January 26, 2013
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Things I’m tired of hearing about rape
JDN 2456319 EDT 15:29.
This post will probably offend a lot of people, because I have nuanced opinions that ideologues of all stripes are bound to dislike. While I mostly agree with feminist principles, I am really a classical rationalist egalitarian of the Enlightenment tradition, and sometimes I don’t toe the line of feminist ideology. So I’m probably going to make people on both extremes mad, and I’m okay with that.
1. It’s not really rape.
Even Whoopi Goldberg said this one, an about an incident that frankly would be “rape rape” even if we made that ridiculous distinction. He drugged an underage girl, for goodness’ sake. I could almost understand if you used this to describe the charges against Julian Assange, for which the sex was consensual but the lack of a condom was not.
Rape is sexual activity without informed consent. Anything that fits that definition, is rape. Yes, some rapes are worse than others; fondling a woman who is too drunk to remember isn’t as bad as the mind-bendingly horrific assault that recently happened in India recently (read at your stomach’s own risk). But they are both rape, which has degrees just like murder (you know, first-degree murder, second-degree murder?).
2. She was asking for it.
Asking for… what? Sex? Perhaps. But rape isn’t just sex, it’s sex without consent, which means that pretty much by definition you can’t ask for it. If you ask for it, that’s giving consent, which means it’s not rape. (It could be a rape fantasy, or really rough sex, or something like that; but that’s completely different.) And I don’t care if she’s a bitch, or a prude, or a horrible person in whatever way; that doesn’t mean she deserves to be raped.
3. Why was she dressed so provocatively?
It was particularly appalling when people said this about an eleven-year-old girl who was gang-raped. I don’t care if she was fucking naked. It would be illegal even if she had wanted it, and she obviously didn’t.
In fact, wearing revealing clothes is a risk factor in being raped. But this is simply because rapists are opportunistic; high-functioning psychopaths that they are, they know that anything they can do to shift the blame to the victim is to their advantage. Since they know there is a cultural narrative saying that “dressing like a slut” makes rape your fault, they use this to avoid being punished.
4. Some men can’t help themselves.
Actually, this one is probably true: About 1% of men are low-functioning psychopaths who are so impulsive that they can’t control their own violent behavior. Of course, the response to that is obvious: Lock them up and throw away the key. There is currently no effective treatment for psychopathy, all we can do is keep these dangerous men out of society until we find one (or they die). If this is actually a rapist’s defense for his crime, we should consider him to be signing his arrest warrant.
5. Women often lie about being raped.
The rate of unsubstantiated rape reports is about 8%. That’s actually an upper limit; some of these unsubstantiated reports aren’t lies, they’re just cases where evidence isn’t available. 8% is not zero (see below), but it’s also not very many. The vast majority of reported rapes are actual rapes, and unfortunately there are a lot of actual rapes that never get reported. We should be encouraging people to report being raped, making it as easy and safe as possible. There will be some false allegations, but that’s what courts are for.
6. You can’t get pregnant that way.
This is what Todd Akin was blathering on about with his “legitimate rape” comments. It’s simply false. You can get pregnant from rape about as easily as you can get pregnant from sex in general. In fact, rape would be evolutionarily baffling were this not the case.
Statistically, rapes are more likely to result in pregnancy, but probably because rape victims are more likely to be young and healthy (and hence more likely to be fertile).
7. If you enjoy it, it’s not rape.
Well, usually you don’t enjoy it. But suppose you did; in fact, suppose you had an orgasm. This happens, actually; it has something to do with the overloading of the sympathetic nervous system. How does having an orgasm, or enjoying something, imply that you consented to it beforehand? Even if you really wanted to have sex with someone, the fact that they didn’t ask you first is morally problematic. Consent isn’t retro-active!
8. You should fight back; if you don’t, it’s not really rape.
Most rape victims report that they felt unable to move; it’s the same “play dead” instinct that possums use when faced by a predator. About 10% of rapes involve the use of a weapon (typically a knife or a gun). Your body may not even allow you to fight back, and if it does, fighting back might just turn your rape into a murder.
