth is very different. This is especially true if their is no obvious power imbalance in favor of the perpetrator.
That’s not wishy washy, that’s realistic. It’s only logical to see sexual violence as being a spectrum that ranges from street harrassment to violent serial rape. That leaves a lot in between that isn’t defined by law and/or slips through the gaps of our cultural understanding.
For example, in a previous thread, it was mentioned that one can be legally accused of sexual harrassment if one makes sexual “favors” a condition of employment, raise, etc. And yet the harrasser is not only less likely to be convicted if the employee gives in, but unlike attempted blackmail/extortion vs. just plain blackmail/extortion, the harrasser cannot be accused of a more serious crime, even though more damage has taken place.
How does that make sense unless society believes that:
1) women don’t really want it anyway, so the issue is with treating “good girls” like whores or sluts, not that he’s using a form of extortion to get her to do things she doesn’t really want to do?
and
2) we have trouble seeing rapists as anything but monsters, and so can’t conceive of a type of sexual assault that falls between harrassment and forcible rape?
A young man claiming to leave his girlfriend if she doesn’ t have sex with him is not a rapist. He is a young man that is horney and has no tools to deal or he is just a manipulative jerk and she is a girl that has no tools to say See Ya! They both reinforce each others behaviour.
And, in fact, several people stated on the original thread that if that was all that had happened, that would be fine. He certainly has the right to set the rules for his own interactions with others. But that isn’t all that happened. Most importantly in terms of his actions, she said “no” repeatedly and instead of making his wishes clear again, he suggested it was ok, and then went on to repeatedly ignore her wishes.
And yes, there is a lot that one would hope she would be capable of doing that she didn’t. But she wasn’t the one crossing boundaries that had been verbally established. He didn’t tell her to to go home and she refused, she told him to stop, but he only stopped for a short time. They both could use more maturity, but only one acted in a way that clearly disregarded the other’s autonomy.
It may not legally be rape, but it’s certainly a step up from just a manipulative jerk.
Zakia,
Also, regarding the scenario in comment 75:
She then regrets the sex, feels awful about it, and feels violated even because she just had sex with someone she didn’t really want to and felt she couldn’t refuse when there was NOTHING on his end making her feel that way and now she feels like she was raped.
Maybe it’s just me, but if it’s actually “great” then I don’t think there’s a high probablity that she would regret the sex – at least not in the “I feel used” sense vs. the ‘I was bad” sense.
And if it’s wasn’t “great’ – or at least good enough – I’m a bit confused about the idea that “there was NOTHING on his end making her feel that way.” Did he not notice that she wasn’t having a good time? Did he fail to remember that it being “great” was part of the conditions she required before giving consent? (I mean, that’s a hard thing to guarantee, but he ought to put a good faith effort into it if it was one of her requirements, dontcha think?) Was she faking the entire time as is just that good of an actress?
Whether or not it’s legally rape would depend on a lot more details than you provided. Futhermore, whether he should be convicted, even if the evidence suggests the scenario fits the legal definition of rape, depends on a jury and the idea of reasonable doubt. Just because we say the hypotheticals are rape doesnt mean we think every real guy accused of them should end up in jail – end of story.
Mostly, though, I would hope that men are capable of understanding the difference between submission and consent. In the scenario you describe, her response veers more towards the former and less towards the latter, and yet you give no indication that’s it’s reasonable to expect him – legally expect him – to be reasonably sure that he has consent and not submission.
Mythago – Someone whining “aw come on, it’ll be fun ” and then someone else saying ” Okay” is consent. Your saying its not. What does a man have to do?
I, Billy Bob, would like to take you,Mary Joe, into my bedroom right now and have sexual intercourse with you, do you give your consent to such an act?
I, Mary Joe, give my consent to have sex with you, Bill Boy, in your bedroom for the purpose of Sexual Intercourse.
Okay folks sign on the dotted line-
??
