Lauredhel had a post on Hoyden About Town on how the very language we use to describe violence against women erases male responsibility. Including the phrase “violence against women”, which implies but doesn’t actually state “male violence against women”. It’s interesting, because in journalistic writing, the first rule is to use the active voice as much as possible, which is to say make the agent of action the subject of your sentence instead of making the object of action the subject, for clarity’s sake. But this rule is thrown out the window when describing crimes acted upon the bodies of women.
When it comes to reports of men abusing and oppressing women, the passive voice prevails.
Women are discriminated against
Women are paid less
Women are objectified
Women are groped
Women are sexually harrassed
Women are exploited
Women are threatened
Women are assaulted
Women are abused
Women are rapedNo big deal, right? It’s just a bit of linguistic flipping, with neutral semantic effect, surely? No. This ostensibly innocent bit of subject-camouflage has real consequences. If you can’t see it, you can’t fight it, and you can’t blame it. The perpetrators of violence are rendered invisible. The culprits are shoved beyond the frame.
Part of the problem can be chalked up to the fact that the actual agents of action are often out of the frame and hard to pin down. The amorphous “men” didn’t rape the victim, and unless we know for sure who did, its safer to invoke the passive voice. This is often true of the reporting of murdering or mugging—it’s reported as “the victim was murdered” until we can say, “X person murdered Y.” With discrimination, the problem is that it’s often systematic. “Men” don’t discriminate against women so much as the system tilts in favor of men, and to phrase it otherwise is to do ourselves the disservice of forgetting Phyllis Schafly.
That said, Lauredhel is right about the epidemic of refusing to treat the perpetrators of violence and discrimination as perpetrators and in fact blaming the victim routinely for abuse enacted towards her. Even when we have perpetrators to point to, we still frame the responsibility for violence against women as belonging to the objects of the violence.
Example #1 from Twisty: Recently in northern Iraq a bloodthirsty group of men stoned a teenage girl to death with the excuse that it was an “honor killing”. Twisty has the video up so you can see how honorable “honor killings” are—the men throw stones at the girl while she flails about, and when she finally stops moving they get all excited and start taking clothes off. It’s a clear example of how shallow the excuse of “honor” is in these situations, because the real reason to stone the girl is because they’re misogynist fuckwits who get off on killing teenage girls because they hate them. The trumped-up excuse for group violence against women changes only slightly from culture to culture—in ours, victims of gang rapes are usually blown off because they’re deviants, as in they behave like 99% of women and have desires and thoughts of their own. So basically, the crime that gets you gang-raped or murdered is being female.
Actually, the excuse doesn’t change from culture—however men who rape and kill dress it up, the essential crime is being a woman with agency. What is distressing is the way the media buys into the idea that by being female and having thoughts and desires of your own, you invite violence into your life. As Twisty notes, the Daily Mail phrases this misogynist gang violence as somehow the victim’s fault for daring to make her own choice in terms of sexual partners by headlining it, “The moment a teenage girl was stoned to death for loving the wrong boy”.
I know that she knows her shit about the newspaper business, so I’m not surprised that passive voice grabbed Twisty’s eye right away, because putting the object into the subject position in headlines is a real no-no. Even if we have a situation like I described above, where a murder is discovered but we don’t know the culprit, journalists will strain to keep the active voice in headlines by titling it something like, “Police find murder victim in park”. In this case, the Daily Mail knows who did it and has published the goddamn pictures. But because this was a round of patriarchal scape-goating and random violence against women to scare the rest of us into submission, they have to vaguely approve of it, so they posit instead that she brought it on herself for the high crime of having thoughts of her own. May the rest of you learn your lesson and maybe self-lobotimize or something. Twisty suggests an alternate, more accurate headline: “Mob of men tortured fellow human to death to engorge patriarchal godbag delusions.â€?
Example #2, from our country: Lindsay found a video of a PSA released by the Ad Council that shows a series of men and teenage boys harassing and stalking a teenage girl. In the course of the day, fellow students harass her, a coach harasses her, boys at the mall harass her, the guy selling tickets at the movies harasses her, and a waiter harasses her. If we lived in a remotely sane culture, the message would be, “Look at the way that relentless harassment really bothers women, men. Quit harassing women.”
As you can imagine, that’s not the moral of the PSA.
To parallel this with the earlier example, what we have here is male violence against women being framed in a way that validates said violence and posits that women are the cause of male violence against women. Just as in the honor killing situation, the men in the mainstream narrative are good guys, or at least enforcers of the moral code that demands that women have no internal life, no public life, and do nothing for themselves but instead live to be brainless automans in service to their male keepers.
Harsh, yes, when it’s clear there’s probably some good intention lurking behind this. But think of some other PSAs out there. For instance, if you saw a PSA where a guy had some illegal drugs or an illegal gun and the cops showed up and scared the crap out of him and arrested him and took him away, you would grasp that in this scenario, the cops are framed as the good guys, the unfortunate moral enforcers who have to straighten out the person who engaged in criminal behavior. The same narrative structure is in play in these two instances of group male violence/harassment against women. The men who go apeshit are enforcing the moral code against the transgressive women, and the women in these cases have committed the crimes of having their own sexual desires and thinking they have a right to participate fully in a trendy public forum like MySpace or Facebook. You know, the crime they’ve committed is thinking they have a right to exist in the world like men do. The message sent in both cases is that they don’t have such a right and there are a group of men out there who are willing to put you back in line, by force if necessary.
The fact that the bulk of misogynist energy is expended towards hating and abusing teenage girls is probably the theme of another post.
277 Responses to “Women are to blame for everything, including and especially male abuse towards them”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Ever since I read the post on Hoyden around Town I have very conscientiously (and sometimes a little obnoxiously) turned around sentences where I found the subject obscured to highlight the subject and ensure that the subject gets into the debate. It has been a serious exercise in subversiveness. The hostility I’ve encountered has been far more than I expected, even from people I thought knew better. I guess I am a feminist, and not the fun kind ☺
Interesting exercise. I’m going to try to be more aware of people’s reactions when presented with the passive voice that centers the female victim vs. the active voice that invokes male responsibility. I suspect your observations will be confirmed, as well.
That PSA is seriously fucked up. Who the hell do we write to? The Ad counsel? I love how it’s completely okay for strangers to harass that girl, because hey, that’s what you get when you post some pictures of your boobs (or whatever), slut.
The passive voice/active voice analysis is really interesting. I’m going to have to think about that and make sure to consider it in my own writing.
What happened in the PSA at the end, for those of us who cannot download video easily?
The girl learns her lesson about not putting stuff up on MySpace, because she got punished by the male harassers. You can complain to the Ad Council.
You missed the PSA where there’s a woman walking with a friend at night, taking a wide path around a parked van, clenching her keys between her fingers, etc., and then going home, flopping down on her couch and eating a piece of chocolate cake. The tag line is something to the effect of “You do everything else to protect yourself, why would you overeat, you bad, bad, woman!” (I’ll see if I can track it down).
Thank you for filling me in. That is really disturbing.
I wonder if the Daily mail would consider starting a headline “British soldier killed in Iraq for…”
I’ve been doing the passive-active voice experiment for about a year now, and I can tell you it seriously pisses people off. Actually, sometimes I’m literally afraid to do it. The system is predicated on men not being accountable for their actions with women, so even small ways of holding men accountable challenge the foundations of the system. The reactions I get pretty much give the game away. If you try it, definitely be prepared to not be the fun kind of feminist.
Of course, I encourage everyone to do it.
PSA’s sometimes have to walk a line between things as they should be and things as they are. The girl WOULD be harassed - perhaps not that much, but still.
The main reason to not be too open with yourself online is the evil fuckers who would do something with the info. Sadly, that’s always going to look like “blaming the victim”, because, no matter how you try to write it, it is.
As an intellectual exercise, try to rewrite that ad. Keep the “you have to watch out for evil fuckers” moral, and make it NOT blame the victim. I don’t think it can be done. I think using a boy as the lead character would’ve been better as it would’ve stripped away side issues leaving the point of the ad standing clear.
The very first response you’ll get is But Not All Men Are Like That!! And You’re Generalizing All Men!!
Do not let my above comment be construed as disagreement with the point of the post. I just got hung up trying to rework the ad.
I can’t stop seeing this everywhere I go, now. It’s been a surprisingly major revelation for me. (The link isn’t quite right, by the way - it’s here. You’ve linked to JoAnne’s thoughtful, insightful response.)
Several days after that post, a man sexually assaulted a woman while she was breastfeeding in a parents’ room in Melbourne. One article was headlined “Breastfeeding mum in sex attack”. And one of the followup news articles decided it was appropriate to say “Sex attack mum speaks out”.
You probably didn’t want to know about the the culprit, Mohamed Chkhaidem, blamed the assault on his girlfriend having an abortion. On account of you might blow an obstreperal lobe, and all.
(i didn’t watch the ad.)
everyone’s college aged. you see a couple of them interviewing for jobs. then they go out to celebrate how well their interviews went and they take pictures. then you see one person uploading the picture of them doing a keg stand with the caption “fuck monday mornings” or something. the other one discards a picture of a beer bong and crops out the alcohol in an otherwise good group photo and captions it “quiet night during the week”. then you show the people who interviewed say something like “did you run a search on those candidates? what did you find?” and then you show the person who didn’t upload the alcohol pictures going to work.
it would probably be a lot harder to do something like that with high school kids.
I was in fact thinking that using the active voice in talking about men’s violence against women would get you labeled as a “feminazi.” It seems slightly aggressive, and god knows how people treat aggressive women.
Lindsay suggested an ad where someone harasses the girl, and she reports it to the principal. I would go one further and show a girl telling guys to fuck off. But I suppose showing active resistance is really a no-no.
Hi, Hoyden cob logger! I just dropped by to correct the link as well. As Lauredhel wrote, this is the link to her Passive Aggression language post. The discussion thread and the responses about whether drawing attention to this linguistic quirk would alienate men is worth reading.
The other post, by our guest blogger JoAnne, is about realistic anti-rape advice to women. I’ve just added it to the Feminism 101 FAQ on blaming-the-victim.
Please excuse the blog-spruiking, Amanda.
the Ad Council’s got a lovely history with sneaking little bits of fucked up politics into their
helpful advice.
Here in the Triangle, they keep playing a radio PSA which is meant to encourage you
to give blood.
It starts with an earnest college student describing how he and his plucky friends noticed
that a nearby factory was polluting the river. So they protested and got the company
shut down [these are infinitely powerful student-activists!]. Then lotsa people lost their jobs
and everything was worse.
Moral (more or less explicitly stated in the PSA): it’s complicated to make the world better. So just
give some fucking blood and call it a day.
It’s good to give blood, just as it’s good to not get raped by crazy internet stalkers, apparently.
I love this active voice experiment - I’m going to try it this week. Though it’ll be difficult in meetings, as my office is so touchy-feely that we default to never assigning responsibility to anyone, for anything. Hmm.
The PSA is disturbing, although I think there is merit to the message about using caution with internet posting. The framing is really bad - good post, Amanda. I like rachel’s idea, though I’m not sure it would get through to the younger demographic.
The worst thing about the passive voice is how insidious it is. One of the nice things about teaching writing is showing young students how language works and the ways writers, advertisers, etc use it to fuck with their minds. The day or two we spend on passive voice is generally very eye-opening for them.
On a side note, I think we’d be a lot better off as a society if June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” became required reading in school curricula. Here are the closing lines:
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life
Oh, and what the hell is up with the coach in this video? Creepy movie theater guy, whatever. But showing a skeevy coach coming on to a 7th grade girl like it’s the girl’s fault? That’s where they lost me with this one.
One of the trickier points for me to “get” when I first read Starhawk’s Truth or Dare back in the late 1980s was that The Protector, as a socially defined role for men, was, as she showed, just as nasty and patriarchial a figure as the predator. Her general claim was that essentially all post-gatherer-hunting societies went through a patriarchial revolution about 4-5 thousand years ago, and reorganized society around a fundamentally militaristic model. Men as well as women have their independent identities and self-confidence broken down as in military boot camp, and are then offered roles that redeem them socially that depend on external standards. Men are taught that we are inherently predatory and competitive, but if we submit to social discipline we can baptize that violence into the service of Good, where Good basically equates to upholding social hierarchy. So we have the ideals of chivalry as the baptism of lawless warlordism. The good man is essentially a bad man, only he is on “our side” and obeys our superiors.
Therefore, journalists who need to talk about systematic social violence against women can’t simply say “A man raped a woman” since this impugns the honor of the Protector men. It used to be that we openly said there were bad guys and assigned that role to men low on the social totem pole, since Social Darwinism (or earlier versions of the same basic hierarchy based on notions of religious election or the like) assured us that certain categories of men, the important ones, were all a bunch of chivalrous Knights of the Round Table, and hence had authority and standing. In a supposedly democratic society that kind of hierachial finger pointing is hard to get away with as the official last word, but it is going on endlessly as muttering under the breath at the sham of social democracy by Protector types who think they alone stand between helpless ladies (who all too often are disgraced by their shameless agency into becoming the female category corresponding to scummy men) and total anarchic mayhem.
It was hard reading Starhawk’s chapters on The Protector because that was exactly the sort of role I saw myself as belonging to, or at any rate being called to whether I was up to it or not. In fact of course, one’s own patriarchy’s Protectors are rival community’s Bad Guys and vice versa, and as Protectors they set their hierarchy up as judge, jury, and executioner of all transgressors they see, so they look remarkably like Bad Guys to just about anyone not inducted into identifying with that community’s hierarchy. As long as men like myself saw the world in terms of conflicts between one hierarchy and other, rather than as a conflict between hierarchial principles and those of individual dignity of all people, we were guaranteed to perpetuate the basic oppression.
That video is just screaming for an edit job.
I confess, I get how these are all harassment except for the first one. Didn’t the guy just say “Hi Sarah”?
Unless the idea was that he was a stranger who knew her name and face, I suppose. I didn’t get that at all from the video though - just looked like a classmate greeting another classmate to me (i.e. they both knew each other).
Did I miss something in there?
-MH
We’ve got PSAs around here that are produced by the Mormons. Those people aren’t even trying to be sneaky. My two favorites involve a man making a big flaming deal about how taking his wife out to dinner is a big treat for his kids, which wouldn’t be so bad if the wife’s role wasn’t so swoony and depressing (Me? Really? Oh, honey) and a second in which a girl confesses to her dad that she was glad he talked her out of dating her boyfriend, which pleases the dad to no end until he realizes that she’s looking at another guy he might not approve of, so he schedules another long hike during which to brainwash her. Both end with the tagline “Marriage (or, Family) isn’t it about….time?”
The only thing that drives me more insane on the radio is that dog food commerical that suggests you should buy your dog expensive food so that it will love you, and then when it is gazing upon you adoringly you can project onto it all of the validation you wish you’d been getting from your ungrateful family. Not a PSA, sure, but still really grating.