9. Men rape because they can’t get laid otherwise.
Actually, involuntary celibacy is inversely correlated with rape. This is because the kind of man who rapes is aggressive, and the kind of man who is involuntarily celibate is shy. They have radically different personality types. Most rapists actually have no trouble getting laid. This makes the notion that rape is a just response to celibacy even more appalling than it already was (I feel nauseous reading that).
Indeed, it’s hard for me to see rape as “getting laid” at all, though I’m sure that a lot of rapists think of it that way. The whole point of getting laid, I would think, is that someone else desires you and shares this experience with you. Trying to force it on someone seems like trying to coerce someone into being your friend; whatever else they are, they’re not your friend. I guess maybe the penetration itself feels good, but there’s always masturbation, and a wide selection of sex toys on the Internet. Honestly, penetrating someone who is either laying there helpless or fighting back isn’t my idea of fun at all.
In fact, as someone who was until recently involuntarily celibate, I can tell you: One of the biggest things that kept me from being assertive and confident about sex was the fact that women constantly complain about men hitting on them. They confuse wanting sex with wanting rape (see “Schrodinger’s rapist” below), and make it sound like the worst possible thing you could ever do to a woman is want to have sex with her. Small wonder that a nice guy who is a little shy would hesitate to make sexual advances.
9. How many black men with huge cocks do you want to rape you?
No, seriously, I heard this one twice in a one-week period. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s something people actually say… rather frequently. It’s racist, stupid, and it trivializes and deeply misunderstands rape. Frankly, I shouldn’t even have to say this.
10. Every man is a potential rapist.
A lot of feminists applauded this post about “Schrodinger’s rapist”. Personally, I find it offensive, appalling, and sexist. Because I have a penis, I’m inherently dangerous? It’s all right to treat me as a potential criminal? Would it not be racist to say that “every black man is a potential criminal”? Obviously it would. Well, the statistics that say men are more likely to be rapists are actually not as reliable as the statistics that black men are more likely to be criminals. (It’s probably poverty more than anything else, also institutionalized racism in the justice system; I’m sure it has nothing to do with genetics. Still, the statistical correlation is valid.)
Hence, it is sexist to say that every man is a potential rapist. End of story; if you deny that, you are basically admitting yourself to be a misandrist.
Some of the specific recommendations about how to approach a woman without offending or frightening her are entirely reasonable. But you should be doing that because it’s nice, and because it improves your chances of actually having a fulfilling sexual relationship with a woman. You should not be threatened into it by the notion that failing to do so makes it legitimate to treat you as a violent criminal.
11. Don’t tell victims to avoid it, tell rapists not to do it!
We certainly do tell women how to avoid being raped. Dress conservatively, don’t drink too much, go out with a friend, carry a whistle, et cetera. Some of this advice is useful; some of it isn’t. But when feminists insist that we never do this for other crimes, well, it’s simply not true.
Every parking structure in Ann Arbor carries the warning: “Do not leave valuables in your car.”
The Department of Public Safety at University of Michigan posts fliers about watching your laptop so it won’t be stolen.
Even “Don’t walk alone at night” isn’t just about rape, it’s also about mugging.
And then there’s the idea that you should just tell rapists to stop. Yeah, that’ll totally work! Violent psychopaths are well-known for their responsiveness to public service announcements! In fact, the typical rapist makes excuses for why he’s not really a rapist, so that he can (quasi-) honestly say “I’m not a rapist.” Huge signs on every college campus saying “DON’T RAPE” would have basically zero effect.
In fact, rape is especially unlikely to be talked out of. Some crimes, like piracy and plagiarism, actually can be reduced by “honor pledges” and the like, because they are committed in large numbers by ordinary people with ordinary levels of empathy and conscience. Rape is not like that. The only sort of person who could even seriously consider raping someone must already have serious lack of empathy, if not a diagnosable psychopath than something close to one. I’m a high-empathy individual, and I’m honestly not sure I could rape someone even if I had a gun to my head.
