So, while the site was down, the big news burning up the feminist blogosphere is this horrific gang rape at Duke. I’m happy to see so much attention being paid to it; I’m even happier to see that there’s been protests at the university. Without social support for the victims of these crimes, the assailants usually don’t get any justice. Ampersand has a round-up of all sorts of great blogging on it–I won’t reiterate the details because you can get them all there.
Instead, I’d like to talk about the act of the gang rape itself, because I reread an article recently that really gets to the heart of why it happens and why it’s possibly the most socially acceptable form of rape. It’s called “They don’t see it as rape. They see it as pleasure for them.” It’s about the growing problem of gang rape in England and it’s an evocative look at why gang rape exists and why it’s tolerated–to put it bluntly, in a male dominated society, gang rape is a version of fox hunting, a sport of sorts. It’s the patriarchy in its essence, where the leaders of male dominance are active sadists but their followers have managed to convince themselves they do like women, they aren’t evil, etc. In the article, it’s noted that often in a gang rape, some participants will help the victim clean up, give her money, even walk her home (presumably to protect her from rape). Accusations of effeminence are used to keep unwilling participants in the game. The victims are objects of male bonding.
I’ve joked in the past that the states that are lining up now to ban abortion after South Dakota reminds me of a gang rape. It does. The psychology is exactly the same–ganging up to show off who’s the most masculine, who can hurt the victims the most. And the victims are always, always pegged as guilty.
Criminologists say that a lot of young men who participate in gang rapes would never rape a woman on their own. That strikes me as accurate–the pressure to conform and participate is probably enormous. It’s good evidence for the feminist assertion that rape is a tool of male dominance–the psychology is a lot like that of war–you must be brutal to the target to show your loyalty to the group. That the violence on average in gang rapes is worse than most other rapes is more evidence of this.
68 Responses to “The gang rape is the essential scene of the patriarchy”
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I don’t know about “most” socially acceptable–are gang rapes more socially acceptable than, say, marital rape?
But yeah, that’s an excellent–and horrifying–article. Especially about how many of the boys who do this are otherwise normal and even good people, but somehow when you get them all together, they lose what little sense of boundaries they have. It’s just bizarre. I can’t wrap my head around it.
Some of those defense attorneys’ arguments are just revoltingly vicious and ignorant. What, the girls know the boys so they can’t have been raped by them?
I don’t even know what to say about this other than that the Guardian article is indeed horrifying.
Amanda nails it:
One thing that gang rape does is to enact a main premise of homosociality–that relationships between men trump relationships between men and women.Consider this–not only would most of those guys at Duke not have raped those women one-on-one, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the vast majority of those guys would have come to the woman’s defense had they stumbled on to the scene of a one-on-one rape.
Think about it–you’re a young, athletic guy who enjoys a fairly rough contact sport. You turn the corner coming home from the library and you see some guy in the process of sexually assaulting a woman. I’m going to bet that the very least 99% of those guys would have done would have been to call 911. I think most of them would have kicked the shit out of the attacker. But when it’s their buddies or teammates–and as a survivor of 7 years of organized football in Texas, I can attest to the wired lengths that teammate bonding can go to–suddenly it’s “can I be next?” or at the very best, “Hey guys, I’m not sure you should be doing that. Guys?”
That’s because the homosocial codes that are strongly in place in most men’s sports teams (among a bazillion other places) dictate that if you have to choose between your relationship with a woman and your relationship with men to whom you are bonded, you have to choose the latter–or else you’re feminized (a “pussy”) and as such, no longer fit for the homosocial bond.
Disgusting. That Guardian article made me want to wash my brain. I’ve said it before and I stand by it: guys go on and on about being tough, but when push comes to shove in a situation like this, they wimp out and go along like sheep. Weaklings.
I know not all guys are like this. But crimes like this one make me want to enact some kind of “scarlet letter” program, where anybody who commits rape would have an “R” branded into his forehead. According to statistics, about 25% of the male population would wind up branded. How depressing.
OK. Amanda Nails It, Part II:
The other main premise of homosociality that gang rape enacts is that men bond homosocially over/through the bodies of women.That is, the woman becomes the conduit for male connection–the male bond is “triangulated,” deflected through the body of the woman. Not that this is homosexual (that would be insulting to gay men), but the very opposite–the presence of a woman serves to nullify the threat of homosexuality implicit within the homosocial bond.
Look at it this way–is there any place besides a woman’s body that guys are willing to put their dicks immediately after another guy put his there?
Similarly, can you imagine if two of those teammates had been caught masturbating in front of each other? But if they’re masturbating into a woman, suddenly there’s nothing queer about it.We can debate whether men are more violent than women even discounting social factors (I believe they are), but there can be little debate about the size and strength difference of men on average.
The gang rape is NOT the essential scene of the patriarchy. It is tskd tskd at by men and women alike. And not nearly as common as the real essential scene of the patriarchy’s violent control over women, which is the domestic abuse smackdown. One on one. Absolutely epidemic. This scene must stop if women are to be allowed full partnership in our society.
It is the million little bullyings and violences that maintain the staus quo. A woman abused is an assault against civilization. It is a crimiinal matter. If women must be forced to testify, and if we have adequate protections for them, then we should force the issue. Very vexing problem.
The main sticking point between us and bin Laden is the treatment of the women. Boys like Pat Robertson who want women more subservient, but not as much as bin Laden are the appeasers.
What really got me about the accounts of this incident is how horrible the neighbor felt because he didn’t call the cops when he first detected trouble outside the house. If anybody seems genuinely remorseful, it is this guy, who didn’t take part but can’t claim (and doesn’t claim) to be an innocent bystander.
I suspect that he didn’t want to face the facts and think about the reality that such a horrible gang action was really going down. I have to wonder if some of those who ended up not taking part but not taking action were similarly stunned by disbelief as to their own capacity for participation?
It would also be interesting to do a cross-sectional survey of Britons (and in the US) asking people how they “define” or “envision” a gang rape, contrast that with the realities, and do some wholesale educational intervention. The denial of justice on trivial, often romanticized issues is startling.
Everyone needs to be taught to resist mob mentality. That seems to be a major factor.
I read this and immediately thought of two separate incidents. One was that horrible event at a school in Kenya in 1991, St. Kizito. Nineteen secondary school girls died (many suffocated while trying to hide in a cloakroom or closet) and at least 70 others were raped in their school dormitory by fellow male students, who lived in a neighboring dormitory. (Apparently tempers were running high during a protest over school fees, and you have to stand in awe at the behavioral non sequiter). A deputy principal at the school was quoted as saying, “The boys never meant any harm against the girls. They just wanted to rape them.”