On the other hand, there’s a really good one that I think was done by the ad council about violence against women, in which a father tells his son that he’s not going to tell him how to treat women, so maybe it’s best if the son get his ideas from other sources, like bad TV or ‘irresponsible older boys’. That one is actually pretty well done.
The very first response you’ll get is But Not All Men Are Like That!! And You’re Generalizing All Men!!
Or, better yet, the NO TRUE MANLY MAN defense. NO TRUE MANLY MAN would ever do such a thing, so, obviously, the vile perpetrator is not a MAN but some other creature, like a slug, or something.
” ‘If we lived in a remotely sane culture, the message would be, “Look at the way that relentless harassment really bothers women, men. Quit harassing women.’ ”
So we can look at Sarah’s MySpace page and think, “Nice tattoo, Sarah!” - we just shouldn’t say “Nice tattoo, Sarah!”. Especially not to Sarah!
I have to think, however, that women are conscious actors, and if Sarah’s putting her tattoo on her MySpace page she’s proud of her tattoo and she wants me to see it. Otherwise… she wouldn’t!
“The amorphous “menâ€? didn’t rape the victim, and unless we know for sure who did, its safer to invoke the passive voice.”
Have we learned something from a recent highly-publicized case?
“I confess, I get how these are all harassment except for the first one. Didn’t the guy just say “Hi Sarahâ€??”
It wasn’t that he said, “Hey, Sarah!” It was the way he said, “Hey, Sarah!” He said, “Heeey, Sarah!” It totally creeped her out. He shouldn’t have invaded Sarah’s personal space by saying anything at all - if she wants him to speak to her, she will speak to him first.
I’d start remaking that ad by changing the genders. Make it a guy on the football team who likes playing with his cousin’s two-year-old. But of course that wouldn’t be right because the guy wasn’t doing anything wrong by having pride in his actions. (Or at least no one hating such an ad could admit that they think it’s wrong for a guy to like taking care of toddlers.)
Things have gotten subtly worse over time — at least when Golda Meir suggested a curfew for men, the men had the decency to shut up instead of going off to produce PSAs.
Life’s great when you’re a movie usher. You can say shit to young girls and nobody will fire your ass. Being a waiter or a gym teacher’s good too. The girl won’t complain, cause she won’t know what to say, cause it’s not like there’s a PSA about how to get some dickwad in trouble for on the job harassing.
Ah yes, J, your harassment of women is a “compliment”. Heard it. Unsurprisingly, men like you who enjoy harassing teenage girls on the sidewalk also think that the victim in the Duke case didn’t get raped. Didn’t get raped or it doesn’t matter because you’re not really against it? No matter, off-topic, not interested in a real discussion, openly enjoys harassing women for the high crime of existing, so banned.
That ad pissed me off so much that I sent an e-mail to the Ad Council about it. I usually just froth at the mouth and bluster incoherent curse words for twenty minutes, but I’m fucking tired of seeing misogyny normalized and justified every freakin’ day.
I think motherhood may yet make an activist out of me- I don’t know why but having a son has radicalized me as a feminist and makes me want to change the world he is going to grow up in.
JSmith: you’re an asshole and a misogynist.
Banned? Sweet.
Shorter J: If women don’t want to be harassed, they should probably avoid existing. How can we (Us Men) not harass women when they’re THERE?
On the topic of the PSA: there was this email that got mass-forwarded a year ago from a girl to a guy she’d been with, telling him his spunk was “yum” The guy forwarded to five friends, and so on round the world.
The girl was internationally humiliated and her name became well known, published in newspapers, etc.
Nobody remembers the name of the allegedly yummy-spunked guy who broke her confidence and forwarded a private, personal, sexual email about his own penile secretions to all his mates. That made me furious. He’s probably even been able to get laid since then, because people aren’t going to go “Oh, you’re THAT guy” and run off. If I knew his name I’d put it in here. I was never, ever able to understand how her behaviour had been the aberration and not his; but hers was the name that stuck to the story.
Why did I say a year ago? it was much longer than that, and I knew it was. Weird not-quite typo type error there.
How about a PSA showing the barely teenage boy being complimented on his tighty-whiteys by the neighborhood p*doph*le?
I keep asking myself how a woman being objectified after presenting herself as a sexual object is different from the same thing happening to, say, some porn star. Then it occurred to me that the star of the PSA is uncomfortable because the situation has basically escaped her control. Right? So, there is the social context in which men and women interact, and she has changed that context but not on purpose.
The only way I can see that this PSA is like men stoning women to death is that in both cases, the men should have ceded back to women that social power that lets them control the social context. Other than that very broad and vague statement I think the comparison is horribly off.
Quote Jsmith’s; emphasis mine. Comment unnecessary.
PSA make me sad. I write to Ad Council.
What would this sentence look like if written in the active voice?
Personally, while I get how the passive voice can be used to obscure male responsibility, I’m not convinced that simply switching to the active voice is a very sensible solution, since statements like “men rape women” are problematic for several reasons that Amanda brought up. Rather than focusing on whether we’re implying or not implying male responsibility, I think we should be actually talking about male responsibility, specifically and explicitly. If it isn’t actually brought up, it’s left an ambiguous, unexplored concept regardless of how language is manipulated.
If you ever reacted to news about a woman being targeted by harmful, hateful or degrading comments on the internet by saying “what did she do to set that off?�, go sit in a corner and think a bit more.
Unsurprisingly, men like you who enjoy harassing teenage girls on the sidewalk also think that because the Attorney General dropped charges against the three men accused in the Duke rape case that no man raped the victim. No man raped the victim or it doesn’t matter because you’re not really against it?
How’s that?
“Unsurprisingly, men like you who enjoy harassing teenage girls on the sidewalk also think that no one raped the victim in the Duke case. No one raped her or it doesn’t matter because you’re not really against it?”
Not really the point of the whole active/passive thing, but there you go. What’s your point?
I think Amanda’s right: the commonality between the PSA and the “honor killing” is that in both cases, random men in society are given the “job” of punishing young women for making mistakes. And the mistake in both cases is her assumption that she has free will or “rights” and stuff.
I also agree that the passive voice is very often used to protect the subject (the classic “mistakes were made” BS). But I do know several men personally (who don’t harrass and don’t support it in others) who may feel personally accused by constant repetition of “Men did this” and “men did that”. I think this is where a lot of Rush’s “feminazis hate all men” support comes from, and I think that hurts the overall issue in the long run. “Some man did this” or “A group of men did that” maybe? That gets into the “NO TRUE MAN” dodge, though, doesn’t it?
I’m also wondering about those cases where women are the patriarchal agents of punishment to merit consideration (my mother springs immediately to mind. Any suggestions on rephrasing to the active voice that handles either one of these issues?
As far as the old “harrassment or compliment” question, here’s a handy guide for distinguishing between the two.
In a perfect world, Sarah could post whatever she wanted and wouldn’t have to worry about harassment.
But until that happens, Sarah should be careful online, which is the point of the PSA. I did not see the PSA as justifying the actions of the men as much as taking a neutral stance toward them. If you post personal information online, it’s no longer personal and you may get unwanted attention, which is a good message for everyone, not just teenage girls.
No, it isn’t right, but that’s unfortunately the way things are.
I don’t know about that. The ad would have still “blamed the victim”, but the victim would have been male instead of female.
Those boys were cleared on all charges. I am not quite sure what you mean by this.
The problem with many of the laws against harassment and even rape, especially date rape or marital rape is that the charges have to be proven, and in many cases, they are difficult or impossible to prove due to the nature of the crime.
For example, if a man makes an inappropriate, harassing remark to a woman in private, then what happens? If she reports him, he will deny it, and she will not be able to prove anything. It’s “he said/she said”. On the other hand, if the system always believes the woman, then what is to protect the accused from false accusation? He can’t disprove anything either.
I don’t think that changing a news story from “Last night, a woman was raped . . .” to “Last night, a man raped a woman . . .” is blaming all men for everything, though. It’s really different from saying that “men rape women.” That’s what I think that we’re talking about. The woman didn’t “get raped.” Someone actually did the raping.
Men who get all knotted up about “men rape women” because it doesn’t apply to all men usually have no trouble with “women have babies” even though this doesn’t apply to all women. I wonder why?
Snore, wayward. No one said that Sarah shouldn’t be careful of the “imperfect world”, aka men who stalk and harass girls. We just said it would be nice if those guys were called out for their behavior, instead of treating male abuse of women as something that can’t be changed.
Oh, Sniper, don’t you know that women are rapists too? Forcefully sitting on an erect penis is every bit as much rape as ramming an erect penis into a vagina. Or so the argument goes. For every instance of “men rape women,” true and frequent though it may be, they’ll want at least one “women rape men,” rare and debatable as that may be, to give the illusion of “balance.” If merely 99% of rapes are committed by men, that is in no way analogous to the 100% of births given by women.
At least I think that’s it. I’m not as well versed in the tortured logic of misogyny as I could be.
To everyone wanting to write the ad, or saying that the ad could not exist in a “blame the victim way:
The ad should actually should be, like Amanda said, aimed at men to say “harassing women is not okay, don’t be a creepy predator” not “women watch what you do, because you’ll probably be harassed.”
If they want the message to reflect the importance of not sharing too much personal info, they should have shown a variety of different kids of different sex, race, etc. (therefore saying that it’s not just “slutty little white girls” who get this treatment and deserve it) being unwittingly harassed on their myspace pages and through email (since I think the vast majority of this type of harassment occurs online). Then it could say something like “while most people you meet online will probaby be good, you never now who the creeps are. You should watch your own back and be careful who you trust.” Preferably it would be written in a more eloquent manner, but hopefully you get the idea.
oops, that first sentence is supposed to say “could not exist in a non “blame the victim” way”
I’ve been doing the active voice thing for a while; it exposes you to incredible hostility. Men are supposed to be shielded from the consequences of their actions.
Wait, what?? would be harassed for WHAT, using myspace? i use myspace, i’ve never been harrassed about it.
There are very serious safety threats when it comes to 7th grade boys or girls posting information on the internet. But instead of focusing on safety they focused on slut shaming.
And the men who sexually harassed Sara were never reprimanded at all. I think they really could have worked this ad differently, showing young men and women applying for a job, or getting in trouble with a teacher because of things they posted online. They could also have shown how some people get stalked fromputting their information online.
I wrote an angry e-mail.
And the men who sexually harassed Sara were never reprimanded at all.
Or fired, or jailed. Apparently what used to be called “the stronger sex” cannot bear to be accountable. Bad behavior counts as “youthful indescretion” for a man up to middle age, but a woman is supposed to be the soul of foresight and discretion from menarche on.
“i use myspace, i’ve never been harrassed about it.”
You’re part of a privileged minority. Statistics show that 82.3% of people who have blogs are harassed about the content on a weekly basis. I myself can’t walk down the street without somebody getting assy about a typo or factual error in a post less than four days old.
Seriously, though, this could have been handled so much better. The people who put this together and the people who put the pot-IM radio ad together need to be slapped with a marketing textbook or two.
On the other hand, if the system always believes the woman, then what is to protect the accused from false accusation?
The restraint of women?
No offense, but assuming only two alternatives, I’d rather the reputations of men depended on the restraint of women than have the lives and safety of women depend on the restraint of men - just based on the numbers. False accusation of rape almost never happens, while rape is fairly common.
I’d rather that there was more than those two alternatives, of course, but the one we seem to have picked right now - where we rely on men to not rape women - seems to be the worst of two alternatives (unless you’re a man.)
On the other hand, if the system always believes the woman, then what is to protect the accused from false accusation?
Chet, I think your response is pretty good but how about, I don’t know, the legal system?
A trial is what prevents people from going to prison or jail if they are falsely accused since our justice system is based on an innocent until proven guilty model.
Jaysus, Mary and Joseph, what is the deal with people forgetting that the court of public opinion is not, you know, actually a court.
:sigh:
If JSmith had said, “If Sarah’s putting her tattoo on her MySpace page she’s proud of her tattoo and she wants the whole world to see it”, would that have changed the way you read his post? There are a lot of people who forget, or don’t realize, that My Space and Facebook pages are accessible to almost anyone, anywhere who has an Internet connection. Anything you do online, whether it’s expressing an opinion or flaunting a tattoo, you essentially do in public.
I sent a highly-pissed off email to the Ad Council. WTF were they thinking?
Ugh, Wayward. Yes, of course, in a perfect world, lots of crap wouldn’t happen. Instead of saying “but until that happens” (because, frankly, I don’t see harassers just “happening” to stop their harassing), why poopoo the idea to go after the harassers to stop harassment? It seems rather sensible to me.
“If you post personal information online, it’s no longer personal and you may get unwanted attention, which is a good message for everyone, not just teenage girls.”
First off, watering down “harassment” to “unwanted attention” is yet another way to minimize the crime (he didn’t harass her, she merely received attention that was unwanted).
Secondly, I “post” personal information in the public sphere all of the time. It’s called walking out of the house. It’s like my 2-dimensional picture comes to life! And talks! In public! I guess I should just stop walking out of the house, so that men don’t interpret my “posting of personal information” as a message that “unwanted attention” should be given to me (like a present without wrapping paper!).
“Statistics show that 82.3% of people who have blogs are harassed about the content on a weekly basis.”
Which is why it’s such a bad idea to use your Real Life indentity on the internet.
Very few of the commenters here use a full name and many use a pseudonym. It’s a good idea to be protective of one’s identity online whether you’re male or female.
“On the other hand, if the system always believes the woman, then what is to protect the accused from false accusation?”
how about, I don’t know, the legal system?
A trial is what prevents people from going to prison or jail if they are falsely accused since our justice system is based on an innocent until proven guilty model
I think the legal system provides more protection than that: isn’t filing a false police report itself a crime? And slander or libel charges may come into play, also, as well as extortion, obstructing justice, or harrassment, depending on the circumstances.
Maybe the lawyers on this board can provide more detail, but I don’t think that anyone who willfully and knowingly files false charges against someone gets off scot free. (”I’m going to say he raped me because I hate him” is world’s apart from “Someone raped me, and I think it was him.”)
Sometimes I wonder if the false charge fear stems from the cases of black men being falsely accused of raping white women and dealt with by mob justice. Is it possible that MRAs read those chapters in history and conclude that it was sexism (against men) at the root rather than racism?
To the ‘if you post personal stuff online you get unwanted attention crowd’, think about this. Would you really react the same way if the harassers were lesbian women? What if the poster were a straight male who body builds and was trying to show his buddies how ready he was for the body building contest next week, but a bunch of gay guys picked up on it and reacted this way? Would your attitude maybe bleed over into, hey, those chuckleheads don’t have any right to mess with her over a few pictures on the internet. Then the ad would show the harassed person calling the cops and saying I am being stalked by crazy gay people, who would then have to register as sex offenders.