12. Men will never understand the fear of being raped.
Actually, men are raped about as often as women, maybe more so. Most men who are raped are prisoners, either as convicted criminals or prisoners of war. But then, rapes of male victims are even more underreported than rapes of female victims, so we honestly don’t know. Here’s a study saying that women are about three times as likely to be raped than men. Here’s a study suggesting that college-age men are more likely to be raped than college-age women!
13. Women don’t rape men.
Clearly, they do: Here’s an example right here. Here’s another, a more typical date-rape scenario. Here’s an even more horrific example. It does happen. The real question is how often that happens, which is frankly really hard to say; the statistics just aren’t there.
Even worse, people believe ludicrous myths like “A man can’t get an erection if he doesn’t want sex.” So… you’ve never heard of nocturnal tumescence? I guess it’s less weird not to know that fear can sometimes produce an erection; but come on, you’ve never seen a man sleep?
14. Women never lie about being raped.
As I mentioned above, the rate of unsubstantiated rape reports is small, but it is not zero. A comprehensive study suggests that the rate of truly false allegations is about 6%. We do still need courts to determine when a criminal accusation is valid, because serious consequences are at stake. There are degrees of false accusation, some of which there’s basically nothing we can do about; and some of what is called “false accusation” is actually mistaken identity or true with insufficient evidence.
15. Rape is a system of control used by men against women.
4-6% of men are rapists. That means that 94-96% of men aren’t. What’s more, our “rape culture”, insofar as it exists, is really limited to a lot of ignorant misconceptions and victim-blaming behaviors (see above). There’s virtually no one who would publicly say that they think rape is a good thing (if you scour the Internet, you can find a few, but that’s because the Internet is a compendium of all human thought, both brilliant and depraved). There are systems of control in this world: government, culture, religion. And many of these do in fact oppress women (among others). But far from being “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear“, rape is committed by a minority of men with particularly high aggression and particularly low empathy. I would not be opposed to enforcing treatment upon them in A Clockwork Orange fashion. I certainly would much prefer a world where rape wasn’t something that people I care about had to fear.
16. Rape has nothing to do with sex.
It’s not just sex, that’s certainly true. But no, it has something to do with sex, and if you can’t argue against rape without denying a basic fact like that, something is wrong with your worldview. Especially in an evolutionary sense, but even at the level of the rapist’s psychology, rape has an awful lot to do with sex; most rapists think of themselves as “getting laid”. Victims are selected for their attractiveness and perceived sexual availability. Pregnancy is a common outcome.
It may be uncomfortable to think about, that something as beautiful as sex could have such a horrific dark side, but it’s the truth. We have to face that truth responsibly; we can’t just deny it out of existence.
17. There’s no excuse for violence against women.
In other words, violence against men is just fine? Men are vastly more likely to be the victims of assault and murder. They may not even be any less likely to be the victims of rape (see above)! Thousands of men suffer domestic violence. College men and women are statistically indistinguishable in their rates of violence victimization.
Why would we say this? Is it really to strong to think it’s because of the trope that Men are the Expendable Gender?
I suppose “there’s no excuse for violence” would be too strong: What about self-defense? Justified war? So we needed a slogan that distinguishes these cases, and “There’s no excuse for inexcusable violence” is a tautology. Fair enough, how about this one: “There’s no excuse for domestic violence.”
Comments (40)
I agree with everything here. Even a man of my age is not expendable, and violence, in general, is just plain wrong, regardless of target-gender.
Thank-you for writing this..as a woman I appreciate it.
I wish I could do this entry more justice than to merely recommend it and write a few comments; again thank-you.
Zoe
I don’t agree with all of your points, and I don’t think you meant to suggest that those who disagree don’t have nuanced views. I did agree with a lot of it and especially appreciate a rationale that isn’t based on simplistic gender assumptions. That is rare on Xanga,
I agree with most of this. Great post.
#10… No, complete strangers who are men are potential rapists… more accurately, be aware of your surroundings because you never know when a rapist is lurking in the shadows.