The other thing I thought of, which I can’t source at the moment, is an article I read recently about a vicious practice among some guys in which fat girls and women are targeted for crude sexual encounters, which are often observed or photographed, the evidence to be used as trophies. The men call it hogging or sweathogging, and interviews with them reek of the sick pseudo-sporting attitude they have about loving to “violate those little pigs every which way” they can.
This is people-hunting, folks. This is sick shit, and everyone knows it. The pack mentality is powerful, and the social cues supporting objectification of women as disgusting, convenient, subhuman receptacles are plentiful.
Guys, you need to speak out when you hear the jokes or the verbal posturing. Maybe you don’t need to lecture, but you need to decline to participate and to say why it doesn’t amuse you, and to tell these other guys that even if they’re joking, it’s some kind of sick shit. You have to haul their asses to some recognition of empathy: what if it was their mom, or their sister? What if it was their very own male buttholes being used for sport, by assailants sharing a pack mentality of contempt, convenience, threat, and terrorism?
As for the rest of us who are the not-men…hell. I think we have to kill our attackers. Just kill them, preferably in the immediate moment prior to the attack, but if that isn’t possible, then as soon afterwards as we can get a weapon and/or call for reinforcements.
If the perpetrators of sport-rape began to realize that it could be an event they might not survive, maybe we’d see a change.
I don’t know. The point about domestic violence is well taken, but I think I might call domestic violence the most common, widespread, and overwhelming act of patriarchy.
Gang rape is “essential scene” in the sense of revealing it being an enactment of the essence of patriarchy.
Domestic violence is usually committed by individual men, often behind closed doors, and with a certain veil of secrecy. Gang rape, by its nature, is a group assault, and this is where it displays the “essence” of patriarchy. Patriarchy is not something men can do alone. Just like patriarchy in general, gang rape is not something that a single man can practice by himself. He needs the active consent and participation of other men. In return for his support of their dominance over women, they can be counted on to in turn support his dominance over women.
Patriarchy is a system that requires both the active and passive participation of other men. Gang rape enacts this.
Point taken, epi, but I’d say DV is the day-to-day enforcement, whereas the gang rape is sort of symbolic of all the various ways the patriarchy functions. The way that otherwise unwilling men are sucked into it replicates the patriarchy very well. The Duke rapes were also viewed by the rapists as reenactment of white supremacy.
As for socially acceptable–well, “tsking” in theory, acquittal in practice.
Amanda and RJ–this “homosocial male bonding” is what I’ve been calling militarism. It’s what they do at boot camp. To make a soldier, you need to destroy the individual’s self-esteem and then offer as a substitute an identity based on membership in a group–a team, the winners.
This is the foundation of any dominator society, and dominator practically equals patriarchy.
Then, having created the identity and established socially that members of the dominant team will indeed go unpunished for such acts as gang rape, the domination of individual men over their individual wives is sanctioned and demanded.
Hence, in an ideological sense, I think it is correct to say the gang rape is more archetypical, and abuse in the home is more the result to be aimed at–for that environment does result both in women being wrung out as laborers and trophies, and creating a home where young children get pre-conditioned for the ultimate training.
A domonator society might evolve into one where the gang rapes might not actually take place any more–as long as culture and social practice are saturated with their atmosphere. Let the conditioning be challenged–let there be women who throw off the gloomy warnings since people don’t actually act that way any more–let there be men who like the women they are attracted to too much to mentally degrade them or love their daughters too much to scar them–and the society will sanction actual excesses again, to restore the strength of the ruling myths.
Answer: None.
Imagine if you will a group of FratBoys encircling a young woman who’s weeping and begging them to stop. And they participate anyway.
You might as well ask how many SS death camp guardswere “otherwise normal and even good people.” Group think, however powerful, is not a replacement for individual culpability, moral or legal. If they’d deny her essential humanity in a group they’d deny it as an individual whether the group gave them courage to perform the sin or not.
To me, acting out evil in a group is even more contemptible than acting singly.
The gang rape is NOT the essential scene of the patriarchy.
It’s certainly the flag ship, gang rape is very much a hate crime against women in general, and a very bad one because instead of having one guy who rapes, you have a small section of a community, who rapes.
It doesn’t matter how much anyone tsk tsks, what you still have is part of the community (the gang rapists) not just saying “we’ll rape bitches who step out of line, or just because women are lumps of meat for our amusement”, you have taht part of the community actually raping a woman because she stepped outside some community standard (these are followed by the bitch had it coming justifications) or just because part of community believes it has the right to amuse itself by abusing women, or even worse than that, believes its members need to abuse women to fit into community standards.
The most common scene of a racist society is anti-whoever graffitti, the most essential scene of a racist society, the scene that most efficiently sends the message the racists want to send and which puts the hating in plain view (but it’s just an isolated case tsk tsk tsk…) is the lynching.
Peggy Reeves Sanday’s book “Fraternity Gang Rape” talks about many of the points raised in this post in greater detail, including the homosociality stuff that RJ raised.
We can debate whether men are more violent than women even discounting social factors (I believe they are), but there can be little debate about the size and strength difference of men on average.
what the fuck? why does it matter, the gang rape sends that even more important message that no matter how strong, how able to handle yourself you are, if neccesary the patriarchy will send wave after wave of wimps to rape your skanky ass if neccesary to put you and all other women in their place.
larkspur -Guys, you need to speak out when you hear the jokes or the verbal posturing. Maybe you don’t need to lecture, but you need to decline to participate and to say why it doesn’t amuse you, and to tell these other guys that even if they’re joking, it’s some kind of sick shit.
I agree - it can lead to some social marginalization, but it’s the right thing to do. I don’t hang out with the kind of men/boys who do this sort of thing (or even talk about it without revulsion), so I’m not well placed to understand the social dynamics. However, in the few cases where I have had a chance to speak out (nearly all involving racism) the immediate social awkwardness has passed relatively quickly, and the only person offended was the offender. In a number of cases I’ve been approached after the incident by other bystanders who expressed thanks for my speaking out, or at least respect for my willingness to put my beliefs out front.
Mighta missed it…as already posted, but
Aren’t the terror-rapes by Jimjaweed(sp?) just what we’re talking about?
They are tailored to fear, repression, intimidation of the subjected and so are a
statement of domination, for… group and exprression of…power.
Happens the victims are black-black and the rapists are dark-Arab but they’re all Muslims.