Mickle -We are talking about feelings and preceptions here, not what is actually occuring. If a woman FEELS she was raped than she was Raped according to folks here. So in my opinion if a man FEELS a woman is comfortable having sex with him and FEELS its okay that maybe she didn’t give an expressed, shout it out loud, NO I DON”T WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU, then it would seem alright that he goes along and has sex with her, because he FEELS it. If a man FEELS like he can force himself on a woman and FEELS like he didn’t rape her than he is not a rapist.
Whatever a woman feels is rape is rape. So I guess if I see a man I FEEL looks like a child molester playing with his daughter in the park and in my mind that way he is playing with her is sexual to me, even though maybe he is just holding her butt so she can get up on the monkey bars, I can go accuse him of being a child molester because he is, because I felt that he was?
What about woman that WERE raped and raped violently and FEEL that they weren’t raped? Does that mean a rape DIDN’T occur?
You see how that makes no sense?
Again, people always put expectations on men that they wouldn’t on women. Men are suppose to be able to be experts on body language, be able to read a woman’s mind, and on top of it all probably should have a lawyer present and a legal document written up before he has sex with a woman to protect herself. Or throw a woman out of his home or get the hell away from her immediately if she mutters one ounce of indecision.
On the other hand, we are powerless creatures that can’t make smart decisions for ourselves or see the forest for the trees. We are also perpetually irresponsible for anything and everything.
Because all it takes is her feeling like something happen and that makes it truth.
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Zakia:
Actually, I don’t think anyone has said this in the de- and acontextual way you state it here, and it is the context that makes all the difference; and here’s the thing: we could argue about fine variations in context from here to eternity; each of us on this thread can construct a particular situation that at one and the same time demonstrates the validity of our own definition of rape and invalidates someone else’s definition. No one here that you disagree with is going to argue that it’s rape, by definition, each and every time, under each and every circumstance that a man asks a woman for sex and she says yes after having first said no, or if she says yes under some internal duress without first saying no. Much more context is needed than those few details.
What I do hear people saying is that the violation of emotional and psychological boundaries that takes place when a man badgers a woman for sex–whether that badgering is whiney or not–exists on a continuum with the violation of physical boundaries that constitutes rape, and that when one violation has already committed, you can not suddenly say that the person who has been violated has not really been violated. By way of example–and I am not purposefully trying to conjure Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse here, though a lot of what she says in that book is apt–the people of a country that has been occupied militarily exist in a perpetual state of violence even when over violence is being committed. That is the nature of military occupation; it is an ongoing act of violence. Any choice that any citizen of the occupied country makes in relation to the occupying powers, therefore, needs to be understood in the context of the ongoing violence of the occupation. In other words, even if this citizen has never personally been the object of the occupier’s violence, when an occupying soldier, in uniform, asks him or her for a cigarette–yes, even in as simple a human interaction as this–the citizen’s decision to give the soldier a cigarette, or not, cannot be divorced from the citizen’s awareness that he or she has already been violated by the occupier and of who, therefore, has power, and what kind of power, and who does not.
A woman alone in a room with a man who is badgering her for sex is in an analogous situation. Not because she is powerless, not because she cannot leave, not because she might not be able to beat the shit out of the man–the citizen in my example might be perfectly able to beat the soldier in a one-on-one fight–but rather because she too exists in a context where she has been occupied, and I don’t care for the moment whether you define that occupation narrowly as the way in which someone’s badgering you about anything can get inside your head to the point where you can’t think straight or more broadly as the patriarchal training that women get in how they are supposed to be sexually. You cannot divorce the answer she gives to a repeated and badgering request for sex–hell, to any request for sex, no matter how politely and respectfully made–from that larger context.
Now, it might be, it certainly is desirable that women should learn how to handle situations like the ones that have been argued about in this thread such that they feel they can get up and leave or physically defend themselves or whatever it takes for them to avoid having sex they have been coercively manipulated into having, but the reality is that many women are unable to handle the sitations in that way, and it doesn’t matter why. It is the violation of boundaries that makes rape rape. Period.
Zakia:
Yes, that is consent, but that is not what happened in BB’s scenario or any of the scenarios people are calling rape. I don’t know why you and many others insist on turning scenarios where the victim said no and had that answer disregarded into “aw come on, it’ll be fun” and “okay.”