#17 is just MRA bullshit. There’s no excuse for violence against women is NOT saying violence against men is okay. And no self-defense doesn’t make it okay for a man to hit a woman. Which doesn’t mean a woman should ever hit a man. Which doesn’t mean any person can’t defend themself from an attack. I work with special ed students some as big and stronger than me and I’ve never had to hit one to defend myself.
Well done! You do realise that the only way to stop rape is with the rape-free zone sign that you scorned. Signs work, and I have the proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF0YnLNRfU0
Thank you. I too tend to cause a disturbance in the force when it comes to ideologies which use a gendered lens to view the world, and I think it’s important to deal with the facts regardless of what those ideologies might predispose us to believe.
Thus my strong loyalty to the 2nd amendment. An experienced gun carrier always has a fighting chance against the physically superior.
“fighting back might just turn your rape into a murder.”
This is something I wish I could get people to understand. I’ve wanted to tell so many women that told me that they would have fought back that well then we would not be having a conversation then.
I agree with everything that you’ve said here even the last point. I read it as there is no excuse for violence against anyone, not just women. I can see how it would make some people upset though. I think they may be assuming that because most of the time a male will have the upper hand physically, there are never instances where the reverse is true AND the female instigated the violence. I think it is easy to ignore that in those cases the fact that the man probably resorted to violence as a last resort (and the fact he was going to be judged for being attacked by a woman + hitting a woman). There is no excuse for violence against anyone, but then again, you did already stated that.
I love, love, love this post. nicely written!
I’m tired that we still have to hear about rape…sigh.
As a victim, I agree with it all.
raped unconscious may not feel as horrible as forced intercourse but trauma is still there.
really good insights though
In the evenings, after the so-called watershed hour of 9pm, the commercial channels run a series of ads aimed at “young people” about their behaviour. There’s a brilliant one where a girl is completely rat-arsed at a party making a fool of herself and being generally obnoxious, when the camera pulls back she’s there twice and the second her is unable to prevent the first one from doing all these things. Another one is a lad getting ready to go out – he looks great but then he rips his jacket, loses a shoe, rips out his earing, vomits down himself and so on… THEN he goes out. But the most important one is a couple on a coat-strewn bed in the bedroom of a house where a party is going on. The girl is really drunk, the boy less so. At first he seems to be just making sure she is all right but then it gets a bit more serious and she feebly begins to protest, then more loudly the camera pans away to where the same boy is sobbing and banging on the window to make himself stop… but he can’t. I think that image is very chilling and I hope its message works.
Oh and I’ve remembered another one. It’s kind of dual one for both partners. It charts their relationship from the tentative beginning to the day when she says something as a joke and he slaps her for the first time. The “dual thems” watch it deteriorate further with her yelling at herself to get out and him screaming at himself to stop. For a 30 second advert it’s incredibly effective.
Your post is really very good. And how an idiot like Todd Adkin even has a public forum to express his shite views in is beyond me. That such morons can influence the thinking of others is frightening. But then, that’s democracy for you I suppose and I’d rather have that than an alternative.
I’ll stop rambling now.
While I don’t necessarily agree with everything here (particularly the bit about “rape culture”), I happen to agree with most of it. I also really like your style of writing here, too.
Let’s also mention those roving bands of female rapists ( seriously ) who steal the semen of street boys for use in juju medicines.
Is this remotely controversial?
I don’t know, I loathe Feminists too much to read their inane rantings. Half-wits, the lot of them. Wendy McElroy is alright, for a heroin junkie.
@TiredSoVeryTired -
If that’s really the intent of 10, it’s even stupider, because the majority of rapes are committed by acquaintances, not strangers.
As for 17, well, your statements are together mutually contradictory.
A. “self-defense doesn’t make it okay for a man to hit a woman.”
B. “Which doesn’t mean any person can’t defend themself from an attack.”
If a woman hits a man, what is the man supposed to do? By A, he should stand there and take it. By B, he should fight back to defend himself. He can’t possibly do both.