And I don’t know if these particular monsters restrict their offences to females
or even just humans.
Gets mixed up, I guess, any hole in mob rampage.
I still think it goes to the ‘desocialized’ male…the deficient Y not just failing to express humanity but disallowing it otherwise… chromosomally.
These people maybe can’t help it…but still mustn’t be loose and never condoned.
‘Jeez’, really.
It appears that gang rapes are even harder to convict than individual rapes, because instead of just one nice boy in the dock, you’ve got ten, or five, or whatever, and they all swear up and down that oh, no, sir, they would never do that kind of thing. It’s like the reverse of the ancient concept that a woman’s word is only worth half that of a man’s.
It’s like, if they hurt the woman enough, nobody will believe her because to do so they’d have to believe that these guys got together and did this, and now walk amongst society. Better keep the denial; it’s so much more pleasant.
You might as well ask how many SS death camp guardswere “otherwise normal and even good people.�
A lot of people do ask this. Or state this. Or believe that death camp guards and other Nazi soldiers were basically good people. Especially the camp guards or other German soldiers who happened to be their own personal parents and grandparents, whom they remember bringing them presents at Christmas and playing cards with them.
Hast_te what you’re talking about sounds like rape as part of organized state terrorism (practiced by a state or quasi state entity to cow the people). The psych literature recognizes other motivations to rape. From a comment I made at Feministe:
Some studies suggest three categories: power rape (establish power), anger rape (vent anger) and sadistic rape (satisfy sadistic release)… Scully and Marolla (1984,
1985) find that rape “can be viewed as the endpoint on a continuum of
sexually agressive behaviors that reward men and victimize women.�
Another type of rape is where the victim was a “convenient target�
where the perpetrator did not necessarily intend for the situation to
end in rape, but took advantage as an afterthought.
Brilliant analysis. I had never realised how much gang rape is a perfect microcosm of patriarchy. It neatly contains violence against women, pressure to conform, bonding through shared criminality, group obedience to alpha male direction, and freedom from punishment. And as Mildred indicated, it shares with lynching the effect of terrorizing a segment of the population with acts that are demonstrably illegal but socially condoned.
Worse, I suspect that the perpetrators aren’t getting away with it just because of sympathetic juries. I believe that gang rape is just another form of the cohesive force that binds a patriachal society together, similar in structure to programmed military cameraderie and businessmen’s “old boys clubs”. Therefore gang rape cannot be effectively prosecuted or discouraged, as it is an expression of a dynamic that is vital to the maintenance of the patriarchy. To call out gang rapists is barely at a remove from calling out gender inequality, male privilege, and institutional biases. So a patriarchal society can only at best shrug over a crime that helps maintain the status quo. That they also blame the victim is unsurprising, as the victim represents a threat to the established order. Giving her voice would chip away at the social edifice, and therefore silencing her with scorn keeps the walls of the citadel strong for one more day.
While I can still find it…
“Sex chromosome genes influence aggression andd maternal behavior, say UVa reasearchers” March 7th
http://www.eurekalert.org.pub_releases/2006-03/uovh-scg030606.php
Turns out this configuration enhances violent, aggressive & desocialized behaviors by inhibiting essentially Human empathic, caring behaviors…this is Man.
My own take is that he is kinda like the soldier ant…really good at hunting, sentinelling, defending, maybe policing….etc.
A useful actor for a society under certain circumstances but one also demanding constraint & restraint.
Scary…for us guys, a bit.
E.O.Wilson would know.
I think the very normality of death camp guards and pack rapists alike cuts to the core of the problems with awareness, obtaining convictions, etc. It feeds the denial - the denial of the acts and, given evidence of the crimes, the denial of the normalness and humanity of the perpetrators.
Some of that is even going on in this thread. It is a big part of the problem. We don’t want to believe that normal, “good” people do these things. We don’t want to believe that people who commit terrible crimes are normal or “good” people otherwise when they are not in the pack mode. We don’t want to believe that our sons or brothers could do these things if they were in that situation. We want to think that such people are other and not us.
In my community, some teen football players (with local addresses for famous high school football coach reasons, but actually living 15 miles away) beat the hell out of a cop after leaving a local carnival. There were witnesses to what happened that supported the police reports, including several of my husband’s students.
The teens’ lawyer and their church pastor tried to paint the cop as having harassed these “good boys” for no good reason (police had asked them to leave the carnival along with all the other bands of teens lingering after closing, and then responded to a complaint of harassing and threatening people at a convienience store down the street). Their community did not want to accept that their good boys that help their mothers and are hero football players were capable of such extreme pack violence (possible steroid abuse not withstanding). Meanwhile, churches in our community of similar denomination to their church refused to support them. As one woman I know candidly put it: if they get away with gang banging a cop, my daughter is next.
I think she’s on to something.
Yeah, it’s much easier to attack a woman—physically, socially, and emotionally—than an armed man who’s got some status in the community.
I think the very normality of death camp guards and pack rapists alike cuts to the core of the problems with awareness, obtaining convictions, etc. It feeds the denial - the denial of the acts and, given evidence of the crimes, the denial of the normalness and humanity of the perpetrators.
Honestly? I think it feeds into the only fact in Christianity–people are basically evil. The whole of human history is a demonstration that we’re basically just walking monsters, and that some of us are more aware of it than others and are able to control it better. But make no mistake–people are basically bad, and in groups are worse.
I also must say that the Rodney King assault was another example of “our good guys” don’t do bad things, it was the fault of the “other” they were responding to. Cops too often get going with the pack attack thing. In many jurisdictions in the “good old days”, pack violence against marginal people by cops was considered a perk!
When cops go crazy on people these days, there is denial of their capacity for animal freakout, rationalizations, etc. Many people don’t want to look at the world that way, not just in Simi Valley.
Characterizing this as behavior of “the other” or as a rational response to “the other” is a means of quelling the dissonance when reality meets worldview. The fact is, we all are “the other”.
I had a discussion with a male coworker about the alleged rape earlier this morning. I expressed my outrage at, not only the rape itself, but the complicity of those who witnessed its initiation but did nothing. While in complete agreement that all involved, including the permissive bystanders, were wrong, he remained unwilling to condemn them to the same degree that I do. He confessed that in his own youth, he’s not sure if he could have been counted on to protest the actions of his peers. Of course, now that he is in his 40s and, presumably, the hormonal fires of youth have been brought under control, he insists that he would come to the woman’s aid. But back then? Well, he opined, a 21-year-old male is but a boy, an immature person who cannot be expected to control himself when faced with an easy target. He even went so far as to say that most young men (his former self included) would not see the rape as criminal. When I retorted that most pedophiles also refused to accept the immorality and illegality of their own behavior, he acted as if I were making some fly-by-night comparison between apples and oranges.