By your characterization you are altering the physical details of the non-violent rape scenarios and then saying the girl or woman is out of touch with the reality of her situation because she didn’t react as if she were in your scenario.
What kind of man would want to be physically intimate with a woman who he’s incapable of being mentally intimate with?
Zakia and SmartBlackWoman: where are the men in your scenarios? What are they doing? What are they thinking?
I don’t see either of you arguing that the man’s urge to have sex is simply in his mind. You a priori assume his right to have sex – otherwise your arguments are simple strawmen. Yes, sex is usually negotiated amongst all parties. That negotiation is NOT what is being dissected by feminists. Feminists are looking at the action of men in the face of clear coercion of women’s consent. Coerced consent, in most cases, leads to rape, not sex. You two seem to be looking at only the mild cases where it is fairly clear that sex was offered as a means of getting the males in the scenarios to quit bugging the females. You also seem to imply that this is healthy and normal, which is another whole bag of worms.
The two of you come across as being very threatened in any examination of heterosexual sex — I’ve seen the same arguments from you before. You argue all day long for women’s agency in the face of coercion, but you fail to critique what drives men to coerce in the first place. You admit to their coercion; but you seem to find it normative, with the onus being on women to be able to walk away 99.9% of the time. And then you get really worked up that we want to define rape in a way that benefits women more than it benefits men. You say we’re splitting hairs, essentially. Yet when it comes to coercion, you find 1,000 shades of gray to meet your ends: keeping heterosexual sex safely out of the reach of transformation and change, and keeping rape as something that happens to women — apparently without any substantial male involvement — instead of making rape something that men DO.
Shorter TBQ: It’s better that other women have sex that they don’t want, because I can’t be bothered to actively express consent.
Frankly I don’t know who BB is and I don’t think I’ve been commenting anything on post by someone named BB,
Am I missing post?
Zakia:
Mickle -We are talking about feelings and preceptions here, not what is actually occuring. If a woman FEELS she was raped than she was Raped according to folks here. So in my opinion if a man FEELS a woman is comfortable having sex with him and FEELS its okay that maybe she didn’t give an expressed, shout it out loud, NO I DON”T WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU, then it would seem alright that he goes along and has sex with her, because he FEELS it. If a man FEELS like he can force himself on a woman and FEELS like he didn’t rape her than he is not a rapist.
OK, I think I see where you’re coming from. I have a son, too, and like you, I’m trying to develop a nice set of rules I can hand him to use in sexual situations. The point that most of us are trying to get across here, and that I think you’re having trouble turning into a rule for your sons, is that rape avoidance should be proactive on the man’s part as well as on the woman’s part. We’re trying to say that sexual intercourse can be rape unless there is active, enthusiastic consent on both sides because many women have had experiences that lead them to respond to sexual advances in ways that bear a superficial resemblance to what men in our culture have been taught is OK.
Here’s a statistic to help you and your sons understand this better: one out of every 6 girls has been sexually molested, abused, or raped by the time she turns 18. (I don’t have the link for this statistic, but it is from the Catholic Church’s child abuse prevention training.) So if you think about this statistic, your sons have a 1 in 6 chance of initiating sexual contact with someone who has a built-in set of responses to a sexual situation where her wants and desires were ignored and/or overridden (probably, but not always, by a male person). Lots of research has shown that nonresponse, passivity, or lackluster “going along with the program” is a common survival technique for young people in these situations, and that in stress situations, adults frequently revert to their childhood patterns of response unless specially trained otherwise. Of course, the trouble is that your sons are probably not trained telepaths or empaths, so there is no way for them to know that the woman they want to have sex with is one of these one-in-6 women. The women your sons date probably aren’t trained telepaths or empaths, either, so they have no way of knowing that, unlike the manipulative jerks they’ve known in the past, your sons are not going to beat them up for saying “no” or force sexual intercourse on them anyway; they don’t know that your sons FEEL as if they have consent unless your sons say so.