Haven’t tried to load the ad (I’m on dial-up, I’d be here for an hour) but since I read the comments, I have been thinking a little bit about how to convey the message, “Please don’t post personal info, there are creeps in this world,” without implying, “you stupid slut,” in any way. It can’t be too hard.
For example, my first (cheesy and overdramatic) thought: First scene shows a nice, happy high school girl uploading a picture of her tattoo while talking about it, very normally, on the phone with a friend. “Yeah, I was worried about it at first, but honestly, it turned out great. I’m putting it on myspace, you can take a look . . .” Cut to a different computer screen, in the dark, where a never-completely-shown creepy guy is printing out the picture—along with the girl’s name and address, because this is about posting safety. He pins the printout to the “stalking wall” that Hollywood tells us all serial killers have. (You know the deal: a sort of Collage of Obsession covered with snapshots and possibly newspaper articles about all the nasty things he’s done.) He circles the address in red marker. Fade to black, with the slogan, “Please post safely,” and any further tips the advertisers feel really need emphasis, like, “do not put your name and address on your webpage.”
That wasn’t hard. In fact, that barely took any thought at all. And I think the emphasis is on the predatory, voyeuristic nature of Creepy Guy rather than any wrongdoing on the part of High School Girl.
I keep trying to type, “Surely, a professional advertiser can come up with something along similar lines, only less cliche-ridden and lame,” but then I think of some of the advertisements I’ve watched and I just can’t finish the sentence with a straight face.
Irene
if Sarah’s putting her tattoo on her MySpace page she’s proud of her tattoo and she wants me to see it
Quote Jsmith’s; emphasis mine. Comment unnecessary.
Which isn’t going to stop me from making it. J, she’s not showing it to you, honey. You’re a slug. No one cares what a slug thinks of their tattoo, so if you tell them, don’t be surprised if it grosses them out.
“The restraint of women?”
Just curious; should rape be the only crime where a victim is automatically assumed to be telling the truth, or for all crimes where a woman is the victim?
I understand the problem with low conviction rates for rapists. But, as great many of these crimes are he said - she said situations with no other witnesses or evidence, how can that be changed without removing the protections that all accused of a crime are entitled to?
Should those accused of rape be treated differently than those accused of other crimes?
I always thought that liberals believed in the theory that it better to let 100 guilty go free than to imprison one innocent (I know I do). Why doesn’t this apply to rape?
Sometimes I wonder if the false charge fear stems from the cases of black men being falsely accused of raping white women and dealt with by mob justice. Is it possible that MRAs read those chapters in history and conclude that it was sexism (against men) at the root rather than racism?
I think it is because the media publicizes false (or more often mistaken) accusations to the nth degree.
I don’t really understand why people don’t understand that distinction between a mistaken ID (happens all the time sadly) and a FALSE accusation. The two just aren’t equivalent.
And given that crimes against women are underreported it is hard to understand where the fear comes from.
I think it links back to the patriarchy and men’s fear of having their power “taken” from them by some “woman” –men found guilty of rape react as if they never did anything actionable in the first place. It is this sense of entitlement to treat women as less than autonomous human beings by virtue of being female that is the benefit of being male in a patriarchy and then being outraged at being held to account for it by other men.
It is kinda beyond fucked up when I start thinking about it. Ew.
Irene, I don’t think frightening teenage girls with serial killers would help. Kids are already taught to be terrified of living, so there’s not much reason to make them paranoid about a far more remote threat. And being harassed by random men is a real threat for most women. The problem is what the ad says we should do about it.
If Jsmith had said, “she’s proud of her tattoo and she wants the world to see it”, would that change the way you read the sentence? Because that’s effectively what a posting on a public website is: a message to the world. And some people that you would rather not see it may still see it anyway.
Fade to black, with the slogan, “Please post safely,� and any further tips the advertisers feel really need emphasis, like, “do not put your name and address on your webpage.�
That wasn’t hard. In fact, that barely took any thought at all. And I think the emphasis is on the predatory, voyeuristic nature of Creepy Guy rather than any wrongdoing on the part of High School Girl.
I think you failed. The onus of behavior is still on the girl, which means that you’ve still put forward a message that basically says “Don’t want to be slut-shamed? Then don’t be a slut, stupid!”
If the moral of your story was “Hey, jackass, don’t be a creepy stalker who cuts out the names and addresses of girls in your neighborhood”, then you would have successfully shifted the emphasis to Creepy Stalker Guy. But so long as you portray Creepy Stalker Guy’s behavior as a constant of the universe, as a force of nature that it’s useless to do anything but take defensive actions against, you’re still making it about how it’s women’s fault for getting abuse.
If you’re portraying abuse of women by men as something like tornadoes or tides - something that it’s useless to try to prevent, it’s just going to happen anyway - then you’re shifting the onus of behavior to the victims, rather than to the perpetrators. Girls don’t get stalked on the internet because they post pictures of tattoos in their underwear, they get stalked because creepy stalker guys are stalking them, and nobody seems interested in doing anything about convincing men not to choose to do that.
Make sense?
“For example, if a man makes an inappropriate, harassing remark to a woman in private, then what happens? If she reports him, he will deny it, and she will not be able to prove anything. It’s “he said/she saidâ€?.”
Awww, just kick him in the nuts and be done with it. If he reports it, it’s “he said/she said.”
Kidding.
Maybe.
Of course, I once punched a guy in the throat after he grabbed my ass and then sneered at me, as if to say, “Whatcha gonna do about it, little girl?”
Not surprisingly, he never touched me again. His hyena friends, who laughed when I confronted him (I gave Ass Man one chance to apologize), slinked off like the losers they really were.
Raging Dumbass:
should rape be the only crime where a victim is automatically assumed to be telling the truth
It sure as fuck shouldn’t be the one crime where a victim is automatically assumed to be lying, as it currently is.
“Just curious; should rape be the only crime where a victim is automatically assumed to be telling the truth, or for all crimes where a woman is the victim?”
Mmmh, the underlying assumption of this question is that law enforcement automatically thinks a victim is lying for all crimes reported? I don’t think that is always the case.
If Jsmith had said, “she’s proud of her tattoo and she wants the world to see it�, would that change the way you read the sentence?
Of course it would. J specifically assumed his own right to leer at a teenage girl and not be thought a slug. If he had attributed that right to “the world” instead, it would still have been obnoxious, but somewhat less like pointing at your own erection with a lecherous grin on your face.
And some people that you would rather not see it may still see it anyway.
Sure they will. And if they start bragging about how hard it got them, I’ll tell them how sad and gross I think they are.
Of course, I once punched a guy in the throat after he grabbed my ass and then sneered at me, as if to say, “Whatcha gonna do about it, little girl?�
I’m glad that turned out well for you, but most women aren’t going to be so lucky, so that’s not a helpful suggestion.
Just curious; should rape be the only crime where a victim is automatically assumed to be telling the truth, or for all crimes where a woman is the victim?
Let’s stick with rape, for now. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the historical principles of our justice system, having evolved as they did in a time when rape was essentially considered a kind of property crime, might have developed a certain “blind spot” for dealing with rape as we are now beginning to come to understand it.
Should those accused of rape be treated differently than those accused of other crimes?
Sure, why not? Assuming we can prove that intercourse took place. I’d set that burden of proof, at least. But what’s the harm in accepting the woman’s account of her own consent as privileged over the man’s account of his own ignorance?
Unless, of course, you believe men have a right to have as much sex with women as they can get, and that actually believing women when they say they were raped constitutes a chilling effect on a man’s ability to get sex in “grey-area” situations.
Come to think about it, I don’t see what would be so bad about that. Where’s the harm in forcing men to achieve enthusiastic consent before they decide it’s not too risky to have sex?
I’m just throwing things out there, I guess. But I don’t really see that putting the burden of proof on a man asserting that he didn’t rape someone he had sex with would bring about an apocalypse for men. I notice that the vast majority of men who have consensual sex with women who are equally enthusiastic about it never face false accusations of rape from those women. If you’re having sex with women who you suspect, later, will level accusations of rape, maybe it’s time to ask yourself - am I a rapist?
This is an excellent point.
The fact remains that the girl objectified herself and is uncomfortable with being an object when it’s thrown in her face. The men should not act in such a disrespectful and immodest manner towards her–I get it. But are we supposed to gleefully endorse all women’s choices?
I have a longtime friend who is trying to become “something more” but I’m not interested because she really is very promiscuous and this is a turnoff for me. Am I just playing my role as masculine enforcer of unspoken moral codes? Or on some level do I actually get a say in this sort of thing, and if so, where?
Without some kind of guiding principle this is less about women being respected and more about them just having power.
Awww, just kick him in the nuts and be done with it. If he reports it, it’s “he said/she said.�
That’s exactly what you have to do. When I was in 5th grade, before I even had nubs with with to attract such attention, a group of boys saw fit to do run-by “breast” pinchings. The girls who were assaulted and went directly to the teacher saw no justice. They were simply told that boys would be boys. When the boy who’d pinched me ran to the teacher to complain that I’d punched his glasses across the gym, I listened with cocked eyebrow while he had to explain exactly why he’d been punched. He was the only boy in the bunch who was chastised by the teacher for that little bout of kiddie sexual assault.
As far as rewriting the ad, I think the right thing to do would be to drop the girls’ name from it - and just have a bunch of creepy, leering men going “Heeeeey sexy, what color underwear are you wearing?”
The real discussion I’d like to see the ad facilitate is the priviledge men assume they have to comment and discuss women’s bodies in public - an attractive teenage girl would probably be getting that kind of attention regardless of what they posted on MySpace, and I definitely think a “get that scumbag in trouble with his boss!” PSA would be actually appropriate.
The fact remains that the girl objectified herself and is uncomfortable with being an object when it’s thrown in her face. The men should not act in such a disrespectful and immodest manner towards her–I get it. But are we supposed to gleefully endorse all women’s choices?
I have a longtime friend who is trying to become “something more� but I’m not interested because she really is very promiscuous and this is a turnoff for me. Am I just playing my role as masculine enforcer of unspoken moral codes? Or on some level do I actually get a say in this sort of thing, and if so, where?
Are you familiar with the concept of “your rights end where I begin?” Obviously you get a say in whether or not someone else gets to have a relationship with you. The fact that women have the same right as men to decide who gets to sleep with them is what bothers a lot of men. The unspoken moral code is that only men should have that right. If you don’t want to date someone because they’re “promiscuous,” that’s your own loss, but they still don’t get to fuck you if you don’t want them to. Not complicated.
And it says a lot about you that you think a girl posting pictures of herself is “objectifying herself.” Just because you think of her as an object doesn’t mean she does.
“The fact that the bulk of misogynist energy is expended towards hating and abusing teenage girls is probably the theme of another post.”
My guess would have something to do with a combination of the fetishization of innocence and the widespread sexual interest held by American males in girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen — not the frank pedophiles who are few in number, fewer still when you only count the ones who believe there’s nothing wrong with wanting to fuck children, and fewer yet when you count the ones who’ll say it out loud even on the Internet, but, rather, most American men.
In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that the right-wing fetishization of innocence, and the other kind which is rather less abashed about wanting to destroy that innocence, aren’t all that different — maybe even the same impulse, just expressed differently. After all, the right-wing style is the ‘Protect the children! Keep them pure and untainted!’ stripe — I was going to say that the fetishization of virginity here is only implicit, but the whole purity-balls movement is making that less and less implicit every week — anyway, the right-wing innocence fetish isn’t about protecting girls, but rather protecting their virginity, and what good to men is virginity, after all, except as a guarantee that no other penis has been where you’d like to put yours? Pedophiles are just a bit more direct about it, is all.
While I’m taking the time, if you do end up writing the ‘nother post about how misogyny tends to be directed most hotly at teenage girls, I wonder whether you’d find it worth your time to include an unpacking of the term ‘jail bait’. That phrase seems to embody a great deal of the misogyny you mention that’s directed toward teenage girls, being as it is an epithet on the order of ’slut’, and structurally incapable of applying to anyone other than teenage girls.
Without some kind of guiding principle this is less about women being respected and more about them just having power.
And God forfend that should happen.
For Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin, meaningful consent is impossible: all intercourse is rape.
justicewalks, if it makes you feel any better, a boy caught doing that in my school would be called to the office to have a little chat with our Community Police Liaison Officer and would face at least suspension for a first offence, possibly a fine as well, depending on his age.
For Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin, meaningful consent is impossible: all intercourse is rape.
If that were true, and not a myth, I guess you would have a point, troll.
For Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin, meaningful consent is impossible: all intercourse is rape.
Well then, don’t have sex with them. See? ITS EASY.
“Mmmh, the underlying assumption of this question is that law enforcement automatically thinks a victim is lying for all crimes reported? I don’t think that is always the case.”
Neither do I. But I have a few friends who are cops, and they tell me they were trained to be skeptical about all accusations, treat the accuser with respect, and to investigate to see if the accusations are true. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.
“If you’re having sex with women who you suspect, later, will level accusations of rape, maybe it’s time to ask yourself - am I a rapist?”
Or you yourself were falsely accused of rape, or know someone who was. My brother’s ex-wife accused him of raping her while they were in the middle of a child custody dispute. I know it was a false accusation, as I was with him when it was supposed to have occurred. Thankfully, the police were skeptical about the claim, and that their investigation showed that the accusation was false.
A great reminder of why an accusation alone is insufficient for a conviction.
Hold on there, hoss. I’m only pointing out that (theoretically, since we don’t know what the girl posted) she presented herself as a sexual object. The men have seen her in her undies, they know that she has tattoos somewhere covered up by normal clothing, etc. So they are reacting to her as a sexual object.This is fine in situations where the woman still maintains some level of control–as I noted in an earlier post, men would probably react the same way if they met a famous porn star, with lewd comments and so forth.
The source of the drama in the PSA is that the girl is NOT in control and finds herself in a situation where she is powerless. She has men treating her as a sexual object whom she does not want to treat her as a sexual object. The men have the power, and they are abusing it.
So, the PSA is saying “Don’t give up this power over yourself,” which is good advice, and the point of the blog is “Men, if you have this power, you don’t have the right to abuse it.”
Capisce?
For Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin, meaningful consent is impossible: all intercourse is rape.
Yeah, I totally believe that you have read those authors.
For Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin, meaningful consent is impossible: all intercourse is rape.
Oh yes, let’s conflate the legal definition of rape with feminist criticism of the patriarchy.
Oh yes, because they are the same, but no they really aren’t. Intellectual honesty anyone?
As for gaining a woman’d enthusiastic consent I propose that men. don’t. rape.
It isn’t about “getting” consent, it is about not committing rape. Why is this so hard to understand?