Anyway, I just wanted to express my heartache and utter disgust that this sort of thing is condoned in our society. It really sickens me that men are allowed, even to some extent expected, to engage in this sort of woman-as-sport/game/prey behavior, only to come to their senses in their old age, completely forgiven.
I don’t want a man in my life who is in some stage of the progression from rapist/enabler to fully-realized human. I want a man who was always a decent person, who would always have recognized my humanity, even though I may also have been the object of his sexual desire. My faith that those men exist is diminished with every turn of a newspaper page, every conversation like the one described above, and every click my mouse.
“I don’t want a man in my life who is in some stage of the progression from rapist/enabler to fully-realized human. I want a man who was always a decent person, who would always have recognized my humanity, even though I may also have been the object of his sexual desire.”
Do those men even exist? Sadly, each day that I am on this earth, I doubt it more.
Well, he opined, a 21-year-old male is but a boy, an immature person who cannot be expected to control himself when faced with an easy target. He even went so far as to say that most young men (his former self included) would not see the rape as criminal.
And yet (as Golda Meir pointed out, was it not?) we let the boys and men run free and keep the girls and women indoors and under heavy clothing
As an aside, I think this depends on one’s idea of what constitutes decency. Now, I know that the basic standard of “don’t rape and don’t condone rape” is a pretty obvious one and it’s totally sensible to expect that from a human being.
We all, however, have our skeletons in the closet; stuff we did that we wish we didn’t, stuff that may have even hurt others. I’m not condoning these acts, but we’re all flawed in some manner. Perhaps not equally so, but we all are. Having made mistakes or exercised bad judgement in our lives seems to me to be common to everyone.
(apologies ahead of time if I’ve misread the sentiment of that passage).
“We all, however, have our skeletons in the closet; stuff we did that we wish we didn’t, stuff that may have even hurt others.”
That’s true, Linnaeus. What makes a person decent is the ability to stand up and admit wrongdoing, and to willingly make whatever legal and/or moral reparations that are necessary *to make the VICTIM feel that justice has been served*. That is the road back from evil. It’s not the easy road, but for truly decent people, there is no other.
“Having made mistakes or exercised bad judgement in our lives seems to me to be common to everyone.�
Is that what gang rape (or just rape in general) is, a poor exercise of judgement? I’m not talking about someone who went along with the crowd and stole some pencils or vandalized a building while they were young. I’m talking about using a woman for your own pleasure against her wishes, wishes that go entirely unacknowledged, as if she were some inanimate hole without a person attached. I’m talking about the abject denial of a woman’s humanity, simply for the sake of convenience and lust.
That sort of transgression doesn’t (at least it shouldn’t) just fade into history. I’m not asking that people live perfect lives; far from it. But I do think that decency stems from an overall belief that your own life is worth only as much as the value you instill in others, all others. People who are guilty of disregarding other people’s humanness in order to further their own selfish purposes (think slavery, genocide, sex-trafficking, rape) are not decent people and, frankly, I don’t know if they can be redeemed, although Ginger seems to have a pretty good grasp of what that redemption might take.
Even in a group or pack, there’s going to be some young man (or possibly one who’s not in the group, but is passing by) who knows*, and is capable of saying, “Hey, hang on. This is fucked up and you guys know it. Who’s got a cell phone? Call a cab, right now. This is what I’m doing. If y’all don’t like it, take it up with me later.” And we’re not going to know the details, but I’ll bet you half the other guys present are going to feel some silent relief, even if they’d have participated otherwise. Some guys are going to be resentful, possibly vengeful.
But I’m curious: what do you guys think? How do you rate the likelihood that a man putting a stop to a gang rape, in the Duke circumstances (as opposed to a gang rape by armed, drugged militiamen, for the purposes of this argument), is going to encounter true physical resistance from the potential rapists? I’m inclined to think that when this momentary assaultive cohesion is busted up by a dissenter, it’s not likely to reconstitute immediately.
(* I.e., knows that “don’t rape and don’t condone rape” is irrevocably true, and yet is not enough, because the impulse we should aim for is, “OMG, I have to help this person who is in danger”.)
Some quick responses:
Ginger: I agree with you that decency requires acceptance of responsibility and whatever reparations or remedies are required.
justicewalks: I definitely don’t think that a crime like rape is simply bad judgement, though I understand how I may have left that impression and I’m sorry for that. Reading your expansion on your earlier comment helps me a lot to understand what you’re getting at, and I agree. I think I was a little uncomfortable with the idea that people can be unforgiveable, but I get it now what you’re saying.
larkspur: Yeah, it takes more than understanding what’s right and what’s wrong; you have to act on that understanding, too. As to your question, it’s a really good one. I’m doubtful that someone disrupting the dynamic, especially if he’s a part of the group, is actually in physical danger. He probably kills the dynamic, which ends the “appeal” of doing it in the first place.
At least I would hope this is true.
I studiously avoided any contact with sports and fraternities and the like, so a lot of this is quite alien to me—but I suspect that in any such grouping, the question wouldn’t arise, because the people involved in the gang-rape are self-selected to comply. ie, the people who wouldn’t comply are just not there—they never arrived. I mean, I selected myself away from that scene, and a lot of this, so real to many of you, is a third-hand story at best to me.
I suspect that I’m not alone in this. Not everyone gets to (or wants to) hang out with the football team.
“….Is that what gang rape (or just rape in general) is, a poor exercise of judgement?…”
Justicewalks, I share your opinion, but I do think “poor exercise of judgement” might be an appropriate reference for the many people who’ve been in situations in which they knew something bad was happening, or was probably going to happen, and did not act. Good and decent people do fail to act, and that omission can stay with you for a long, long time. I’m talking about the jokes, the discussion of a planned sex “party”, the occasions when you left a party early, even though you saw a female acquaintance drinking way too much and getting felt up by an equally drunk boy.
I remember reading an essay years ago by a young man who played college football, and he recalled frat parties at which sexual misconduct of varying degrees happened fairly often. Specifically, he recounted one intoxicated young woman who was upstairs giving blow jobs to a number of guys in succession. The writer didn’t participate, and reflected that he’d have intervened, but he couldn’t see the point: the same young woman had been there the previous weekend and, he said, would probably be there next weekend, too.