Our culture also teaches us that it is more “sexy” if the man and the woman just suddenly start tearing each other’s clothes off without so much as a preliminary “How ’bout it?” Beyond that, I’ve noticed that a lot of young people seem to think that having sex with someone is sorta like inviting a vampire into your home – once in, they can come and go at will unless you go through a certain set of actions to banish them again. (My analogy, not that anyone has actually said that to me, just to be clear.)
As I said before, I’m still working on this, too. I guess the best things you can teach your sons are: 1) “No means NO”; 2) “yes” has to be verbal, *enthusiastic*, and obtained legitimately (i.e., you can’t whine, threaten, or hit your way into getting some sex), and 3) just because you got a “yes” before doesn’t mean you are entitled to a “yes” ever again. It isn’t rape unless sexual contact actually occurs, but sexual contact could be rape unless both parties make it clear *out loud* that the sexual contact is desired. I kinda like your vows – wouldn’t it be cool to teach them just like that?
I think here is where we get to the root of our differences:
It seems to me that both SmartBlkWoman and Zakia are doing the same thing. Both are going from a woman’s perception that she is raped all the way through to an accusation, a legal complaint, and public revelation. Both are deeply concerned with what happens when this perception of rape goes from being a private thing, to being a public denunciation.
What most of us seem to assume without stating is that the trauma of filing a police report for rape is a huge disincentive, and that this hypothetical woman will never report it. It seems obvious to me that ambiguous circumstances such as we’ve been discussing will never result in a man being branded a rapist. Her perception of rape does not immediately lead to arrest, conviction, and public shaming for him. The odds of even violent rapists being convicted are small. None of these hypothetical men are ever going to be branded as rapists, except in the minds of their victims.
Where does this idea come from, that women are rushing into police offices eager to file criminal reports after disappointing sex? Defining marital rape as a crime has strangely not lead to large numbers of women accusing their husbands of felonies because the women didn’t orgasm.
Good point, Kaethe. Personally, I think it also has something to do with my feeling that ‘If it’s rape, it should be prosecuted.’ Not that it necessarily will be prosecuted as rape, but that it ought to be.
Which works in reverse as well . . . if I look at a situation and don’t think a criminal prosecution would be reasonable, I have a hard time thinking of it as rape.
I’m certainly not defending this point of view, and it’s something that I (literally) just now became aware of, so I’m just articulating it.
Kaeth – The legal part is not what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking about the accusation or the view of the other party and a clear definition of rape.
Kaethe, I was thinking about that too, because Zakia said something very similar about my post from last year. The squaddie who tried to rape me “was seen as a rapist” by a bunch of people on the internet who wouldn’t even know him if they met him in the street, because I never identified him beyond saying he was a squaddie. Total effect on his life of my stating that he tried to rape me: nil.
Rape is so horrible to me, and I view it as one of the most violent acts against a woman that a man can commit, either through physically violence, emotional abuse or emotional manipulations, and I have no desire to view a man that has raped as any other than horrible person, I can’t have all these gray areas about what rape is. You tell me a man has raped your or you’ve been raped or feel like you’ve been raped by him, that man is shit to me, and he should be punished socially and legally even if he’s not (he should be).
add in , “Almost raped you”
Well, the solution to your taking rape seriously is not to give the guy the tender sympathy you’re conspicuously denying the victim. All this talk about strong women and crap like that is a smokescreen for blaming victims. If laws only protect the strong, then what good are they, because while you and SmartBlkWoman may be strong 24/7 I think the rest of us are honest enough to say that not only we not strong all the time, we’re often stupid and foolish, too. That, however, does not mean someone can rape us with impunity and blame it on that foolishness.
Seriously, saying that rape is so serious a crime to you that you want to be careful about labelling a guy with the terms sounds good on its face, but in reality what it seems to show is that you’re bending over backwards to try and find reasonable doubt—-in what a woman says. Criticizing women over and over retroactively does them no good at all. They can’t get in a time machine and go back in time to chaeng the situation based on what they and we both know now.