Reputation? Try “freedom”. Rape carries a rather long prison sentence.
I don’t think the ratio of false accusations to unreported rapes is because women are any more or any less restrained than men as much as it is that the benefit of the doubt goes to the accused.
If there were a way to more accurately determine which charges were true and which were false, that would be great, but I don’t think changing the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” is the way to do that.
I’m only pointing out that (theoretically, since we don’t know what the girl posted) she presented herself as a sexual object.
Or a sexual being. Which all humans are supposed to be, except, of course, women.
Aaron, the discussion of the “honor-killing” of women is a great example of men having arbitrary power without justification. I should think that if it’s Bad Mmkay for men to do this, then it is so for women as well.
I also think it’s statements like yours that lead many men to believe that feminism is less about empowering women than about empowering them at the expense of men.
My brother’s ex-wife accused him of raping her while they were in the middle of a child custody dispute.
Now that’s what I call impressive multitasking.
You can switch “object” for “being” or “manner” and not change the intent of my post.
If I’m abusing the language, by all means, let me know.
And the plural of anecdote is not data.
I personally think believing all women that say that a man has raped them as a default position is a very feminist position to take.
Historically women’s claims of rape (and hell, contemporarily) have been marginalised, dismissed, and turned back on women themselves. Women’s claims of rape were as a default not believed (we aren’t talking scepticism here, we are talking complete denial) and so knowing such, and the strength it THEN takes for a woman to NONETHELESS say she has been rape, takes so much power, so much courage, that I can only but take as a default as position supporting women doing such. Maybe in supporting those that do come forward, some of those huge numbers that wouldn’t otherwise might instead do so as well.
Yeah, sure, in very rare cases my believe in a woman won’t be justified. But I’ll EASILY live with that and not apologise for it.
But I do know several men personally (who don’t harrass and don’t support it in others) who may feel personally accused by constant repetition of “Men did this� and “men did that�. I think this is where a lot of Rush’s “feminazis hate all men� support comes from, and I think that hurts the overall issue in the long run. “Some man did this� or “A group of men did that� maybe? That gets into the “NO TRUE MAN� dodge, though, doesn’t it?
Sure it does. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the ‘NO TRUE MAN WOULD DO THAT’ excuse actually means ‘I WOULDN’T DO THAT’ — the assumption that the speaker is a True Man is implicit, at least in every such case I’ve encountered.
As far as I’m concerned, though, and speaking as a man who has in the past, before I gained a clue, felt personally accused and blamed when hearing women say things like ‘all men are potential rapists’ — I’ve got something to say to men who feel that way:
Use those vaunted, cherished testicles of yours to put on some big boy pants and get the fuck over it.
You do share responsibility for the behavior of your fellow men. You think you’re better than that? You think it’s unfair that you should be tarred with the same brush? You think that women ought to live with the constant tactical calculation that men make necessary, that’s just fine, but you are different, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether women might find you trustworthy — you feel you ought to have the benefit of the doubt, in spite of everything?
Well, great. Stop whining and start finding something to do about the men who’re dragging your ass in the mud. And y’know what’d be a great start on that? Stop letting your buddies slide when they say things that make you wince on the inside. Yeah, you know you do it. I do too. It’s a bad habit either way. Cut it out.
Oh, what, you’re not willing to do that? You’re afraid you’ll lose friends over it, and you don’t feel you should have to pay that price, and it doesn’t occur to you that maybe a friend who doesn’t really see women as human isn’t really anyone you’d want to call a friend, after all? Well, that’s fine too. Just don’t expect me to take you seriously when you come and start whining to me about how those mean, mean women don’t give you enough credit. Not unless you really do enjoy the sound of a tiny violin.
And, while you’re listening to the faint, sweet strains of ‘My Heart Bleeds For You’, you want to maybe think about why it is that men get so defensive so fast about this stuff. It’s not like accusing someone of pedophilia, where the accusation is equivalent to instantaneous conviction and at best ostracism — calling somebody a rapist, or a potential rapist, or saying that men rape women, doesn’t have anything like the same moral-panic-witch-hunt effect, you’re not going to lose a job or go to jail just because some random person who doesn’t even know you said that she thinks you might possibly not be instantly worthy of complete trust. So — why so wrought up about it? Why the instantaneous defensive reaction? Why don’t you examine yourself and your reaction before you scramble and sprint to blame anybody else you possibly can? It smacks of avoidance, that.
Hold on there, hoss. I’m only pointing out that (theoretically, since we don’t know what the girl posted) she presented herself as a sexual object. The men have seen her in her undies, they know that she has tattoos somewhere covered up by normal clothing, etc. So they are reacting to her as a sexual object.
Maybe that’s the automatic reaction if you’re eleven years old and still think it’s funny that girls wear bras and panties, man. Or maybe you’re right, and she did post those pictures because she wanted to show people how sexy she is, and was inviting them all to tell her what they think of their tattoo. That doesn’t mean harassing her for it doesn’t make you a giant wanker, and if she doesn’t know that, she needs to be told.
The whole idea of men who harass women having “power” is a joke. Yeah, sure you’ve got power, because you can make women uncomfortable and beat them up and rape them if they don’t like it, and they can’t do a damn thing about it. What a stud. I think the best thing we can do for these guys is point out what utter losers they are, and ask them how the hell they can avoid falling apart from sheer self-loathing.
Reputation? Try “freedom�. Rape carries a rather long prison sentence.
What part of “the court of public opinion is not the legal courts” do you not understand? Nobody here is advocating eliminating the legal principle of the presumption of innocence.
Oh you most definitely are.
“Object” means the person is something less than human, “being” or “actor” means the person has agency and power. Word use is specific for a reason.
I also think it’s statements like yours that lead many men to believe that feminism is less about empowering women than about empowering them at the expense of men.
They are being empowered at the expense of men. Men won’t get to rape women and beat them up and insult them and hate them without suffering consequences. A lot of men just can’t have that.
As a man, I get pretty personally offended by a lot of presumptuous statements all the time. But it’s not feminists who are making them.
So if you can sit through a typical American sitcom but not deal with the active voice, there might be other (almost certainly unconscious) issues there.
Aaron -
That post actually made me want to stand up and cheer. Kickass.
“Aaron, the discussion of the “honor-killingâ€? of women is a great example of men having arbitrary power without justification. I should think that if it’s Bad Mmkay for men to do this, then it is so for women as well.”
Sure, Pete. Because, yeah, there are so many instances when women have slaughtered men because they didn’t like the choices those men had made. You know, it’s right up there with female-on-male rape, in terms of social crises.
Seriously, though, on a level playing field, your argument might have some merit. As the situation here in the real world stands, though, and given what I’ve seen of your previous comments, I’m going to assume that you know better than to think your argument’s worth addressing on its merits.
“I also think it’s statements like yours that lead many men to believe that feminism is less about empowering women than about empowering them at the expense of men.”
As I see it, feminism is about empowering women at the expense of men, because men hold an extremely disproportionate share of the power in this world; as such, any gains women make are going to have to be at the expense of men’s ability to run the world as they like it. I don’t have a problem with that. Why do you?
Or, better yet, the NO TRUE MANLY MAN defense
Hee. I’ve gotten that. Counter it with “Ahh, the no true Scotsman fallacy” and walk away.
I have never been wrongfully accused of rape, but I have been wrongfully accused with harassing someone.
A girl said that I had been following her around campus and that I had been up to her dorm room when she wasn’t there. This came as a complete surprise to me. They wouldn’t even tell me who my accuser was, because after all, I should know.
It turns out the girl was the suitemate of a girl I knew. We had several classes in the same area at the same time, so it probably appeared that I was following her around campus. I had been up to her room when she wasn’t there, but I was looking for the suitemate. It was just a series of coincidences that understandably freaked her out.
What was particularly frightening is that the school officials assumed I was guilty. This girl had no malicious intent and I only dealt with school officials, not legal authorities, so it could have been far worse. The misunderstanding was cleared up and she later apologized.
The fact remains that the girl objectified herself and is uncomfortable with being an object when it’s thrown in her face.
You can’t objectify yourself. Period. Oxymoron. As Sara pointed out:
In the ad, men and boys objectified the girl. Period. They had a socially approved reason to do so (punishing her for thinking she had an equal right to use the internet that men enjoy), but it doesn’t change the fact that they are the ones who are negating her humanity by treating her like shit.
Again, I have read Dworkin and Brownmiller. Do not conflate what is being talked about here rape, as in the felony defined by law and feminist criticism of the patriarchy.
Rape is a tool of the patriarchy to enforce women’s obedience to the system that oppresses us –follow the rules and you won’t get raped, stoned to death or murdered. And you know what, there are no rules to prevent that, because the rules aren’t made by women, enforced by other women sometimes, but we sure don’t make them.
A great reminder of why an accusation alone is insufficient for a conviction.
RagingTrollerate, who here, or anywhere in the debate about believing women who say that they have been raped, has ever suggested that an accusation should be enough for a conviction?
A complaint of rape should be enough for a thorough investigation, and people (including journalists and jurymembers) should be very aware that a mistaken ID is not the same as a false accusation of a rape that never happened.
(insert standard comparison to mis-ID of burglar doesn’t mean your TV never got stolen here)
(NB: were I a police officer, or a jury member, I would, while treating the accused with respect, automatically be skeptical of any alibi provided by a family member for any crime unless it was independently corroborated)
As I see it, feminism is about empowering women at the expense of men, because men hold an extremely disproportionate share of the power in this world; as such, any gains women make are going to have to be at the expense of men’s ability to run the world as they like it. I don’t have a problem with that. Why do you?
I’d see feminism as freeing the vast majority of men and women at the expense of a few assholes.
In the case of sexual assault and stalking, a world where there was none would be a world in which men could express interest in a woman without fearing coming off as creepy or threatening. This isn’t the primary reason men should be working to end it, of course, but it does mean that they have nothing (collectively) to lose from doing so.
Dworkin didn’t say intercourse couldn’t be not-rape; but as most intercourse is currently understood, it certainly is.
So what? Dworkin wrote a lot about how heterosexual sex is construed by society, so feminists are crazy and you shouldn’t feel bad about harassing women?
I think her intent is irrelevant if you focus on the behavior of the males. It’s obviously immature, I agree with you there, but I think the discussion of power here is germane.
Also, I don’t understand your last sentence–are you speaking to the “moral enforcers” idea expressed earlier?
Huh? I should think that the issue of a man having physical strength during a rape is no joke. Men DO have power over women and DO abuse it (in social settings too). I don’t see where you are really disagreeing with me but I get the impression that you’re trying to correct me–what exactly are you saying?
Thank you. I am familiar with this usage (I first encountered it in the last Pope’s “theology of the body”), I just wasn’t thinking it through. My apologies.
So they are reacting to her as a sexual object.
No. They are creating their own projection of her through a lens manufactured by thousands of years of male dominance over women. She, herself, is a human who exists, has desires, has pleasures, has wants, has needs, is human like the rest of us (which I assume you define as male). The men who objectify her do not know her as a human, they know her as an image created within their own heads. This is not a reaction but a completely separate series of actions, all having nothing to do with the woman in question.
Then again, when you already think of a woman as a sexual object (and not a human being) in the first place, your argument becomes a lot more believable, which is why I’m sure you are making it.
I think her intent is irrelevant if you focus on the behavior of the males.
But you aren’t focusing on their behavior, you are focusing on hers, and what she should or should not have done. Are you even reading your own line of argumentation?!
I’d see feminism as freeing the vast majority of men and women at the expense of a few assholes.
Not exactly “a few assholes” IMO, but a good summary of the way I see it as well.
Projection much Petey? I wonder why you didn’t consider a more likely scenario where a young girl posted a picture of a tattoo she got on her lower back (one of the most common locations for women to get tattoos, BTW) and a bit of her underwear was peaking out. Then some creeps say ‘nice tattoo’ and ‘what color underwear are you wearing today?’. Was she presenting herself as a sexual object? Or is it more likely that these creeps feel entitled to objectify her for their own pleasure? If there is one thing I have learned over the years, a girl/woman does not have to display any overt sexual signals for men to objectify them in a sexual way. I know, I know- it doesn’t go with the whole slut-shaming meme you’re running with.
And as to the second paragraph: WTF? I’m sorry but just because a woman is a porn star does not mean that strangers are allowed to sexually harass her when they see her in public. Being a porn star does not grant all men sexual access to her, whether it is to make lewd comments or think they are entitled to sex with her.
Dude, you’re scaring me.
Dude, you’re scaring me.
Me too, which is probably the effect he’s going for.
I believe in first principles in ethics, such as the idea that power has to be justified with moral premises or else is arbitrary and should not exist. I have absolutely no problem with women acquiring access to the power–and maybe power is not a good word, I’m thinking of the ability to access your rights and take control of your own destiny here–that they deserve by dint of their status as human beings.
Nor do I have a problem with men giving up certain power that they have–or at least ignoring it–such as the power to abuse women. This is unjustifiable. If they give it up then they are going to act more morally. I believe the same can be said for much power held by men so to that extent we agree.
But what you said sounds as if for women to gain power, men have to give it up; in order for women to have freedom of speech, men need to shut up, in order for women to be paid equally, men need to take pay cuts, etc. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, given the above reasoning process.
If I am missing something blatant and you feel like playing educator, I’m all ears.
Um, can we leave off with the vituperation? I’m in a learning mode here, and I don’t think I deserve to get treated like the Troll du Jour.
Being a porn star does not grant all men sexual access to her, whether it is to make lewd comments or think they are entitled to sex with her.
Well, the problem is, as has been noted earlier, she may be a woman who likes sex. Liking sex is only for men, and as she is not-a-man, she’s also not a human being, and can and should be treated accordingly.
/sexist asshat
Not ALL men have to give up power for women to gain power. It’s not the same kind of zero-sum game that some of you are seeing.
Take an example: How do I lose power when a woman takes over a CEO position held by men throughout the company’s history? I don’t.
How do I lose power when a woman gains the opportunities and resources to leave an abusive man? I don’t; in fact, I may very well gain from such a situation.
This is fine in situations where the woman still maintains some level of control–as I noted in an earlier post, men would probably react the same way if they met a famous porn star, with lewd comments and so forth…
1. What the hell is “so forth”? Whistles? Groping? Rape?
2. Who are these men of whom you speak? I know some who would probably react the way you describe, but they’re all misogynist assholes.
I have a longtime friend who is trying to become “something more� but I’m not interested because she really is very promiscuous and this is a turnoff for me. Am I just playing my role as masculine enforcer of unspoken moral codes? Or on some level do I actually get a say in this sort of thing, and if so, where?
Glad to know that ‘being promiscuous’ makes you less of a person!
You seriously need to re-examine yourself. And besides, I hope that you’re just as big of an asshole to all your promiscuous male buddies.