I found this so depressing. What I so wished he’d have done was to interrupt and see that she got home safely, and talk to her roommates, and get into an argument with the frat guys, and try to get them to think about how their very own behavior has value and weight. Even if a drunken girl literally says, for example, “Come on, line up, I wanna do all of you guys”, this doesn’t release a good person from doing the right thing. Clearly her ability to consent is compromised, and even if she’s not drunk, there’s good reason to question her agency, and all kinds of good reasons for not participating in such a weird event anyway. Consent or not, it’s about treating a human being as a receptacle, and each one of us has good reason to abstain from such bleak, dehumanizing acts. What we do matters. In a mob or gang or a death-dealing totalitarian state, it still matters, and we each know it.
Larkspur, I agree with you and I appreciate your story because it exemplifies just how much is required for people to count themselves among the decent. However, I simply cannot accept that some of these “omissions,” just standing by when intervention at that moment might have prevented injury, can be brushed aside as mere bad decisions. I think it’s a lapse in decency and character, and such a lapse, in my opinion, should not be easily forgiven or forgotten. I’m not saying that people who find themselves in such situations don’t deserve our empathy, but certainly, forgiveness should not be automatic.
Good people are capable of terrible, terrible things.
It’s an established fact that people are more likely to help an injured person if they come upon them alone than if they come upon them with a group–in a crowd, there’s the ability to say it’s “someone else” who should take the stand–especially if to help the injured person one has to stand up to a bully.
Make the bully a person you thought was a friend, and crowd a whole group of friends, and the injured person just some girl you hired to dance at your party–well, the rationalization may not be pretty, but humans, even people you’d think are decent, are able in the moment to rationalize pretty much anything. It’s what has allowed everything from Auschwitz to Sarajevo to this.
Failing to act in the moment I can almost–almost–forgive. Oh, I can’t quite; each one of those men failed a moral test (except for at least three, who lack anything I would identify as morality). But horrible as it is, I could almost forgive the men who stood by and watched and did nothing in that moment, if at least, in the cold light of day, when it’s clear what has happened and when alcohol has flushed from the system and they know what they should do–if at that moment, those who are guilty of standing by would come forward and say, “I failed to stop the crime, but they’re the guilty parties. And they deserve their punishment.”
But I can’t countenance their continued silence. Failing to act in a moment is lamentable; failing to act over days when you know what you’re supposed to do is evil.
Good people are capable of terrible, terrible things.
No. You’re not “good people” any more if you commit atrocities. Or if you stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.
You only *seem* good, to people who don’t know the real you.
You may be a “nice, normal” person, because nice =/= moral, ethical, or good; and “normal” as it is normally used means ‘that which is common,’ not ‘the way something is supposed to be; the norm.’ Nice, these days, is far more important than *good* - as we see all the time in politics, how can you be so rude as to call a lying warmonger a liar and a murderer? The horror, the horror!
But you are *not* a good person. Not even if no living soul knows what you did, and ‘that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.’
When my wife was studying the Holocaust, she read a lot about exactly who the SS guards were. And yes, a fair number of them were “otherwise decent people.” Rates of alcoholism and suicide were way high among the guards precisely because they were otherwise decent people who were forcing themselves to participate in horrific acts in order to conform to extreme pressure. Same thing with the mass rapes in Bosnia–some Chetniks reported having to get drunk before they could force themselves to participate in the rapes–they knew it was wrong, the felt the revulsion, but they forced themselves to do it in order to conform.Now, before anyone tears me a new one on this, let me be clear that I’m in no way condoning the actions or excusing the people in question. Nor am I saying “poor SS guards, let’s all feel sorry for the Chetniks.” No. They are all 100% responsible for their actions and guilty of their crimes.
What I am saying is that any sociologist will tell you that people who are decent, by any measure you want to pick, will participate in cruel and dehumanizing actions under the right pressure–the Milgram Experiment, designed in the wake of the Holocaust, tested just this idea: 65% of average folk failed.
There are plenty of cases where entire towns turned out to watch or participate in a lynching. Unless the definition of “decent” is so restricted that you can have a town–multiple towns– without a single decent person in it, then decent people can do–or stand by while others do–horrific things.
The reason this is important is that blaming gang rape on aberrant individuals lets the system off. We live in a society were decent men are constantly pressured, even coerced, to go along with the systematic degradation of women. And while those guys at Duke need to take 100% responsibility for their actions, labeling them as monsters obscures the deeper problem.
…labeling them as monsters obscures the deeper problem.
I have to disagree here. I think it does exactly the opposite. I think that if you really assign blame to everyone who deserves it, the scope of the problem will quickly be revealed. If you make everyone involved understand that even passive participation in the degradation and injury of another human being constitutes a dereliction of your decency and goodness then perhaps people would be less willing to pass responsibility for their neighbor to someone else. People should be forced to open their eyes to the reality that each moral failure is a stain on the conscience, even when, as bellatrys so aptly put it, “no living soul knows what you did, and ‘that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.’� This culture of quick, painless, and private absolution of sin, for lack of a better word, is destroying us. It is only if we’re called to task on our participation in the system that the system can be dismantled. Blaming your own personal failures on some abstract concept leads to complacency and inertia.
When I say “good people do terrible things”–yes, it does make them terrible people. The SS officers, the bystanders, Jeff Goldstein–all these bystanders are abetting terror, and all are guilty of, if nothing else, failing to prevent the preventable.
But I say “good people do terrible things” because these people might, for different circumstances, never have found themselves in the position where they started rationalizing in the first place. Absent Hitler, no doubt most of the Germans who were clamoring for Jewish blood would have simply led the usual sorts of quiet lives.
That’s the problem with the distinction between the monstrous and the good–the line may be obvious from outside, but it isn’t always at the moment, and once you pass over it, it’s easy to keep lying to yourself and telling yourself that well, the Jews/that Girl/Iraq really deserves to be liquidated/raped/bombed, because you’ve already given your tacit assent, and to go back on it now requires you to admit to yourself that you’ve already committed a grievous sin.
That doesn’t make a monster less monstrous. Indeed, it makes them more so. If the men of the Duke Lacrosse team were slovenly, zombie-like subhumans, they’d be easy to spot, easy to avoid. The fact that most of them were, prior to this party, just normal fallable humans is what’s terrifying to me.
“Good people are capable of terrible, terrible things…”
Yes, I have a problem with this too. Jeff, I suspect you wouldn’t disagree with another take on the idea. For example: people who have done terrible, terrible things are not necessarily monsters. Or simply: ordinary people are capable of, and have done terrible, terrible things.