You try to justify it with this: “I work with special ed students some as big and stronger than me and I’ve never had to hit one to defend myself.”
This is a very specific case, where they are mentally impaired students whose aggression is purely impulsive and unplanned. Imagine being attacked by a woman with a knife, or that man who was raped to death by half a dozen women, and you’ll clearly see that sometimes self-defense means injuring your attacker.
@GZLSnob - It makes me sad when women say this. Feminism is about women being full participants in society and not treated as inferior to men. To sweep all feminists aside in such a nasty manner might be intellectually easy, but it’s not exactly accurate.
@EmilyandAtticus -
Equality is for fucking idiots. Don’t talk to me, liberal cunt.
@GZLSnob - LOL sorry didn’t mean to interfere with your vast sense of inferiority. I do agree, you are absolutely not my equal LOL. Luckily I know your stupidity is unrelated to gender.
@pnrj - Yeah, I know we are all most likely to be hurt by someone we know. Doesn’t mean we need to trust a complete stranger just because he’s a man and we know all men aren’t rapists.
Defending yourself does not mean you HAVE to hit or beat the shit out of another person. If someone comes at you with a knife, run away as a first defense. And you falsely assume a student can’t cause damage or pick up something in the classroom to use against anyone. You simply are talking out of your ass, some of my students are aggressive because of their home life. Hell, picking up a knife is impulsive and some kids plan shit out. The response to apply violence to violence is male aggression. Women (not all) tend to freeze or run away.
It would be interesting if studies were done on gender related responses to violence. IME, men don’t hit a woman back to defend themselves, they hit back to punish.
@Erika_Steele - How can another person possibly have the audacity to surmise how they would react to being raped, particularly if they never were, and even more so in contradiction to the real experience of a woman who was raped?! That is beyond inappropriate and deserves a big fat slap in the face.
@pnrj - Agreed. If a man is being put in physical danger by a woman, he has every right to defend himself to the fullest extent of his needs. Gender is irrelevant. A person who seeks to assault an innocent is not a man or woman, but a monster, and should not be regarded as anything but until safely contained.
There is also the fact that strength is not always indicative of power, and no man should have to take a second thought about defending himself on the assumption that his attacker is physically inferior; that’s absurd and discriminatory.
Those well-trained in martial arts have the ability to subdue others much larger than they are. This is something I plan to become trained in in my future and would advocate all women do so.
@pnrj, just to clarify (because this is not obvious to people not working in public education), special ed teachers work with students with all sort of problems (sensory impairments, physical ailments, mental disorders, learning disabilities and those with cognitive impairments). Special ed teachers frequently co-teach classes with regular classroom teachers if there are sufficient numbers of people with IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) or 504s (these are forms indicating medical disabilities). Even within special ed only classrooms though, the vast majority of students are those with AD(H)D, learning disabilities in reading/writing/both, “behavioral disorders” which essentially is an umbrella term for children with severe discipline problems (which may or may not be the result of diagnosed mood disorders), or some combination of the three (comorbidity is pretty common between disruptive, defiant behavior and below grade-level reading or writing, which itself is comorbid with dyslexia/dysgraphia, which is in turn comorbid with ADD). This is actually a cause for concern among educators and parents alike, as the referral process is often based off of a teacher’s subjective judgment and prior discipline referrals, and the “discipline gap” between male students of color and everyone else has led to a disproportionate amount of low-skills black male students, despite not having been diagnosed with a mental/emotional/learning disability or disorder, being placed in exclusively special ed classrooms, where the educational outcomes typically are worse than their mainstreamed peers.
All this to say that a special ed teacher, even in a special ed classroom, will rarely be assaulted by students who are cognitively impaired in a purely impulsive moment; more often than not it’s an episode of frustration/aggression that peaks in physical violence from students that have a history of violent outbursts sufficient to place them in special ed to begin with.
I agree 17 should be about “violence is never acceptable.” I knew some women who beat their husbands. Really it was awful.
