A comment on rape and "she asked for it" by Pink Dream Poppies

Erica,

If you had written this series of posts about nine months ago, I probably would have agreed with a lot of what you said. Over time, though, my opinion has changed drastically (in large part because of this very blog and dicussions in its comment threads), and I’d like to take a moment to write about what made my mind change.

I used to have an idea of male sexuality similar to the one that you seem to have. My theory went that men were biologically “wired’ in a way that is different from the way in which women are “wired”; men, in my way of thinking, were naturally more aggressive, more assertive, less able to control their raging hormones, and more horny. I based this on a lot of things ranging from the fact that I’d never seen a girl play a really aggressive sport like football to the fact that I’d never heard a girl boast about how often she masturbated. The more “masculine” guys I knew, the burly guys who drank a lot and pushed people around and otherwise acted like the “men” on television, were also the ones who were most likely to be accused of rape.

I thought that girls who dressed in a “slutty” way didn’t necessarily deserve to be raped, but they certainly weren’t doing anything to keep it from happening. Another way to put it might be that they weren’t “asking for it,” as the saying goes, but they were raising the subject for the asking. I based this theorum on my own reaction to girls who dressed in “slutty” clothing (I wanted to have sex with them), and my observation that the girls who wore “slutty” clothing were also the girls most likely to say that they’d been raped.

So, the “manly” guys, by my observations, were more likely to be rapists while the “slutty” girls were more likely to be rape victims. Thus, those “manly” men couldn’t help themselves but to rape the women who tempted them. When I factored into my theory that most of those people seemed to be into drinking and taking drugs, I came up with an equation that went a little like: guys who had a lot of testosterone + girls who showed off their bodies + drugs + alcohol = rape.

Then things started to happen… I found myself in the position of being very close friends with a woman who had been raped by her husband. It was an internet friendship, but I was no less effected by it. She spoke to me shortly after he did it and almost none of what she said fit in with my view of rape and rape victims. Eventually a part of my mind fell back on the idea that she’d been drinking, he’d been drinking, and … Something. I don’t know. A fuse was blown the moment she told me that her husband had raped her, but my mind wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge it yet. Just because a significant portion of my mental “house” had ceased to have power, I didn’t think it was necessary to venture into my basement and examine the way things had been strung together.

After that I started meeting more women who had been raped. Curiously enough, almost all of them had been raped while in their late twenties or early thirties, while they were sober, by people they knew and trusted, and when they were in comfortable and safe environments. Many of them were athletic, as well. I stumbled across this weblog (shortly after I stumbled across the entire concept of being a part of the progressive movement after I’d spent so much time being a conservative, but that’s a different topic entirely) and was fairly shortly ripped to shreds by bean (thanks, by the way) for some comments I made, was politely rebutted by Ampersand (also thanks, by the way), and stuck around to find out more about this whole feminism thing. I also started dating a young woman quite seriously.

The most important thing, though, was that I started thinking about myself. Once I had deconstructed the myth of the uncontrolable male, I was able to deconstruct a number of other myths.

The first thing I thought about was that I’d been tempted in the past to kiss a woman or grope a woman or have sex with a woman who didn’t want me to kiss/grope/have sex with her. Because I’d been tempted to commit sexual assault and rape, I reasoned, there must be a part of my male mind that was naturally inclined toward rape.

Um. Uh. What?

I’m also tempted to steal, lie, cheat, hurt, and kill. I don’t get some sort of pass when I do those things, so why would I get a pass if I decided one day to grab a woman’s bottom who didn’t want me touching her there? Because I’m a guy?

Let’s assume for a moment that men really are genetically more inclined to try to force sex with an unwilling partner than are women. Okay. So? People are also inclined to physically assault people who wrong them and defecate whenever they feel the need to. We have a term for not beating up others and not defecating in a hotel lobby because our bowels are full; it’s called being civilized. Children are potty trained, taught to not beat each other up, not to lie, not to steal, not to cheat, and not to interrupt while other people are speaking. I’ve yet to see someone argue that guys should be allowed to urinate in public because people are genetically inclined to urinate when the urge strikes them.

Perhaps, then, sexual urges are different for men, are less controllable than the need to urinate? It doesn’t take too much thought to dismiss this one. When was the last time you saw a man masturbating in the mall corridor? Personally, I’ve never seen it happen but I can guarantee you that there are a very large number of men who have been walking around in the mall and have really wanted to have an orgasm. If it’s not okay to masturbate in public, if the expectation is that men can control their sexual urges long enough to drive home, why is it okay (or at least “understandable”) for men to not control their urges and rape women?