Reading what Sy Hersh has written about the toll that our young soldiers’ service in exceptionally bad situations in Iraq illustrates this. He’s written about one young ex-servicewoman who’s been uncommunicative and disturbed, and who has made her guilt and pain visible by getting more and more black tattoos all over her body.
I’ve never stood by while someone was brutalized or beaten, but I have failed to object to verbal abuse against others. Compared to concentration camp guards, my guilt is about far more trivial things. But the recollections still pain me, as they should. Even the small stuff that pains us, in retrospect, contributes to the impulse to do better, although it can’t ever undo the earlier damage.
Ordinary people who do terrible things must be held responsible, and must pay a penalty, and in no way should that clear the slate. But if we don’t make space for such people to atone or make restitution, it seems like there’s no hope at all. Acknowledging mitigating circumstances doesn’t necessarily entail absolution. We all know that, for example, not every homicide is equivalent. The details can serve as mitigation or aggravation. We use discretion all the time (although fixed sentencing and three strikes and zero tolerance all tend to devalue the idea of judicial or community discretion).
(None of that has to mean blurring an individual’s agency. I remember reading a Rolling Stone article after one of the school shooting sprees. The writer was talking to a group of the perps’ classmates, trying to get a sense of how the kids viewed the situation. He asked them why they thought the shooter did it. There was an awkward silence, and then one youngster offered, “Um, he made a bad decision…” I’m not sure what the writer actually said, but I know he reported that he thought, “Oh dear god, child, it was a whole hell of a lot more than ‘a bad decision’!” I think the poor kid was parroting the mixed-up concept of blame and condemnation somehow being the same as responsibility and culpability.)
Oh dear. I think I am being OT-ish and meanderistic. But I’m gonna post it anyway, because the timer just went off and I have to go retrieve my laundry or my neighbors will be inconvenienced (it’s a shared apartment laundry room) and that would be wrong. So unproofed, here it is.
I think that calling out the system, rather than just the individual, is assigning blame to everyone who deserves it. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but my original point was that labeling the most egregious perpetrators as “monsters” lets a whole lot of people off the hook–thus hiding the scope of the problem.It’s almost like a wierd reverse scapegoating. If you brand someone as a “monster,” then you’re labeling them as “other,” as in “something other than normal people.” But what I think you and I are both saying is that “normal people” are, in fact, complicit in the system that allows, even encourages, this to happen.
Even if we labeled all 47 of the Duke lacrosse players–and their coaches, and their roommates, and their parents–”monsters” or “evil” or “abnormal,” we’d still be letting the vast majority of people who participate in the system off the hook. The very horror of the situation is that most of those guys probably are normal. We live in a culture where normal people can stand by and watch a woman be gang-raped because women, especially if sex is involved, just don’t receive full human status. How much do you want to bet that if the 3 active perpetrators had grabbed the pizza guy and were treating him in exactly the same way, their teammates would have said, “What the Fuck are you doing?!” and intervened?
Perpetrators and enablers do not deserve easy absolution. Nor do they get to blame their personal failures on any abstract concept. But branding them as unnatural beasts denies the fact that they are a natural product of a patriarchal society.
It’s complicated. You don’t want to choose a one (or three, or 47) individuals and say “this only happened because they are morally reprehensible abberations.” Nor do you want to grant the “easy absolution” of blaming their acts on the system in which they were formed. The goal should be to hold the guilty responsible while still calling out the system which allows and even encourages such crimes.
If I my just add on to this, I think that in addition, the “other”ing of perpetrators of such crimes can be used as a way of not examining our own behaviors on an individual level as well.
I don’t think anyone here avoids putting herself or himself under an internal magnifying glass, nor am I saying “we’re all guilty” and thereby, as justicewalks says, diluting the seriousness of what happened or deflecting responsibility. But “other”ing someone can be part of a strategy of projecting one’s own shortfalls onto someone else on a personal level as well.
If this makes any sense…
Absolutely. One of the reasons I’m not a fan of simply declaring monsters as monsters is that it lets us wash our hands of the matter. “Oh, those evil athletes,” we say. “They’re all jerks.” And thus we can go to bed happy and secure that We’re Not Like Those Bad People, except the truth is that what separates us from them is not the bright line that we’d like to think it is.
If I’d been at that party, would I have stood up, demanded it stop? I’d like to think so. But would I? If I’m honest with myself, I have to say I don’t know. (I do feel confident I wouldn’t have participated, but that’s not exactly saying much.)
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have–I think I well might have, in fact. But I don’t know, and I know that it wouldn’t be as easy for me to step forward as it should be. It would take courage, and it would most certainly be easier for me to stay quiet, just ignore the bad behavior, and rationalize that what’s happening isn’t really happening.
I’m not proud of that. I’d like to say that certainly I’d stand up, of course I’d risk ostracism. But I can’t honestly say that. What I can say, though, is that admitting that to myself allows me to put myself in that situation, to tell myself that if it came up I would have to do the hard thing, the risky thing, the courageous thing. And that makes it more likely I would.
Which in the end is why it’s important that we don’t set these guys up as “other.” Because monstrous as their silence may have been, it was neither rare nor unpredictable.
OK, I’m going to get all geeky here, but the above is exactly what Rene Girard is on about with his whole theory of scapegoating. What he says happens is that when a community finds itself in discord, it has two choices–it can either deal with the actual cause of the discord, which will implicate the community as a whole and force it to change its ways, or it can single out an individual and place all the blame on that one person. Then, the community which was fractured can come back together in wholeness–with the exception of the scapegoated individual. Girard calls that “unanimity minus one.”Being part of the unanimity allows you to project any culpability you may have in the community discord onto the “one.” As long as you’re not the scapegoat, you are absolved of both your personal culpability (for participating in the system) and the community-wide culpability of keeping the system in place. All the blame is placed on the scapegoat. And because the scapegoat is driven out of the community (apparently, the used to actually use a goat. They would symbolically load it with the community’s sin, and then drive it out into the desert to die) the community can go back to thinking of itself as a just and harmonious community–until the next discord, when they will have to select another scapegoat.
Now, this is complicated by the fact that unlike the traditional scapegoat who is innocent and is selected for reasons other than guilt (often vulnerability–like the single women who were killed as witches and the African-American men who were lynched for rapes that white men committed), gang rapists are in fact, guilty.
But what tends to happen is that in addition to the wrongdoing that is justly heaped upon them, they also become the carriers of the larger community’s culpability. When they are driven out into the desert (or into the penitentiary), they take with them the culpability that the larger community ought to be dealing with.