And besides, I hope that you’re just as big of an asshole to all your promiscuous male buddies.
He’d never have sex with them. What, do you think he’s gay or something?!
/sexist asshat
Men DO have power over women and DO abuse it (in social settings too). I don’t see where you are really disagreeing with me but I get the impression that you’re trying to correct me–what exactly are you saying?
Obviously women have to take men seriously when men are beating and raping them. I’m saying that when we emphasize the power that big, bad, manly men have over women, we’re giving wank fodder to a lot of shut-ins. I think it would help to emphasize how pathetic you are when the only way you can get a woman to pay attention to you is to harass her. That might make wanting to hurt women seem a lot less sexy.
He’d never have sex with them. What, do you think he’s gay or something?!
/sexist asshat
ROFL. hi-five, JackGoff!
Lorelei, I don’t think he’s in the wrong for not wanting to date his friend. If anything, he’s doing her a huge favor.
*shrug* “Porn Star” was the first thing that came to mind when I was trying to think of a woman who presents herself as a sexual being (thank you, Sarah) and yet does not cede power to men except on her terms. That is, if men make lewd comments at a famous porn star when they recognize her in the produce aisle, it means she is getting paid, not that she’s at a social disadvantage. I did not say that men were justified in making these comments, nor do I think I implied it anywhere. I believe this is what you might call “projecting,” only, it’s yourself and Sniper who are culpable.
If it’s merely a poor analogy, then I apologize (and I can see how yours are at least less inflammatory). I’m honestly not trying to propagate any kind of “slut shaming” meme and I’m not sure where you’re going with that.
That is, if men make lewd comments at a famous porn star when they recognize her in the produce aisle, it means she is getting paid, not that she’s at a social disadvantage.
Okay, last try and I’m done. What the hell do you mean? Are you suggesting that being harassed=getting paid for one’s work, whatever that might be?
As for sexual beings… oh, to hell with it.
See what I mean? If I make any sort of negative judgement about a woman’s sexuality then I’m automatically branded “an asshole.” Did it occur to you that maybe I don’t want to be the third guy this week, right before the fourth? Do I get no say in this? I have to endorse her unsafe behavior, and I have to participate it, or else I’m an asshole.
This makes absolutely no sense to me.
But what you said sounds as if for women to gain power, men have to give it up; in order for women to have freedom of speech, men need to shut up, in order for women to be paid equally, men need to take pay cuts, etc. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, given the above reasoning process.
Nobody has to give up freedom of speech for someone else to gain it, but narrowing the range of socially acceptable speech in certain ways can certainly create an environment where more people are willing to speak up. (Again, note the difference between the Court of Opinion and actual courts.)
As for pay, yeah, men have to give up a bit of their salaries-as-a-proportion-of-the-whole in order for women to make as much. That’s just basic math.
Lorelei, I don’t think he’s in the wrong for not wanting to date his friend. If anything, he’s doing her a huge favor.
and I have to participate it, or else I’m an asshole.
Ah, sorry, I read the comment wrong. I thought he meant ’something more’ as in ‘a better person’ or something. Sorry guys, I have a fever and reading is getting really weird for me. o.O
However, it still stands, Peter, that I hope you think lowly of your man friends who are promiscuous, too.
Petey, you might want to take a look above at how you phrased things; namely that there was something wrong with her because of this, and that was why you didn’t want to take things to another level.
Rather, instead, you should have merely talked about your own preference for someone that is monogamous.
The others here are reacting to what you wrote, which was to say that there is something wrong about women who have a lot of partners, which IS “slut-shaming”. It may not have been your intention to say this, but that is what you wrote and what people are reacting to.
One can state one’s preference for something without denigrating either the other possibilities or those that chose amongst those other possibilities.
See what I mean? If I make any sort of negative judgement about a woman’s sexuality then I’m automatically branded “an asshole.� Did it occur to you that maybe I don’t want to be the third guy this week, right before the fourth? Do I get no say in this? I have to endorse her unsafe behavior, and I have to participate it, or else I’m an asshole.
Nobody is saying you have an obligation to have sex with her. Please feel free to not have sex with people based on whatever arbitrary standards you wish.
But please restrict your judgments of people to actually ethically important matters. Perhaps you are not judging and do recognize this to just be a particular kink of yours. Good on you, then.
Um, no.
I suggested that the problem in the PSA was that the girl was powerless–she had ceded power to males and they were abusing it. I am aware of many instances where women do not cede power to men by presenting themselves as sexual beings and was trying to think of why the case in the PSA was different. The first example that came to mind was porn stars, who actually profit from it. I already admitted that it’s not the best example, but it is a functional example.
Somehow you folks have turned this into “So she’s a dirty slut huh? I bet you have a tiny dick.” I’m glad I could be your effigy for the afternoon, but I was really expecting a higher substance/sarcasm ratio, since it’s pretty obvious that everyone here is way more experienced in exploring these issues than myself.
JackGoff: I think I have my first internet crush…
Petey, don’t get involved with anyone you don’t want to. That is a totally different issue from whether you should actively harass someone who does not behave the way you think she should. Your thoughts are your own. What you DO is what matters to the rest of us.
Peter,
This is not the 101 blog. THIS is the feminism 101 blog, where people will be far more patient with your questions, as it is the purpose of the blog.
That is, if men make lewd comments at a famous porn star when they recognize her in the produce aisle, it means she is getting paid, not that she’s at a social disadvantage.
Unless they’re handing her $10 for each lewd comment they make to her in the grocery store, I don’t see how this qualifies as ‘getting paid.’
The lower back tattoo thing is a pretty classic example of how women are dehumanized routinely. It’s assumed straight up that women get lower back tattoos because they are sluts who are asking for it. On one level or another, this is widely seen as true. Guys assume de facto that the tat is for them, because it has to be for a human being’s pleasure, plus, it’s by her ass, which has only one real purpose.
And they couldn’t be more wrong. I have a lower back tattoo because I’m curvy; it’s one place you can put one where it isn’t subject to the vagaries of minor weight gain. I also have one on my shoulder for the same reason. But these reasons for tattoo placement aren’t even considered. She got it on her back, she is a sex object who has no reason to exist but for male pleasure, ergo it’s for men and they can act accordingly.
Quick note to second, since the concern came up in response to a comment of mine, that feminism is not a zero-sum game: neither I nor Pete nor any other random man has to give up legitimate agency in order for women to gain theirs. (Except if you classify things like being able to rape someone and very likely get away with it as ‘agency’, which I don’t, in the same sense that the law doesn’t regard any crime as protected free speech.)
Guys, can we please give Petey the benefit of the doubt for a moment here?
I know he has said some dumb-arse troll-like things here that are very reminiscent of misogynist trolls in the past, but I tend to think that he is actually trying to learn.
You all here know that I am one of the first to rip a troll to shreds (ah, good times had by all, eh JackGoff, MAJeff?) and if I am wrong about him, I’ll be the first to admit mea culpa.
But I suspect this may be more a case of ignorance rather than malice, and possibly a learning opportunity.
Somehow you folks have turned this into “So she’s a dirty slut huh? I bet you have a tiny dick.� I’m glad I could be your effigy for the afternoon, but I was really expecting a higher substance/sarcasm ratio, since it’s pretty obvious that everyone here is way more experienced in exploring these issues than myself.
First, what Sarah said.
Secondly, this is a blog that has to put up with ludicrous amount of concern trolls. It’s simply impossible to have a productive discussion in that environment while keeping the principle of charity. So think about how you phrase things. If you don’t want to be perceived as slut-shaming, then don’t write things that are objectively slut-shaming. Say what you say you mean.
I suggested that the problem in the PSA was that the girl was powerless–she had ceded power to males and they were abusing it.
I think there is a problem with the underlying assumption here.
I would argue that she incapable of ceding power, because women only have as much power as we are granted by the patriarchy in the first place.
On one level or another, this is widely seen as true.
Which is where we get terms like ‘tramp stamp’.
But these reasons for tattoo placement aren’t even considered. She got it on her back, she is a sex object who has no reason to exist but for male pleasure, ergo it’s for men and they can act accordingly.
Which is the same reason women wear T-shirts with words on them. The words are there to be read, right? So obviously it’s okay that I read them! And they’re not on a flat surface and not particularly easy to make out all the letters, so obviously it’s okay if I stare for two minutes!
Thanks to Pete I can’t stop imagining some female porn actor trying to buy some damned lettuce as a bunch of assholes subject her to their judgement and comments.
The weirdest part is there are people who think there’s nothing wrong with this scenario. Some on this thread, apparently.
First, what Sarah said.
‘Love is watching someone die…’
:P
Thank you, Sarah.
Here is what I actually wrote, for those who don’t feel like scrolling:
In fact, I did present this as a personal preference, and not as an absolute judgment. I think people are reacting less to what I wrote and more to what they think I’m thinking…or perhaps just what they wish I had written, because after lurking here for several weeks it seems as if some people are just spoiling for a fight.
For the record…if there is a record…this is less about “monogamy” and more about “health” and “safety” and “me not contracting an STD.” Since the new year she has had partners in the double digits. I know this because we are close friends and she confides in me. I know that she rarely takes precautions (though she is on the pill). I’m pretty sure that her chances of having an STD are much higher than people who have fewer partners.
Her past does not concern me so much as her present, understand? If I thought her attitude towards sex had changed to become more like mine, then we would have less of an issue. I completely agree with you so far as respecting other people’s choices…though I wonder why my decision to play the field fairly conservatively is frowned upon as “sexist” by some of the other readers.
Just wanted to note again for the record: Sorry guys, I fucked up. Petey was asking why he *has* to sleep with a promiscuous person because I misread his comment. I didn’t understand that this person wanted to sleep with him. Fucking fever. In fact, I didn’t even notice that his handle was ‘Petey,’ not ‘Peter,’ until just now.
Also: Is there no FAQ on FF101 for sexual liberty or am I just bad at navigating the blog?
Petey, you might want to take a look above at how you phrased things; namely that there was something wrong with her because of this, and that was why you didn’t want to take things to another level.
I think I understand what you are trying to say, but you aren’t doing a good job phrasing it.
I believe the phrase is “Think before you post”.
Welcome to Pandagon. I got the lesson myself a few days ago.
You have a friend of yours who wants to date you, but you are concerned about the number of partners she has had.
There are legitimate reasons for being concerned. Perhaps you are concerned with STD’s, or perhaps you are concerned that you will be just another notch on her bedpost. Women can use men for sex just as much as men can use women for sex.
However, the way you phrased it, you come across as an asshat who believes that a woman with a lot of partners is “damaged goods”. Maybe you are that asshat, but for now, I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Besides, if the genders were reversed, and Petey were a girl who was turned off about a guy friend who had a large number of partners and wanted to date her, I think most of us would be more respectful of Petey’s concern.
I’m sorry, but I’m not in a good mood after the video posted at Twisty’s. I’m in a rather vindictive mood at the moment, as a matter of fact. Lo siento.
And I’m fucking furious on behalf of all the poor porn stars trying to buy groceries.
Bad html. The first paragraph in my last post was Sarah’s.
Which reminds me, OT, but I need to pick up a cucumber on the way home …
Aha!
Try this link, Petey. It’s more specific than just sending you over to feminism101.
http://finallyfeminism101.blogspot.com/2007/03/sexual-harassment.html
Again, sorry the misunderstanding.
Amanda: I feel you on the lower back tattoo. When mine peaks out and I’m with a male acquaintance that didn’t know I had a tattoo there, all of a sudden the flirt factor gets turned on full force. Apparently, my lower back tattoo is a come on.
Sarah in Chicago: I tend to think that he is actually trying to learn…I suspect this may be more a case of ignorance rather than malice, and possibly a learning opportunity.
I think it’s a fantastic learning opportunity, starting with the opportunity to learn how to examine one’s own words with an eye toward how they may be perceived by others, why it’s a good idea to do so, and what sorts of reactions are and are not useful when words said in good faith are taken otherwise.
If he’s actually speaking from ignorance and unexamined prejudice rather than from malice, then I hope he’ll have the diligence to wait a bit, re-examine what went on in a cooler frame of mind, and see what he can learn from it. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve managed to figure out plenty.
If he decides that it’s just too dangerous to tread in those waters, and he gives up on trying to learn about feminism or decides that feminists are hateful et cetera, then as far as I’m concerned that’s his fault and his problem, and cue the tiny violin again.
Of course, being male means I have the privilege of making that decision without worrying very much about it. I do have that in mind, and I’m not trying to tell feminists how to be feminists. But I think that someone who’s actually turned entirely off of feminism by one thread of unfriendly responses to ignorant statements is someone who was not going to Get It in any case. That’s the act of a person who is looking for a reason to disregard feminism, not someone who is genuinely interested in learning.
Aaron -
I am not asking you to tone it down, I am just asking others here to maybe not automatically assume he is a troll. I know it’s easy to do, and FSM knows I love how this blog bands together to destroy the trolls that come a-posting here, but just in this case all I am saying is to hold off a tad on the default assumption of troll-hood.
Re- Lower back tattoo placement:
My friend was considering getting a tattoo, we discussed it at Denny’s. Our waiter overheard and said “Don’t get it on your lower back man, if you do every guy you ever have sex with is going to want to do it doggy style and then cum on your tattoo.”
….I’m still not really sure if that was mean, or actually a nice thing to point out, but we were entertained. (She did not get the tattoo.)
Aaron:
As far as I’m concerned, though, and speaking as a man who has in the past, before I gained a clue, felt personally accused and blamed when hearing women say things like ‘all men are potential rapists’ — I’ve got something to say to men who feel that way:
Use those vaunted, cherished testicles of yours to put on some big boy pants and get the fuck over it.
Thanks for saying this. Seriously. You cut through all the BS handwringing and “don’t upset people” socialization, and I really appreciate that.
Petey:
Hey man, I’m not sure where you were when this particular lesson was being taught, but let me recap:
You don’t have to have sex with anyone you don’t want to have sex with. Ever.
Sometimes people are mean. Good heavens, being called names because you don’t want to have sex with someone… That never happens to women… does it?
Of course it does! It happens all the frickin’ time! “Frigid bitch” is one such insult. It’s not right when it happens to men and it’s not right when it happens to women. It’s not right.
The thing is, it’s still not really okay for you to judge other people just because they approach sex differently than you do.
I think what people might be reacting to here is that instead of saying “I don’t want to have sex with her and I feel uncomfortable when she doesn’t take no for an answer.” you’re coming down on the side of patriarchal judgement, saying “She has way too much sex, and the idea of having sex with her disgusts me.”
Just a thought.
Somehow you folks have turned this into “So she’s a dirty slut huh? I bet you have a tiny dick.� I’m glad I could be your effigy for the afternoon, but I was really expecting a higher substance/sarcasm ratio, since it’s pretty obvious that everyone here is way more experienced in exploring these issues than myself.