How about we criticize the men instead? IF she’s drunk, don’t rape her. Rape means sex without consent. I don’t know about you but it’s not resisting lack of consent that should be the issue; it should be guys being able to demonstrate that in fact they got positive consent, not coerced, reluctant, haven’t-got-any-other-realistic-options consent. That’ s manipulation at best, coercion at worst, and, yes, it’s edging into rape territory.
Zakia,
You have been giving examples of what isn’t rape. It might be helpful if you described what you think is rape through emotional manipulation.
You agree that rape can be carried out using only emotional manipulation. What would be an example of rape using emotional manipulation? How is it fundamentally different from getting consent through emotional manipulation, such that there is no grey area in between? Assume there is a grey area, a situation that could either be interpreted by an observer as rape through emotional manipulation or consent gained through emotional manipulation. What should be the standard for deciding whether a situation in that grey area was rape or not rape? Do you have a better basis for deciding whether a situation that was in that grey area was rape than asking the person who was raped or not? Do you think we should ask the person who possibly raped instead? Do you think that the grey area should simply be pushed outside the bright line of things we can call rape?
We are talking about feelings and preceptions here, not what is actually occuring.
No, we’re not. Or at least I’m not.
That I do not want to do something is not a feeling in the sense that you mean. It is my opinion and when it comes to my body, my opinion is the only one that matters.
The question then becomes what obligations do other people have to make sure they are certain of my opinion before they do something with it. And what obligation do I have to make my opinion understood.
Since it is the other person that is asking for a favor, I’d say that whether the issue is borrowing my car or making free with my body, the balance of the responsibility lies not with me, but with the person doing the asking.
If someone borrows my car without my permission – even if it’s only my squirt of a little brother – that’s stealing. It may not make sense to prosecute for various reasons – such as: he’s my little brother. But it’s still wrong. And it’s still stealing. And it was still his responsibility to make certain he had my permission.
The fact that it was my little brother does not mean that it should never be prosecuted, either. There’s lots of reasons why being my little brother shouldn’t make him immune from criminal charges for doing nothing more than borrowing my car without permission. Even if in the most common scenario, no one would consider it worth the bother of a frickin police report.
As I’ve written before – here and elsewhere, little brother may have never borrowed my car without my permission, but he did hide and watch me undress – back when he was actually little – and I wasn’t so much anymore. One could argue that what he did wasn’t really that wrong because I didn’t do the kid version of “saying no and meaning it”: going to Mom and Dad. (right away) Therefore he couldn’t have really understood how serious what he was doing really was.
I don’t see why I should have had to. If he was old enough to understand “keep out of my room without my permission” (most of the time, anyway) he was perfectly capable of understanding that my not going to Mom and Dad right away didn’t necessarily mean that I didn’t care. Even if he couldn’t guess that I was torn between protecting him and protecting myself, he did know that parents were a last resort when it came to the real fights.
Whether he had to guess at my “feelings” or not doesn’t matter. The only difference it makes is in making it easier for him to justify his actions to himself. What he did was wrong because he didn’t have permission – end of story. And I know that he knew this even then. The boy wasn’t stupid.
And yeah, there were big NO signs (like “stay out of my room”) that might not be there in a relationship between teens or adults, but I also think that teens and adults should be capable taking a little more responsibility for their actions. It’s one thing for my brother to not ask permission when he’s still little, it’s quite another for a driving age adult to claim they are incapable of understanding the sex version of the “be clear before you borrow” rule.
Rape is so horrible to me, and I view it as one of the most violent acts against a woman that a man can commit, either through physically violence, emotional abuse or emotional manipulations, and I have no desire to view a man that has raped as any other than horrible person, I can’t have all these gray areas about what rape is
While you are busy not gathering up the courage to face real life – real women are being hurt – and I don’t just mean their frickin feelings.
How do men become such monsters? For starters, they get away with the kind of shit my little brother wasn’t allowed to get away with. Often the excuse is “how could they know?” As if a twelve-year-old can’t understand the basics of autonomy and property rights. As if an sixteen-year-old isn’t capable of recognizing intimidation that a fourth grader could easily identify. As if a twenty-year-old can’t recognize the difference between caving in and eagerly agreeing.