That allows the community to tell itself, “Whew. Thank God we got rid of those people who were the source of all that discord. That problem no longer exists within our community. Now we can go back to our just and harmonious ways.”
Only the community doesn’t have just and harmonious ways. The fact that the scapegoats are publicly (and rightly) saddled with their personal culpability doesn’t change the fact that the discord was caused not solely caused by the acts for which the scapegoats are culpable, but also by the community-wide culpability which the scapegoating process serves–intentionally–to deny.
[All of which is further complicated when defense attorneys take it one step further and attempt to scapegoat the victim. “She led these poor boys on. She’s the one at fault. Cast her into the desert and then we can go back to our just and harmonious ways.”]
>>>But I’m curious: what do you guys think? How do you rate the likelihood that a man putting a stop to a gang rape, in the Duke circumstances (as opposed to a gang rape by armed, drugged militiamen, for the purposes of this argument), is going to encounter true physical resistance from the potential rapists? I’m inclined to think that when this momentary assaultive cohesion is busted up by a dissenter, it’s not likely to reconstitute immediately.
[…] Amanda writes a short but compelling post on gang rape as the essential scene of patriarchy. Instead, I’d like to talk about the act of the gang rape itself, because I reread an article recently that really gets to the heart of why it happens and why it’s possibly the most socially acceptable form of rape. It’s called “They don’t see it as rape. They see it as pleasure for them.â€? It’s about the growing problem of gang rape in England and it’s an evocative look at why gang rape exists and why it’s tolerated–to put it bluntly, in a male dominated society, gang rape is a version of fox hunting, a sport of sorts. It’s the patriarchy in its essence, where the leaders of male dominance are active sadists but their followers have managed to convince themselves they do like women, they aren’t evil, etc. In the article, it’s noted that often in a gang rape, some participants will help the victim clean up, give her money, even walk her home (presumably to protect her from rape). Accusations of effeminence are used to keep unwilling participants in the game. The victims are objects of male bonding. […]
See TalkLeft.
Rape is a serious charge. It is easy to make and difficult to defend.
Jesus Christ, he quotes a seventeenth-century witch hunter and that’s not biased, nor proof of how little attitudes toward rape have changed?
Ginmar, I’m a “she” not a “he” and I’m speaking from a criminal defense lawyer’s point of view. As I wrote on TalkLeft, there are many inconsistencies and not enough facts to say that the players are guilty of rape. I wasn’t there, I don’t know what happened, but I think even in the court of public opinion, the players are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
Rape charges are difficult to defend, particularly in he-said, she-said situations. Rape-shield laws protect the accuser. Corroboration is not needed. Put yourself in the shoes of the person accused for a minute.
Ginmar, I’m a “she� not a “he� and I’m speaking from a criminal defense lawyer’s point of view.
And presumably, you’re therefore aware that the majority of rapists brought to trial are acquitted, even if you are blithely unaware that the rapists brought to trial represent a minority of rapists who commit rape and get clean away with it. And you’re also aware of the strategies used by criminal defense lawyers to make the woman who is testifying against her attacker look like a loose and lying slut.
As I wrote on TalkLeft, there are many inconsistencies and not enough facts to say that the players are guilty of rape.
Yes, because the mere testimony of a loose, lying slut, aka a woman accusing three men of rape, especially a black exotic dancer, is not in itself a fact: nor is the evidence of the nails and the bag left behind in the house: nor is the bruising a fact: nor is the medical evidence of sex. None of these are facts. Would a videotape of the three men having sex with her be a fact, or would that, to you, merely be further evidence that she’s a loose, lying slut?
I wasn’t there, I don’t know what happened, but I think even in the court of public opinion, the players are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
Whereas a woman who says they raped her is only entitled to the presumption that she’s a nasty, vindictive, loose, lying, slut. Right.
Rape charges are difficult to defend, particularly in he-said, she-said situations.
And yet, the majority of rapists brought to trial are acquitted, and the vast majority of rapists are never brought to trial. Rape has a lower conviction rate than any other crime of violence.
Rape-shield laws protect the accuser. Corroboration is not needed.
And naturally, when you start with the presumption that their accuser is a nasty, vindictive, loose, lying slut, it is appalling that her word should be considered equal testimony. Much better in a system that would require at least two men of good character to testify that they’d witnessed the rape.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person accused for a minute.
Put yourself in the shoes of the woman who was held down and raped by three men, got out of the house, called 911, and brought charges - knowing that she would face a defense lawyer who would make her out to be a loose, lying slut, vindictively accusing three fine boys of rape when all they were guilty of was a little racial abuse.
Or can’t you bring yourself to think that this could have been you?
I’m still waiting for an answer as to her three-hundred-year-old justification for her outmoded attitudes toward rape victims. So? You’re quoting a guy who burned witches. Do you think maybe, just maybe, it’s not me that needs to put on different shoes but you, seeing as how I can back up my attitude with facts, and all you’ve got is three-hundred year old sexism?
TalkLeft said:
I wasn’t there, I don’t know what happened, but I think even in the court of public opinion, the players are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
and Jesurgislac said:
Whereas a woman who says they raped her is only entitled to the presumption that she’s a nasty, vindictive, loose, lying, slut. Right.
The first statement here doesn’t imply the second. Acknowledging that there may not be proof of rape doesn’t imply that the woman is “a lying slut.”
TalkLeft also said:
Rape charges are difficult to defend, particularly in he-said, she-said situations.
and Jesurgislac responded:
And yet, the majority of rapists brought to trial are acquitted, and the vast majority of rapists are never brought to trial. Rape has a lower conviction rate than any other crime of violence.
…yes. This happens because rape charges are difficult to prove. It doesn’t contradict what TalkLeft said at all.
We can acknowledge that rape is a pervasive problem in our patriarchal society and that it’s difficult to prove that a particular individual man is a rapist.
No. You’re not “good people� any more if you commit atrocities. Or if you stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.
You only *seem* good, to people who don’t know the real you.
“The real you”? Why is one’s negative actions more “real” than positive ones?
I agree that calling people “monsters” is a way to avoid the reality that atrocities are a human. It’s a way to avoid facing the fact that perhaps you are capable of atrocities and just haven’t been tested yet. I don’t think it’s an excuse for inertia and a sense of “we’re all guilty so why bother.” To the contrary, it’s a reason to avoid feeling complacent about your superiority to those Other Bad People, and a reason to be keenly aware of your own potential for destruction so you can fight it.