Look, I know how you feel. I was excoriated for being a loathsome “Male Rights Activist” when I first started posting here, and it was infuriating to be so misunderstood.
Then I realized it was because much of what I had been conditioned by society to regard as legitimate discourse about women and their rights was actually inherently and objectively sexist.
I’d invite you to examine your own remarks in the same light. It may not be that the rest of us are oversensitive, or leaping to conclusions. It may very well be that you’re communicating sexism that seems normal in a sexist society.
[…] But today, Pandagon. Amanda’s got a great (which I say only partly because she quotes me) and à propos post (an ‘apropost’?) about blaming the victim, the popular use of passive voice to sneakily remove male agency from rhetoric about the violence dudes perpetrate, honor killings, and stuff like that. The Ad Council vid she nicks from Lindsay is unbelievable. Also riveting is the discussion, if one is — and I know you are — of a patriarchy-blaming temperament. […]
Also: Is there no FAQ on FF101 for sexual liberty or am I just bad at navigating the blog?
*me adds to to-do list*
Lorelei: I’m glad you found the link to the sexual-harassment stuff, but it’s not quite the same as detailing the sexual liberty concept, is it? I’ll get on it, but if anyone’s got some favourite online links discussing sexual liberty, please head on over to FF101 and rop them into the open suggestion thread.
Thanks.
There’s a couple things I want to say in this discussion:
First off, men not understanding feminist ideological shorthand isn’t the same thing as men trying to obscure male responsibility. Sometimes men (and some women) think feminists are generalizing about all men because it looks like they are at first glance. Other times they’re just using a strawfeminist argument. Recognizing that sometimes there’s difficulties involved in communicating about some topics - especially rape - is important. Sometimes you’re dealing with willful ignorance and bad faith arguments. Sometimes you aren’t. Assuming anytime you run into a certain reaction it’s in bad faith is, I think, a bad idea.
While it may strike many feminists as unproductive, the “no true men would do that” reaction is a way of trying to claim a positive conception of masculinity - and saying that things like rape are clearly outside of it. I don’t really see what’s so wrong with that. Men in general don’t rape women. Rapists rape women. Rapists are almost always men. Men aren’t usually rapists (although a fairly significant minority are).
Again, I want to argue for actually talking explicitly about the realities of rape and harassment rather than merely trying to modify our language when we talk about specific instances of it.
I’ve got no problem with the active voice.
Men rape women.
Cats eat mice.
Americans kill poor brown people.
Muslims blow up innocent civilians.
Women murder their children.
But I do have a problem with “every man is a potential rapist”. Just as I have with “every muslim is a potential terrorist”, and “every woman is a potential murderer of her children”.
I believe Chet did, at 1:43 pm.
Yeah, but labyrus, the “no true men” talking point is, as others have pointed out, a circular argument of the “No True Scotsman” variety. It’s impossible to have an discussion/debate/argument with that point.
It’s particularly bad because it does cut off discussion of how masculinity IS fucked up in our culture, and in its current manifestation contributing to our rape culture. When we bring in the “no true men” point it merely leaves the question open of who is defining what a true man is. By defining out rapists from the category, we are leaving untouched the above question of what is wrong with masculinity as a generalised cultural concept that promotes rape.
I know there are good conception of masculinity out there, but denial of how rape operates as a part of our societal performance of masculinity is not a step towards an affirmation of such.
But, that’s just my opinion mind you
Raging Moderate:
But I do have a problem with “every man is a potential rapist�. Just as I have with “every muslim is a potential terrorist�, and “every woman is a potential murderer of her children�.
Goes back, I think, to what labyrus said a bit earlier:
First off, men not understanding feminist ideological shorthand isn’t the same thing as men trying to obscure male responsibility. Sometimes men (and some women) think feminists are generalizing about all men because it looks like they are at first glance.
As I understand it, ‘all men are potential rapists’ is not meant to be read so it accuses Joe from off the sidewalk of being a rapist, but rather so it says that, absent any other knowledge, you can’t assume that Joe from off the sidewalk is not a rapist; in other words, to say that men don’t get the benefit of the doubt. It makes a fantastic sound-bite denouncement for people who don’t like feminism for one reason or another (including their misunderstanding of it) — verbal dynamite, I agree. But it’s worth checking to make sure you really understand what something means, or is meant to mean, before you go making categorical judgments based on it.
lybrus,
Rapists aren’t some strange breed of animal. They are people who rape. They are usually men. 1 in 25 college-aged men rape (according to Mary Koss’ survey, which has been replicated over the years). And that number is only men around 18-25 who inadvertantly admitted to it in her survey!
I believe Chet did, at 1:43 pm.
I guess I wasn’t clear. I don’t believe the accusation should be sufficient to convict.
But I don’t believe either that the male’s assertion that he didn’t know she hadn’t consented should be sufficient to establish reasonable doubt, as it often is today.
Isn’t the same argument used against muslims? Ya can’t give ‘em the benefit of the doubt?
My mistake then.
Sarah - Good point. I guess I hadn’t really thought about that aspect all that hard.
I guess what I really should have said is that the “no true man” response isn’t neccessarily a way of dodging discussion - and I think there are ways to say that the dominant cultural idea of masculinity is one that excuses rape without making men (who, once again, often aren’t familiar with feminist shorthand) feel like their personal conception of masculinity* is under attack. Again - Rape is an extremely difficult topic for many people to talk about, and I’m mostly just trying to say that the assumption should not always be made that people are speaking in bad faith when they may well simply be having a difficult time communicating about it.
*I don’t mean to imply that any individual man’s personal conception of masculinity is above criticism, here, but reading it over it kind of sounds like that. I think there are lots of good reasons and lots of ways to encourage men to reevaluate how they concieve of masculinity.
No, they don’t. Terrorists do that. It may come as a shock but racism is frowned on here, too.Why then not “rapists rape women”, instead of “men rape women”?
Why then not “rapists rape women�, instead of “men rape women�?
Why not get over the fact that we are going to say that men rape women and spend some energy encouraging men to not rape, period.
We wouldn’t even have to have this conversation ad infinitum if men would simply not rape women in the first damn place.
It isn’t brain surgery, why is this the sticking point? It is only something that exist out there in the ether, this is something that is a real tangible part of our culture, the violent oppression of women.
Sorry — I meant to type, “It isn’t something that exists in the ether, rape is something that is a tangible part of culture, a culture that supports and defends the violent oppression of women.
Damn typing and composing skills.
Very few Muslims are terrorists.
On the other hand, at best, a ’significant minority’ of men are rapists. I’d be willing to go as high as thirty or forty percent. If one in three or one in four women alive now will be raped, how many men does it take to do the raping? Hell, even if it’s one in six. Even if it’s one in ten — that’s still as many women as all the people in America right now, roughly speaking. And I don’t figure it’s anywhere as low as one in ten. How many men does that take, do you think?
(sorry for the double post, but I didn’t see Lorelei’s response to my post)
Lorelei - Yes, I’m aware of those facts. I think it’s kind of beside the point I was trying to make, though.
I will say that I think there is a pretty significant difference between that 1 in 25 (actually, as you pointed out, it’s likely a much higher number) and the majority of men. I don’t think rapists are a “special breed”, but I do think there must be something different about their experiences, their worldview, and their understanding of masculinity. I think it might be wise to explore those differences, since if we as a society had a better understanding of what it is that makes men rapists, we might be able to help lower the number both of men who rape and women who are victims of rape.
There’s no way you can say “Most terrorists are Muslims.” It’s not only valid to say “Most rapists are men”, it’s not saying enough, seeing as how, in general, the percentage of women rapists are negligible compared to the vast amount of male rapists. Then again, you already knew this, and you’re just doing your usual schtick, RM. I’m surprised Amanda still puts up with it.
Using the internet is objectifying herself?!?!? please.
Um, because the rapists are MEN!!
It isn’t brain surgery, why is this the sticking point?
But bluestockingsrs, blaming women for sexual assault and harassment is simply not a problem worth considering when there are mice out there being blamed for being eaten by cats or brown people blamed for being blown up. Oh, wait. That second one is a big problem.
But I’m sure the media uses passive voice for rapes and “honor” killings for, um, poetic reasons. Why just look at today’s headlines: “Whitehouse visited by Queen”…. “Jail Sentence Appealed by Paris Hilton”.
I guess we’re just being paranoid.
so… a “sexual being” when referred to women, is exactly the same as “sexual object”?
you’re misogny is showing….
Wow! Does that PSA piss me off! I am so tired of people telling women to stop participating in life “for our own good.” I am particularly tired of people shaming/scaring teenage girls into self-abnegation. If anyone was REALLY worried about unsafe internet behavior, they’d show some clueless middle-aged man entering his SSN on some dubious “win a big screen TV” website over an unsecured network.
That PSA has nothing to do with real concern, though. It’s about the newest hot-spot in the “culture wars”- How To Reclaim “Our Women” from the Godless Clutches of the Internet. With no physical body to threaten harm to online, women are just getting all uppity and crazy. I mean, gosh, they can actually take part in a community on (almost) equal footing, and that’s giving them ideas. Ideas like, they have a right to be sexual beings (not a sex object, thank you), or they can talk openly about their beliefs and ideas, or they can just anonymously be a part of the conversation without fear of their gender getting in the way. So we’ve got to crush this young, before they start to think they can actually demand to be treated like actual human beings with full agency.
What better way, then, to corral these wild young things, than to bring the old physical harm threat out and retool it for the Internet Age. “Sure, they can’t ‘get’ you while you are online, Sarah, but just wait until go out in public. So, you’d better just quietly walk home, delete the Facebook pics, and oh, while your at it, pull out the Bible and start reading. ‘Cause you’ll need Jesus’ help if you posted anything more revealing than you in full ‘Rebelution’ approved Modesty Wear.”
I dashed off an angry e-mail to the shitmonkeys at AD Counsil. I hope others will do the same. It is time we shifted the blame back where it belongs- on the perpetrators, their apologists, and all of the “culture wariors” who are unabashedly trying to shame women out of public life.
/end of rant.
Wrong. Dworkin said that patriarchal society conflates sex with rape. This was not how she felt about it.
If you’re going to tell lies about feminist theory, at least tell some NEW ones, okay?
Wrong. Dworkin said that patriarchal society conflates sex with rape. This was not how she felt about it.
If you’re going to tell lies about feminist theory, at least tell some NEW ones, okay?
Brilliant, Flewellyn.
Thank you.
This post is pertinent to me, today, as I read this article on New Zealand’s biggest news site.
The story is about a woman who was attacked by two men on a city street at 9p.m. as she walked along.
Police are warning young women against walking alone at night, after a Wanganui teenager was abducted and sexually violated on the weekend.
Detective Constable Felicity Mansell said the young woman was walking along Smithfield Road in the suburb of Castlecliff about 9pm on Saturday night, when two men pulled up alongside her in a car .
The woman was pulled into the car, which took off at high speed to another part of the city where she was sexually attacked, and then dumped.
“It’s a timely reminder to young girls that they shouldn’t be walking on their own,” Ms Mansell said.
“These types of attacks are rare but they do happen and girls who are walking the streets on their own at night-time are making themselves targets.”
So the moral of the story isn’t that rapist arseholes better watch out, because we will find them and punish them, but that young women shouldn’t walk alone, at night, ever. They are “making themselves targets”. Making themselves??!! WTF. So angry.
Re. Dorothy’s assertion here: “the commonality between the PSA and the “honor killingâ€? is that in both cases, random men in society are given the “jobâ€? of punishing young women for making mistakes.”
I think Dorothy is wrong here. One of the horrible things about “honor killing” is that the killers are not random men, but rather are close and extended family that a woman or girl is directly dependent on for survival.
This is slightly OT, and maybe not of any interest to any one beside myself, but upthread a ways Petey (I think it was Petey, apologies if it wasn’t) kept talking about women ceding power to men (the girl in the PSA had ceded power to the men, etc), and perhaps because I’m taking a political theory class right now this got me thinking about power and how, it seems to me, various people have different definitions of what power is.
Petey (and if he comes back he can correct me) seems to conceive of power as something that each individual has and by posting on the Internet the girl has somehow given up some of that power over herself. What that ignores, as some other people have pointed out, is that she didn’t “have” the power to begin with–women have to deal with comments like those made in the PSA whether or not they post information about themselves on the internet.
Somehow I feel like this might connect up to why Petey thought that the porn star was thereby retaining more “power” than the girl… Putting aside all the issues with pornography and whether a porn star has “power” in that situation, that doesn’t mean that when she’s walking through the grocery store she somehow retains that “power,” whatever it might be.
Now that i think about it though, I think this is more a fundamental point of recognizing patriarchy or not rather than something really big. Hmm…oh well, maybe someone will figure out what I was trying to say…carry on.
Should have put quotes in to indicate where my words end and the article begins, oops. From “Police are.. to …targets” is from stuff.co.nz
“‘Porn Star’ was the first thing that came to mind when I was trying to think of a woman who presents herself as a sexual being“
Ever hear of the mystification of commodities? A porn-star, when she steps into her work-place, has sold herself, either to her employer or to her customers. She is no longer a being, but an object. In particular, because of the nature of her work, she is a sex-object.
That she is a sex-object does not mean that she objectifies herself either. I have heard that kind of phrase a few times, and it makes no fucking sense. You cannot objectify yourself, unless it is for you and you alone. You don’t objectify yourself for others, because you are not Other, but Self. The Other is always objectifying you.
You are objectified by the Other, and you should note how the passive construction of that precisely demonstrates my point. Women are objectified by men; men objectify women. Women who sell their sexual availability, either actually or potentially, can only do so by doing what they have to do so men can more easily objectify them, which is really the point when you think about it. You cannot sell yourself as a sexual being, because the Other can only possess/consume you as an object.
Generally speaking, women suffer from the fact that men have objectified them since time immemorial, and that has tended their socialization to make them inclined to do/say/think things that are easily sexualized by men. In that sense, it may be true that women are being authentic by doing whatever, but odds are good that what is culturally available/thinkable will pre-dispose them to sexual objectification by some segment of the male population.
Sarah’s case is typical enough. As Amanda pointed out, there are wholly innocuous reasons for why a woman would have a tattoo in the small of her back. What tends to happen is that men (and women thinking for men) assume the sexual nature of the tattoo (i.e. the woman), and omit all else, namely the woman in her way-the-fuck-more-than-sexual (human) being.
A woman can be a sexual being, but that is not the same and does not have the same implications as presenting herself sexually.