When a four-year-old steals a candy bar (as four-year-olds invariably do) the parent usually drags the child back to store and makes of big scene of making the child apologize – often with the parent in tears or yelling because s/he’s so embarrassed. This is one of the ways that children learn not to steal.
When a seven-year-old tells a fellow classmates that he won’t leave her alone until she gives him a kiss, we coo and giggle and say how cute. We turn our backs on the little girl and give winks to the little boy. This is one of the ways that “monsters” – and not-quite monsters – are created. It’s also, btw, how girls learn to not say “no” even when they want to.
My little brother was not a monster. Even though he made me feel like shit. Even though he kept doing it after I made it clear I didn’t like it. Even though he kept doing it after I told our parents and they told him to stop.
My little brother was not a monster – but what he did was wrong. And he deserved to be punished for it.
(sadly, I don’t know that he ever was punished exactly – chalk another one up for “ways girls learn it doesn’t matter if they say no”)
*I should clarify for future argument’s sake that I told him to get out a few times, but mostly I just glared and he ran. I never told him specifically to stop what he was doing. Mostly because there was no way in hell I was ready to give a name to what he was doing. And, of course, I invited him back into my room on several occasions throughout the months?/years? that he did this. It wasn’t until the end that I couldn’t stand the sight of him. I loved him even during all that. How could I not?
Charles
– Any situation where the woman has NO power over herself or her will, none at all. A boyfriend telling his girlfriend that everyone is doing it and he won’t date her anymore or is begging or whining is not a situation where the girl has no power or will. She still has power over herself in this type of situations
A boyfriend telling his girlfriend he’ll tell everyone in school that she is a slut/whore or that he’ll ruin her reputation if she doesn’t do it, is a situation where she has no power, because he has removed her power and her will to be able to control her reputation in the school . He has take her power for her self from her.
A husband constantly threatening his stay a home mom wife(who is probably dependant on him) with removal of children, withholding funds, maybe physical violence, or non access to friends, family or resources, has used his power to remove any she may have because he knows she is dependent on him.
A woman feeling some pressure from a man in her home or his home, say he is saying, “aw come one, it’ll be fun” or “Don’t you want this” or even if he gets pissy and says m, ” thanks for wasting my time” to maybe guilt her into having sex is not a situation where she is powerless if he is not doing anything physically or emotionally specifically designed to take power from her, just being a jerk.
That is what rape is to me. A situation where an individual advances on a person that has no power or creates a self-powerless situation for that person that results in unwanted sexual contact.
Rape is not a situation where an individual makes a bad choice or has unsatisfying sex, based on minimal, non-severe attemps of persuasion.
Mickle – I live real life. Every day. Sorry because I have a different opinion from you that you think otherwise.
But I can’t follow your line of reasoning because rape, stealing a car, and barging into someone’s room over and over again don’t equate to me. My little sister did that same thing, but it was just bothering me and coming into my room, not trying to sexually assault me. She was just being an annoying brat, I wouldn’t classify her as a monster or sexual predator.
If she was kept stealing my car, I would report it stolen and tell them she did it.
But if she was hiding and watching me undress after repeated attempts to tell her no and maybe even finding out why she was doing it, and it was something sexual for her not a adolescent curiousity, then I would say she has a problem and would not be allowed in my room, period. I would tell my parents, and take steps for myself that she could not watch me undress.
Note:
I’m going away for thanksgiving, I don’t really have anything else to say. I think I made myself clear and you’ve all made your opinions clear about what you think or know I’m saying. have a good Turkey day if thats your thing, and on to the next topic.
Z
Zakia:
That is true, but what often happens is that real rape is re-envisioned by rapists and others to turn the rape victim into someone who made a bad choice to have sex or who was merely persuaded to have sex by a polite request or who freely consented to sex without any pressure and who later decided to re-envision herself as a rape victim.
Treating real rape victims like they are liars or delusional heaps more harm on those who have already been harmed by rape (I know this firsthand since these attitudes contributed to my 20 years of silence about my own rape) and that is why I and many other people will challenge those who hurt victims — whether the harm is accidental or intentional.