Certainly it has something to do with the woman’s appearance, right? Well, no. If I said that it was a bit more understandable for a man to rape a woman if she was walking around in nothing but a bra and panties, I’d also be saying it was a bit more understandable for a man to masturbate in front of the Victoria’s Secret store display. Because the urge to masturbate and the urge to have sex are the same urge: the urge to have an orgasm. Guys who complain that they “haven’t scored in so long” aren’t having an urge for sex that’s not being fulfilled by their masturbatory habits; they’re wanting companionship, or conquest, or simply a change in the routine.

But hey, even if the masturbatory urge and the sexual urge are two different things, why should the conquering of one urge be considered insurmountable? Toddlers can be potty trained, I don’t see why men can’t learn how to just not have sex if their potential partner doesn’t want to have sex with them.

On a related note: burkhas aren’t exactly the most salacious things in the world, and yet rape is still rampant in parts of the world in which women are required to wear them. So maybe it’s the circumstances the woman puts herself in, or is put in? First of all, those are two different things so I’ll address them in turn.

Take a the proverbial girl wearing a sexy dress in a seedy part of town at midnight. If she gets raped, did she deserve it? No. A sexy woman in a sexy dress at night, or even a stark naked woman drunk in a bar at night, does not deserve to be raped. These situations should not be viewed as extreme circumstances under which the male mind is incapable of controlling itself. Those are not life-or-death situations; people are not insects that will die if they don’t mate so any man who sees a woman in a sexy dress in a seedy part of town and wants to have sex with her is not going to suffer by waiting until he gets home so he can masturbate.

Blueballs? Just to clear that up, just in case it needs clearing up: blueballs is rare, is a result of extremely prolonged stimulation, causes no permanent damage, and the pain caused by it is not alleviated by orgasm (in fact, if I remember correctly, orgasm is impossible).

Okay, so is that woman in the sexy dress doing everything she can to prevent being raped? Yes. Why? Because she shouldn’t have to do anything in order to not be raped. And no, that’s not an unrealistic, utopian view of the world. There is an expectation that people should be able to walk down the street at night without being shot, why is there not an expectation that women should be able to do whatever they want to do without being raped? (Interestingly enough, there’s no feeling that men wearing sexy clothes in seedy parts of town are tempting people to rape them.)

But what’s about your husband who didn’t lock up his bicycles and they ended up stolen? Isn’t he at fault, at least to an extent, for his bikes being stolen? No. Not legally and not morally. Leaving oneself open to attack of any form (theft, assault, etc.) does not make one culpable for said attack.

Morally, the decision to steal your husband’s bike was not a decision your husband made or had a hand in because your husband did not steal the bike. Did he contribute to it through his negligence? Perhaps, but he cannot be faulted for not locking up his bicycle because there was not a guarantee that his bicycle would be stolen.

Legally, your husband isn’t at fault for his bike being stolen because, again, he didn’t steal it. If you left the front door of your house wide open while you were on vacation, it would still be against the law for someone to walk off with your television.

(As I recall, rape is the only law in which mitigating factors between the accused and the victim can result in the charges being dismissed. Even in murder cases where children kill abusive parents, unless it’s in self-defence, the children are, I believe, still convicted of manslaughter.)

But all of this misses the point: a woman wearing a sexy dress is not equivalent to an unlocked bicycle or an open door. It doesn’t matter where she is or what she’s doing or what she’s wearing: there are no acceptable circumstances under which a woman (or a man, for that matter) may have her (or his) body violated against her (or his) will. And yes, I mean that to include circumstances like a super-model giving a lap-dance to a known sex-offender while they’re both on crack and sipping Jack Daniels. If he has sex with her and she says no and resists him, crack, jack, and record be damned: he raped her, and he deserves to be punished for it.

Because men can control their urges. Because women have the right to be women.

I meant this to be rational and well-stated, but I’ve decayed into ranting. There’s a lot more that I’d like to say, especially about the contributions our culture makes toward the high incidence of rape, but I need to take a few no-keyboard minutes first.

…

Just real quick: our society promotes an image of masculinity that encourages men to not control their sexual urges. It creates a mythical other-world in which a lone woman drunkenly dancing in a rural bar is seen as fair game rather than a human being with a right to chose her circumstances. She chose to be in that situation, she should also be able to choose how the situation develops and ends..