We live in a culture where normal people can stand by and watch a woman be gang-raped because women, especially if sex is involved, just don’t receive full human status. How much do you want to bet that if the 3 active perpetrators had grabbed the pizza guy and were treating him in exactly the same way, their teammates would have said, “What the Fuck are you doing?!� and intervened?
Perpetrators and enablers do not deserve easy absolution. Nor do they get to blame their personal failures on any abstract concept. But branding them as unnatural beasts denies the fact that they are a natural product of a patriarchal society.
Yes. Exactly.
Lenoire: The first statement here doesn’t imply the second. Acknowledging that there may not be proof of rape doesn’t imply that the woman is “a lying slut.�
If you follow the link to TalkLeft’s site, you will find Jeralyn is arguing there that the two women are probably lying vindictively to get these men into trouble because the men racially abused them.
And if you follow the habits of defense lawyers in rape cases, they do habitually try to argue that because the woman was “loose” or a “slut” she couldn’t have been raped. Jeralyn is following a pattern: the men have got to be presumed innocent even in “the court of public opinion” - the women ought be labelled vindictive liars, both in court (as we can safely say they will be, by the men’s defense lawyers), and in Jeralyn’s “court of public opinion”.
And thus we can go to bed happy and secure that We’re Not Like Those Bad People, except the truth is that what separates us from them is not the bright line that we’d like to think it is.
People just love to engage in this kind of moralizing homily, don’t they? Yours, I mean, not the one you’re inventing.
it would most certainly be easier for me to stay quiet, just ignore the bad behavior, and rationalize that what’s happening isn’t really happening.
You think ignoring and rationalizing gang rape that is happening right next to you would be easy? Most certainly? Good sweet fucking lord Jesus Christ. While you’re busy chastising people in love with bright-line morality, you might want to watch your own love-affair with tough-cool moral ambiguity.
The only reason a person could say that they honestly don’t know what they would do in such a situation is because they have not yet decided. People can be shocked, frozen, taken by terrible surprise by horrific actions they never dreamed they’d see. That’s true. But that doesn’t apply to gang rape, because all of us know it can happen, because we’ve read this thread, if nothing else. You don’t have to wonder and wonder what you’d do until you’re finally faced with it. You can decide right now.
I’m not proud of that. I’d like to say that certainly I’d stand up, of course I’d risk ostracism. But I can’t honestly say that.
Nothing prevents you from honestly saying it. All you have to do is make up your mind. You have free will. If you’re ever a witness to an atrocity, you will still have free will. You have complete power to determine your own future actions. Pretending it’s somehow unknowable is the easy, pretend-complex cop-out. Making the commitment is the hard part - but not that hard.
Regarding the mentality of gang rape: there is a chapter of Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler that deals in some explicit detail with the (in his youth) common form of gang rape called a ‘train’. According to the book, he himself took part in one of these (for the macho social reasons discussed here). I certainly would not consider his case a representative one, but I think he may be at least one example of a person who took part in a sexual assault who was later rehabilitated.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679740708/sr=8-1/qid=1143974447/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2511015-7124750?%5Fencoding=UTF8
I am merely presenting this in response to several posters above who questioned whether someone in such a position could ever be rehabilitated. Beyond that, I entirely agree with the characterization of gang rape as a microcosm of the patriarchy and I do not intend to justify it.
That’s only if you accept his own self-reporting. Any guy who commits a rape—and a gang rape at that—is pretty much beyond the pale.
And isn’t it interesting that people think rape victims have no credibility, while it’s unfair to think that such an attitude removes their pretense of fairness, especially when they make a living defending rapists?
I’m still waiting, TalkLeft. Why are you so fond of Matthew Hale?
More on the Duke Gang Rape Casefo…
The recent explosion of posts about the Duke University gang rape has gotten me thinking a lot about the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. There have been some really interesting posts about how these intersections are playing out i…
[…] Pandagon: The Gang Rape Is The Essential Scene Of Patriarchy My favorite post I’ve read in the last week; spot-on analysis from Amanda. Ginmar’s post commenting on Amanda’s is excellent, also. […]
Wow, it’s is amazing how this site, which boasts so many liberal views, is ready to condemn the entire Duke Lacrosse team without so much as hearing all the facts. Does it not raise a red flag to anyone that the accuser was found guilty of larceny, assaulting a government official and other charges while in the act of vehicle theft? Does this establish a prior history? I think most of you would say that once a male has committed rape he should be flagged forever as a rapist. Should this girl not be flagged for trying to make a quick buck? Is this her meal ticket? It has worked many times before, regardless of guilt or innocence that the accuser goes after the civil case lottery. I can’t wait to see what she asks for.
I think part of the problem here is that people may mean different things by “good person.”
If you mean, “never had committed a crime before, pays taxes, pets dogs and kisses babies, in good standing with the community, no horns,” then yes, absolutely, “good people” do horrible things all the time.
And it is true that people who might never otherwise commit atrocities like gang rape of their own volition are much more likely to go along with the crowd when someone else initiates it.
So in that sense: no, there are no “monsters.” It’s not so unusual. You can’t spot them walking down the street.
But it isn’t true that we’re all equally capable–well *likely*, at any rate, to do shit like this. Certainly not as an initiator (and there has to be someone who gets that ball rolling, always). And I honestly don’t think it’s self-defense when i say this. God knows I have my own dark side. Everyone has the capacity of doing seriously nasty shit, yes.
But I think most people tend to look at this in the wrong way. It’s not what a question of what everyone else *does* have; it’s a question of what people who actually do this shit *don’t* have.
There is something seriously whack here, and you can’t just blame “society” or some amorphous construct that has nothing to do with actual, you know, people.
I look at the statements from the Lacrosse team, you know, the group letter bemoaning how they were so looking forward to the season, and I think, as my best friend says, “There’s a wee want in them.” Even if the people who wrote the statement weren’t the actual perps. Something’s missing.
Musings regarding the patriarchy and rape…
I’m reading a book called "Working with Available Light." I was looking for ……
More on the Duke Gang Rape Case…
The recent explosion of posts about the Duke University gang rape has gotten me thinking a lot about the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. There have been some really interesting posts about how these intersections are playing out i…
[…] I think Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon nails this entirely on the head when she says; Criminologists say that a lot of young men who participate in gang rapes would never rape a woman on their own. That strikes me as accurate–the pressure to conform and participate is probably enormous. It’s good evidence for the feminist assertion that rape is a tool of male dominance–the psychology is a lot like that of war–you must be brutal to the target to show your loyalty to the group. That the violence on average in gang rapes is worse than most other rapes is more evidence of this. […]