The reason men are shielded from the consequence of their actions has to do with a dualism. I don’t know if this only pertains to western culture, although it is probably schematised best by it. Men are “transcendent” — which means that they are intellectual, detached and objective, and do not have bodies, passions or desires. This is how come they can represent abstract morality just by being men. Women, of course, are teh sex. Actually, as Simone de Beavoir pointed out, they are “immanent”. This means that they have bodies, but they don’t have anything intellectual, objective or impersonal going on. So, of course, in a material world (which this one is) women are the only ones capable of causing anything. They are “immanent” just as a material world is immanent. Men cannot cause anything because they are spirit. Spirit cannot cause anything in a material world, it just stands apart and judges what transpires from its perspective of a holy crucible.
I don’t think most defendants accused of rape assert that they didn’t know the woman didn’t consent as much as they assert that the woman DID consent, but is now lying about it.
She says, “He raped me”
He says, “She’s lying. The sex was consensual, but now she wants to get me in trouble because [insert motive here]”
Hopefully, there is evidence to support one claim or the other, but due to the nature of the crime of date rape/marital rape/acquaintance rape, many times there is not. If not, the accused gets the benefit of the doubt.
Unfortunately, this means that if there isn’t any evidence, the court must assume that the man is not guilty and therefore that the woman is lying.
As for the “court of public opinion”, the accused are generally seen as guilty by the general public.
The phrase “violence against children” is also used extensively. By extending the above logic we would end up with phrases like “male violence against male childrenâ€? and “female violence against female childrenâ€? etc…
It would also raise the question whether “violence against women� should include “female violence against female children�. If not, then there would need to be a general stylistic guideline when to transition from child to woman.
“I don’t think most defendants accused of rape assert that they didn’t know the woman didn’t consent as much as they assert that the woman DID consent, but is now lying about it.”
You may be right about legal cases. I don’t know. But when feminists bring up issues of consent, a common mocking line of argument is, “But how is he supposed to KNOW??? Asking breaks the mood! What do you want, a CONTRACT?!”
“Unfortunately, this means that if there isn’t any evidence, the court must assume that the man is not guilty and therefore that the woman is lying.”
I understand your point, but if there really is no evidence other than sheer testimony, on what basis is the decision made to let the guy go? On what basis are we to distinguish “innocent ’til proven guilty” from male privilege?
Then it’s up to the jurors to decide who they believe. The only thing they will answer to is their own conscience.
Which would be worse; the incarceration of an innocent or a crime unpunished? The American justice system chose the incarceration of an innocent.
Speaking of “justice systems� reminds me of a great quote: “This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.� ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
“But this rule is thrown out the window when describing crimes acted upon the bodies of women.”
Who throws the rule about passive voice out the window? Journalists throw the rule against passive voice out the window when describing crimes men commit against women.
I really did skim the comments, but I only saw one gender-reversal on the PSA, and it seemed convoluted — s/he added a baby to the mix. One needn’t do anything but switch the genders of the actors. A teenage boy posts a tattoo on his chest on the Internet. The next day, all kinds of women leer at him. Guess who the bad guys are in that scenario? Of course, as in the real PSA, the bad guys are females.
Good God. I leave for a few hours and this thing has taken off.
Folks, I appreciate your second take on my posts. I want to make two things clear:
First, the fact is, feminist philosophy is not an area I have ever really looked into. I have always thought that the common counter-arguments were emotional and un-intellectual but as an analytical exercise I never looked into this. As a man with a mother and a sister and, hopefully, someday daughters, this voluntary blindness is not something I wish to continue.
Second, I have a sort of overanalytical mindset that gets me into all kinds of trouble. So there are times when I am going to make some comment, the result of several iterations of thought on a topic, and something that is perfectly clear to me is going to require a significant amount of unpacking. I ask that you refrain from jumping into my ass when this happens–but by all means, call me on it when I say something stupid. I’ll listen.
Thanks again, and Sarah, I appreciate the vote of confidence. For what I owe you for your forbearance, I hope that a round bought at Hopleaf some night will suffice as payment, if I’m ever back home again.
Which would be worse; the incarceration of an innocent or a crime unpunished? The American justice system chose the incarceration of an innocent.
False dichotomy, though. At this point we’re letting a lot of guilty go free because we refuse to take steps that would imprison them without any danger of incarcerating the guilty.
Really, though, the way you protray rape trials isn’t anything like the trials I’m familiar with. Usually it’s more like “no, she didn’t give her express consent. But look how she was dressed! And she was drunk! I just assumed she wanted it!”
In that case? Why on Earth does that guy’s ignorance and failure to exercise due diligence introduce any reasonable doubt that he’s a rapist?
If your friend says, “I got in a car accident yesterday,” the general response is, “Are you OK?” That is, your friend is believed. No one says, “What EVER. I need to see your car before I believe you got in an accident.” Or, “Dude, you did that on purpose.” Yet there are plenty of high-profile stories of people faking auto accidents for insurance fraud purposes.
If someone says her house caught on fire, the general response is one of concern: “Did everyone get out OK? Was anyone injured?” In other words, the response is NOT, “Yeah, that’s a likely story. I’ll need to see your burnt-down house first.” Or, “How do I know you didn’t start that fire yourself?” Yet there are many high-profile cases of people who deliberately set fire to their houses for insurance fraud purposes.
But then we get into crimes where the victim is a woman, the attacker is a man, and all of a sudden, the bitch is LYIN’. I am speaking strictly of the court of public opinion, of course, and not at all addressing the actual legal system.
My point is, why the fuck shouldn’t women be believed in the court of public opinion? Cuz here’s a clue: they aren’t. See: Duke. See: the nightly news. See: this thread.
We are? What steps are we refusing to take?
When you say “Really, though, the way you protray rape trials…” I’m assuming that you must be speaking of another poster as I haven’t given any examples of any trials.
“Didn’t get raped or it doesn’t matter because you’re not really against it? No matter, off-topic, not interested in a real discussion, openly enjoys harassing women for the high crime of existing, so banned.”
There’s more than 57 reasons to admire this blog but its unapologetic pest control policy is one of my favorite reasons.
More generally, I would suggest that bloggers and others should consider describing the passive voice deployed as a cover for injustice and irresponsibility as the “Nuremberg voice” or the “Nuremberg accent” in eternal contempt of the men who used that voice to provide a fig leaf to their planning, commission and (vain) cover-up attempts of mass murder.
Who harasses? Harassers. Who rapes? Rapists. Harassers and rapists are men, in essentially the same sense that prostate cancer patients are men. Men sometimes get prostate cancer, though most don’t. Men sometimes commit rape, even if the majority don’t. Rape “doesn’t happen” or “get committed.” Thunderstorms happen. Rapists rape, commit rape, plot rape, rationalize rape, cover rape up and evade the responsibility for rape. If even .1 percent of rapists were women, it might be unfair to say “A male committed a rape today in West Smallville” or “Police are attempting to locate the man who raped.” But it’s stone-ass fair, essentially as fair as it is to assume that Hank the prostate cancer patient is a man.
Hi. I’ve been lurking here for a while, and I’m disinclined to post, mostly because I realize my own ignorance regarding a lot of feminist theory. Still, I’ve been reading up, here and on Twisty’s blog, and this quote kind of bothered me:
Raging Moderate Said:
“Isn’t the same argument used against muslims? Ya can’t give ‘em the benefit of the doubt?”
I’m pretty sure that there’s a serious disanalogy between the treatment of men, a privileged group, and Muslims, who are (at least in American society) a minority. The claim that men are not to be accorded unquestioned trust (i.e., “every man is a potential rapist,” if I’ve understood what that means correctly) cannot be equivocated with the view that every follower of Islam is a potential terrorist. The denial of unquestioning trust in men seems to me to be a reaction against the privileged status of men in society, especially in the non-prosecution of rape and the oppression of women, while the automatic suspicion of Muslims is yet another method of oppression a group already accorded a minority of rights. That is to say, there doesn’t seem to be any good way to argue against the “potential rapist” status of men by citing the unethical treatment of Muslims, given the power differential between the two groups. If I’m wrong on this, please let me know. I’m trying to draw off of Andrea Rubenstein’s “Check my what?”, found at http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-03-08_146, specifically,
“The foundation of this argument — that we’re all just people and so -isms are -isms, no matter which group they’re targeted at — is one I sympathize with. Would that we lived in such a world! But the world is more complex than that. The same power dynamics that create privilege have created a hierarchy of prejudice so that discrimination against a privileged group is not the same as discrimination against a minority group. This is because discrimination against a minority group is backed up with institutionalized power, whereas discrimination against a privileged group is often a singular act and therefore easier to avoid. I don’t think anyone would dispute the fact that discrimination sucks, but glossing over the inequity of the two discriminations helps keep the inequity in play.”
Thanks for listening, and I’ll go back to lurking now. I figure I’ve got at least 2 more months of lurking and at least 4 books to read before I’m capable of joining any reasonable discourse.
–Mark
I’m assuming that you must be speaking of another poster as I haven’t given any examples of any trials.
Sorry, I was thinking of Wayward.
I understand your point, but if there really is no evidence other than sheer testimony
Testimony is evidence. Alone, it’s rarely enough to amount to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But it is evidence, and the notion that a woman’s testimony is “not evidence” suggests something rather unflattering about the person making that argument.
But I do have a problem with “every man is a potential rapist�.
To make it a little clearer for you, “Women are better off assuming that every man is a potential rapist unless and until she knows him very well indeed, because if a woman incorrectly assumes a man is not a potential rapist, she is risking both rape and being blamed for that rape.”
Oh, and Petey? On the ‘porn star’ thing, you’re full of it. The porn actress getting harassed while she’s buying produce is not “getting paid for it”; there is no Assholes Talk To You At Safeway clause in her contract. Those men, speaking from experience as a sex worker, simply believe that a woman who makes herself appear openly sexual for any reason, at any time, is fair game.
If even .1 percent of rapists were women, it might be unfair to say “A male committed a rape today in West Smallville� or “Police are attempting to locate the man who raped.� But it’s stone-ass fair, essentially as fair as it is to assume that Hank the prostate cancer patient is a man.
And (at one time in the US) the vast majority of AIDS cases were homosexuals. Do you see anything slightly wrong in comments like “A homosexual with AIDS died today” or “Health authorities are attempting to locate the homosexual suspected of spreading AIDS in Manhatten…”?
Clue: even at that time when most AIDS cases were homosexual, most homosexuals did not have AIDS.
Why not say “the rapist” instead of “the man”?
Why not say “the rapist� instead of “the man�?
I think you missed the point of active voice? If a woman raped a man, I expect the headline to read, ‘Woman rapes man in her apartment’ or whatever. If a man rapes a woman, I expect the inverse.
Phoencian, interesting that you analogize having a disease to a violent, criminal act. In your example, the accurate phrasing would be “the HIV virus infected another person and caused them to develop AIDS today”.
The point, yet again, is that the phrasing centers the discussion of rape around the victim and singles out the victim’s gender. Yet everyone gets up in arms at the idea of centering it around the perpetrator and singling out the perpetrator’s gender.
Petey, you come off as more and more condescending with every comment, I think. We are not required to educate you. How about you educate YOURSELF? Pick up some Pollit, Brownmiller, hooks, Ehrenreich, etc. Listen more extensively to feminists and resist the urge to try and prove us wrong about things that you simply HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED. Take a women’s studies course, if this is still an option.
If people want to volunteer to educate you, then fine. But we’re not here, nor are we required, to make this ‘easy’ and ‘convienant’ for you. If you have a true interest in feminism, do some work.
Petey, you come off as more and more condescending with every comment, I think. We are not required to educate you. How about you educate YOURSELF? Pick up some Pollit, Brownmiller, hooks, Ehrenreich, etc. Listen more extensively to feminists and resist the urge to try and prove us wrong about things that you simply HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED. Take a women’s studies course, if this is still an option.
If people want to volunteer to educate you, then fine. But we’re not here, nor are we required, to make this ‘easy’ and ‘convienant’ for you. If you have a true interest in feminism, do some work.
Ugh, can someone baleet my accidental double-comment? >:|
I have to agree with labyrus, tying masculinity together with respecting women can only be a good thing. I think that masculinity is long overdue for a complete retooling, and at the fore front should be “Real men respect others” and “Real Men never abuse power”
Then how about “the HIV virus infected another homosexual and caused them to develop AIDS today”?
Would you have found that to be an acceptable comment in the early days of the AIDS outbreak?
You mean, would it have been acceptable to emphasize the victim’s characteristics and play down any agency? We’re talking about a disease, not a sentient being, in PiOTR’s rather poor analogy, after all.
Thank you, Mythago. The other falsehood about the issue of reporting is that when we call someone out for a rape, we are doing justice by exposing that person’s predatory, vile acts against the dignity of another human being to a community that might, perhaps, bring that bad actor to justice, etc. Speaking ill of a poor dead patient’s non-predatory personal life and loves has nothing in common with restraining and deterring raists and exacting retribution against them.
But I don’t have a fundamental problem with calling a rapist by the term “rapist.” Far better than indulging the Nuremberg voice.
Well, men sometimes use the passive voice when describing violence against men, also - when it suits them. For example, I read and article about how many women are killed (I mean, how often men kill women) in Guatemala. Someone spat back, that’s nothing; ten times as many MEN are killed there. Passive voice is used to imply that maybe women are killing off men, too, though most feminists know otherwise.
Sorry for the snark, but could someone who speaks pomo translate this for us? I’m not sure that this explains anything, and if it does, I’m not sure how the explanation is useful.
Phoencian, interesting that you analogize having a disease to a violent, criminal act.
Mmm - I believe I used the term “spreading AIDS” in the second example, an active action rather than a condition. My point was that, while trying to avoid the “most men are not rapists” whine, um, most men are not rapists. The use of “a man raped a woman” rather than “a rapist raped a woman” can be fairly compared to “a homosexual spread AIDS”.
The point, yet again, is that the phrasing centers the discussion of rape around the victim and singles out the victim’s gender. Yet everyone gets up in arms at the idea of centering it around the perpetrator and singling out the perpetrator’s gender.
True enough. How about referring to “the victim” at the same time you refer to “the rapist”? Indeed, this may be better: while it is highly unusual for a rapist to be a woman, a victim can be more readily be a man or a child.
It doesn’t fit in with the deliberate attention being focused on the gendered nature of the crime - men rape women. But there’s a great danger in crossing the line between highlighting a real social condition and alienating through overbroad accusation.
I mean alienating people through overbroad accusation.
I mean alienating men through overbroad accusation.
I mean alienating non-rapist men through overborad accusation.
I mean YOU alienating non-rapist men through YOUR overbroad accusation.
“Testimony is evidence. Alone, it’s rarely enough to amount to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But it is evidence, and the notion that a woman’s testimony is “not evidenceâ€? suggests something rather unflattering about the person making that argument.”
You’re right. It’s a good thing, for me, that you’re not possibly talking about me, because per your own comment you understand precisely that I was not saying that testimony is not evidence, but that in fact it is, though it isn’t often, as you said, “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Sheer testimony in this case counts for both sides, which means that it is literally word-against-word, and that raises some really hairy questions about the application of the legal apparatus.