Also #9 1/2 I have heard about my race as well, about Native American Indian and Hispanic men. Those kinds of things said are just racist.
@EmilyandAtticus - LOL Like your answer i have to remember that one!
I agree with you.
@DrummingMediocrity - not sure how I managed not to slap them except that the fact that if I DID slap them, that would have been my fault, too.
It is sad how many people can’t see that the statement that there is no excuse for violence against women is the same as saying that men can’t defend themselves in cases they are the ones being attacked by a woman. Why is it so hard to believe that most men when attacked by a woman will only do so as a last resort? #17 IS about the fact that violence is not acceptable from anyone, it is also saying that men have the right to defend themselves no matter who they are defending themselves against. If you can accept #12 & #13 than it shouldn’t be that hard to accept that sometimes men have to fight off their female perpetrators.
@Ipoplikewhitey -
In that case, I would think that using violence to defend yourself would be entirely appropriate. I wouldn’t use more violence than necessary, but I also wouldn’t refrain from using violence if it meant defending myself or others from violent aggression.
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excellent post!
@DrummingMediocrity - Yeah learning martial arts is a good idea, for those who are interested. My wife actually teaches martial arts and, as you say, even though I’m obviously both larger and stronger than her, she’s definitely capable of easily subduing me. It’s an awesome skill for a woman to have, but it takes a lot of time and effort to learn really well.
I agree, although I would not read too much into the last one.
When you say violence against children is unacceptable, that doesn’t mean violence against adults is acceptable, and no one would get the idea that that is meant. It just means that the specific constellation “adult beats kid” needs to be adressed (even though there are also kids who beat kids, and kids who beat adults.)
There are women (and men) who are very focused on womens rights and are possibly oblivious of what is happening to men (and done to them by both men and women), but that doesn’t mean they think it’s fine.
I think the main point of this statement is to be a counterpole to the opinion that violence against women IS ok (because they ask for it, they said something mean to the man, and mostly because men should actually be the dominant part of the relationship and can physically disciplinne their woman.) You might argue that this is not an opinion that appears in the statistic of college men and women, however it IS what some people, and even some ‘organized groups’ think.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the main-point you are making, violence against men is unacceptable. It definitely needs to be adressed more, and it is getting brushed under the rug. I also think men need to “emancipate” in that they stand up for their own feelings and get rid of this false sense of pride. The way victim/offender relations are depicted and adressed is not at all proportional to reality and that’s a problem. (I saw a youtube video saying something similiar about white and black women)
But no, I wouldn’t think it’s saying “violence against women is ok” if I saw a sign saying “violence against men isn’t acceptable”. I’d think “hey, someone wants to adress violence against men”.
I do see how you would get that impression, but when you are reading things like that you are putting words into people’s mouthes which depicts every individual that fights for one speficic cause as a hater of the other, which is obviously not fair, and creates more conflicts.
Common sense is nice, that’s all.
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Actually, no, rape has nothing to do with sex, most of the time, from the victim’s perspective. Simply because sexual organs are involved does not mean it has to do with sex or specifically, sexual intercourse. If you damage a sexual organ and the doctor checks it out, that is not about sexual intercourse, it is about health. And if a woman is artificially inseminated, she can get pregnant, and it is not about sexual intercourse.
The rapist’s perspective here should not inform the meaning of the act. If you take the position that rape is about sex because that is how the rapist sees it, then you are beginning your analysis from the rapist’s perspective and that is simply unsound. It may serve to understand the problem, but to construct a socio-cultural semiotics of rape then you have to give full weight to the victim’s perspective and in this case, the majority will see the attack as violence employing sexual organs, like torturers who employ genital electrodes or castration.
In some ways, you are being too strict and reductionist with your definitions. What does it mean to be “about sex” in the first place? To me, sex, as in sexual intercourse, is by definition mutually consensual, because it is an act that cannot simply be reduced to a specific set of behaviors involving a specific set of organs. But even here, rape is often physically painful because the victim is not sexually aroused. So rape is only about sex for the rapist. For the victim it simply is not, it is simply violence.
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