Back to the original post, I think it’s downright irresponsible that the PSA didn’t give any information on how to report harassment, or even saying, “tell someone you trust.” They framed it so that Sarah is not only responsible for the situation, but is also alone, isolated, and frightened, with no recourse. There isn’t even the implication that stalking and harassment are illegal.
I have a friend who was slipped and fell while she was climbing a tree a couple of years ago. She ended up with a HUGE gash going literally all the way across her back. It was about a foot long. So, in that manner where people just love to show off their gruesome cuts and bruises, she took a couple of pictures of her back and put them online for those of us who were far away to see it in person. (I was away at school at the time.) In the picture, you could see her tattoo, and yes, even a glimpse of the waistband on her underwear, even though it was clearly not a sexual picture. So who’s to say why any young girl would put a picture of herself online?
Of course, it doesn’t really matter. No one has the right to make creepy comments to women or girls like their bodies are forums for public comment. I’m just making a point.
Sorry for the snark, but could someone who speaks pomo translate this for us? I’m not sure that this explains anything, and if it does, I’m not sure how the explanation is useful.
People in America and Europe, and probably outside it but I wouldn’t know, have the following understanding of the sexes, mainly unconsciously, but one that can be clearly seen in the metaphors they use and so on:
Men are basically minds and women are basically bodies. Men are Rational, not being governed by their emotions, and we can dissassociate them from their bodies, both because we don’t treat them constantly as sex objects and because they aren’t involved in the physical production of human bodies and don’t have, for instance, menstrual cycles. Women are emotional rather than rational, and can’t be disassociated from their bodies because their major worth in life is being sex objects, and because they’re tied down into the physical world by pregnancy and menstruation.
Men have legitimate sexual desires and women do not, but male lust isn’t an example of irrationality. Rather, it’s exactly analogous to the broader way that carnal thoughts struggle against the will from Augustine onward: the body (women) pull the spirit (men) down to its (their) evil level.
In reproduction, men produce human bodies, whereas men produce human persons. The sperm fertilizes the egg. She has a bun in the oven. The anthropomorphization of sperm in cartoons. In medieval medical science spermatazoa were thought to be tiny persons.
The penis resides within the vagina, and the fetus inside the uterus, in the same way that the spirit “inhabits” matter in our general metaphorical understanding. Think of wine inside a chalice - substance and vessel. This metaphor branches out to contextualize women as area more generally. Zoological metaphors abound: males defend their territory.
In a properly-ordered person, spirit directs body and form follows function.
I’m not sure that this explains anything, and if it does, I’m not sure how the explanation is useful.
yes, it probably isn’t useful to you, so don’t bother. However Simone de Beauvoir is not a postmodernist, which is probably not useful to know, either.
Ha ha ha that was funny! I am glad to see you still have your sense of humor while we dispute with one another on this topic.
pdx student, you keep using the phrase “sheer testimony”. What does that mean?
I’m also puzzled as to what ‘really hairy questions’ you think are raised. The prosecution has the burden of proving each element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Testimony is one kind of evidence that the finder of fact uses.
I mean YOU alienating non-rapist men through YOUR overbroad accusation.
Whereas alienating women is perfectly reasonable, and the primary concern when discussing the reality of rape is making sure that men don’t get their fee-fees hurt. Unless somebody is really saying “A man who, like virtually all men, was a rapist, sexually assaulted a woman today at 3 a.m.,” then what’s your beef?
Seriously: I really don’t see the problem with saying ” A man raped a woman today on the hike and bike trail”; I don’t think it actually impugns ANY non-rapist man. If I read “A woman beat her toddler to death in North Austin” I wouldn’t feel painted with the same brush or anything.
An enlightening thing I read (AManda? Twisty? Melissa?) somewhere once said, “Hey, why are Y*O*U identifying with the rapist? If you don’t rape, don’t identify with men who DO.”
Been lurking here for a while… finally going to post…
I think the legal argument about “she said/he said” often not reaching the burden of proof misses the point. Really, the point is how we define the crime. Rape is “the having of sex without consent”, and in some jurisdictions (the UK until recently, not sure about various states in the USA) honest belief in consent was a defence. Uh-huh. Imagine how difficult it was for the prosecution to disprove that one…
BUT even where “honest belief in consent” is not technically a defence, it is the idea of this which often underlies the arguments - as someone said above (sorry, can’t find it quickly now), “she was walking down the street alone at 2 am / she was wearing a short skirt / she was drunk / she was kissing me — and therefore she wanted it”.
Anyway, that’s a little off my point. My point is that lack of consent is currently an element of the crime, so it’s something the prosecution needs to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. So when you talk about defendants using consent as a defence, that’s not really true - it’s more that they’re putting the prosecution to proof on an element of the crime.
What if the crime was defined as “having sex without obtaining consent“?
Then the litany of “look what she was doing/wearing/saying” would clearly be irrelevant: all that would be relevant would be “did she actually say ‘yes’?”
For the “romantics” out there, I’ve got two things to say: (1) if it breaks the mood to ASK, you’re not doing it right. I don’t think I’ve ever had sex without both of us asking something like “is this what you want right now?” at the very least. (2) You could include a defence of constructive consent, which would have to be very pertinent to the situation (eg “she took my penis and placed it in her vagina” might possibly cut it).
But really. The way rape has been defined in our society (sorry, maybe I should say “the way we have defined rape” or “the way judges and legislators have defined rape”
) says a lot about the sex lives of those who defined it. I feel rather sorry for them…
@Myth,
I think his beef is that the “like virtually all men’ part is some what implied.
But unfortunately, that’s something we have to deal with so long as rape is a common crime.
Seriously: I really don’t see the problem with saying � A man raped a woman today on the hike and bike trail�; I don’t think it actually impugns ANY non-rapist man.
And for some reason, we’ve always got the random raging moderate who insists that we discriminated and hated on all men by saying this. And then they wish to be respected as rational people. Again, I’m actually surprised that Amanda allows this subset of random asshat to post here.
Ha ha ha that was funny! I am glad to see you still have your sense of humor while we dispute with one another on this topic.
I am seriously depressed at the moment for one reason or another. If I didn’t retain a sense of humour, or at least proportion, I’d either be turning into ScaryStalkyMan (which is so not where I want to be), or considering cutting my wrists. And what would you do without PiaToR to yell at?
Whereas alienating women is perfectly reasonable, and the primary concern when discussing the reality of rape is making sure that men don’t get their fee-fees hurt.
Actually, no, I’m not attempting to alienate women.
The problem isn’t males raping. The problem is some males raping and general male complicity in a culture that condones, accepts or encourages rape. And harassment, or denying agency to females, or all the rest.
The only thing that’s going to get us through (and things are getting better, slowly) is a common sense of humanity. If I’m a guy that sees women as “alien creatures that give me a stiffie) it’s going to be a lot harder to get it through my thick skull that I might share some of the responsibility for that complicity than if I see women as my sisters, recognising the commonality between us.
So what do you do when you’re in general sympathy with a cause, you agree with about 60% of what its advocates are saying, you think 20% is debatable, and the last 20% strikes you as out and out loony?
PIATOR:
Um. A few things.
I agree with your second and third sentences, but they essentially support the proposition that the problem is males raping.
We get that not all men rape!
And most importantly:
The problem sure as hell isn’t that some dumb women go around getting raped!
If the use of active language (”Man rapes woman”) somehow blames all men (and I don’t for a minute believe or agree that it does - if you think it does, um, projection, much?), the use of passive language (”Woman gets raped”) shifts that blame onto women.
Where (I feel the need to repeat myself) it damn well shouldn’t be!
If I’ve got to pick between blaming men and blaming women for the amount of rape that happens, gee, I think I’ll pick blaming men! Funny that! Might it be because - gasp! - men rape women? Just occasionally - not all the time, not every man, you might not (although I guess she’d have to know your magic safeword to be safe) - but you know what? Men rape women!
So really, you don’t have an argument.
And by the way, I don’t care how depressed you are, you don’t get to be ScaryStalkyBoy, even if you lose your sense of humour. Yes, I flicked through to your blog post, EVEN THOUGH I figured you were probably just trolling for traffic, and you know what? No woman is ever yours. That woman, even if you’d been together, wouldn’t have been yours. You don’t get to own women. There are laws against it. Got it?
Jesus, Raging Reactionary comments:
But I do have a problem with “every man is a potential rapist�. Just as I have with “every muslim is a potential terrorist�, and “every woman is a potential murderer of her children�.
I’m sure that makes perfect sense to your drunk buddies at the bar.
Isn’t it amusing that men are presumed to be the rational ones, yet this guy pulls out these illogical comparisons. They’ve been remarked upon, but I’ll add my take on them.
I’ve taught my 13-year-old daughter that cats eat mice. I see no point in teaching her that every woman is a potential murderer of her children - the fraction of a percent is so tiny because only psychotic mothers could murder their children. A slightly larger percentage of men murder their own. Something about childbirth and holding the baby for the first time…
I’d never tell her every muslim is a potential terrorist because that is racist (religionist?), ignores people like Timothy McVeigh and insults our muslim friends who are wonderful people.
Does RM (RR) think I should refrain from teaching her that every man is a potential rapist? Look at the numbers, man - the percentages. Look at all the crap in the media. I was raped, partly because I was taught to trust everyone, that only kids were mean… once I go off to college everyone will be nice. I was completely ignorant about EZ-lay (never heard of it until many years later.) Oh, here I go again, blaming the victim. Sorry, but it’s hard to undo the brainwashing. You bet I’m going to teach her.
And I don’t worry about, “I mean YOU alienating non-rapist men through YOUR overbroad accusation.”
Enlightened men, some of whom post here, will understand and not be offended. Their feelings are infinitely more valueable that those of creeps who keep sticking up for their rapist buddies.
As far as the he says/she says debate goes, our society encourages men to brag about their sexual exploits, and still teaches women to be ashamed of theirs. She takes a huge risk in making that accusation.
Kathy McCarty:
Anorak’s post from a fair way upthread made me laugh in a mirthless bitter way. Quite aside from the sick “making themselves targets” crap, I can’t quite believe that the New Zealand police are attempting to advise women on avoiding rape. That’s rich coming from them.
What I find so interesting about the first topic (Lauredhel’s post on the use of passive in language), is that this is how I have ALWAYS been taught to speak in conflict resolution.
In junior high, high school, and college, instructors told us that the only way to not put someone on the defensive and maybe(!) bring them around to recognizing what they have done wrong, is to never explicitly link them with their actions, rather always state how their action made you feel.
We are encouraged not to say: You hurt my feelings when you called me a %$@$. Instead we are encouraged to say: My feelings were hurt when I was called a %$@$.
This sort of communication, though, relies on the person who performed the behavior to a) recognize that they are the person I am talking about, b) care about my feelings, and c) understand the unstated plea that I either want them to apologize, not do that any more, or both. That requires a lot on the part of the person who misbehaved, which may be too much to ask when they were unable to prevent themselves from misbehaving in the first place.
Therefore, I think that it is entirely reasonable to say: “Hey, don’t call me a %$@$ again” (in keeping with this example). Continuing with that idea, I fail to see the impropriety of saying, “Men, stop raping people.” Because almost all rapists are men, yet we seem to be able to find every conceivable way (in language, media, and beyond) to blame the rape survivor for the rape.
I agree that equality between the sexes is never going to be achieved without men working with women to make it happen, but sometimes I get so bloody sick and tired of having to hold certain men’s hand! You’re adults! Don’t rape. Don’t physically, sexually, verbally harass me. Stop the men you know, if they do these things. Etc, Etc.
The majority of adults know the difference between right and wrong (or at least have an inkling), and for those who don’t, there are laws out there to guide you. Don’t accuse me of alienating you because I refuse to continue to wipe your ass or hold the tissue up to your nose and ask you to blow because you are too incompetent, immature, intellectually deficient, or all of the above to do it yourself. If I alienate you by stating the fact “Almost all rapists are men. The men who rape need to stop raping people,” then I’m not quite sure what sort of help you would have been to me in the first place!
“Then don’t identify with them. It’s not about you! You stand to pee, they stand to pee, beyond that, what’s the commonality?�
Exactly.
Except I take evidence about the kinds of things men–many men, not just one or two documented cases in known history, but thousands or millions who in turn are merely a sampling of all the misogynistic or just plain selfish stuff happening out there, a sampling that happened to get caught at it or bragging about it–as warnings of things that I might never otherwise guess I’m capable of, until the moment comes up. I’m sure a lot of the most vile stuff is done by guys who crossed the line into clearly hateful territory long ago, but I’m equally sure some cases of really terrible things men have done were done by “nice guys” who were just going along with attitudes and practices they assumed couldn’t be too bad because everyone says normal guys do this kind of thing–then when they’ve done it, they don’t want to be the only suckers to take the rap for what more ruthless guys generally get away with. This is how moral slippery slopes work, and this is how vicious, dangerous movements recruit and sustain themselves.
So just because I know I am a decent, considerate, well-intentioned person, and even one who has deliberately turned away from sexism and educated myself about how it worked, doesn’t automatically mean I’m guaranteed to do no wrong, and I take it as my responsibility to listen to the horror stories as cautionary tales.
OTOH, a whole lot of the protesting I’m hearing about not tarring all men with one brush sounds remarkably like people who are proclaiming that the shoe we name misogyny fits them uncannily well, even if they don’t like the brand name. This, that, or the other restriction can’t be reasonable because it comes scarily close to restricting things they like; this that or the other behavior can’t be so bad because they do it, and that proves it can’t be that bad, right?
Someday that isn’t a last day of my workweek close to the end of the shift when I’m way behind on my workload I’m going to have to bite the bullet and blog about how I almost spent the night I graduated from high school. As it was, it just made me feel kind of sick. I wonder now, if I poke that 20+ year dead and rotting story with a stick, will it become plain that it was worse than I thought at the time.
Mark Foxwell: Except I take evidence about the kinds of things men [often do] as warnings of things that I might never otherwise guess I’m capable of, until the moment comes up.
Exactly. That’s a point I wish I’d made: I think some of the defensiveness a lot of men have when they hear this stuff, a lot of the ‘But I’d never do that!’ response (which sometimes is expressed as ‘no true man’, &c.) — I think some of that comes from the fact that a lot of men hear this stuff and aren’t sure they are not capable of it, and they don’t know how to deal with that. And I can’t blame anyone for reacting that way initially; if I hadn’t had any previous experience in questioning myself on the subject of what I might or might not be capable of, it probably would’ve taken me the same way, too.
OTOH, a whole lot of the protesting I’m hearing about not tarring all men with one brush sounds remarkably like people who are proclaiming that the shoe we name misogyny fits them uncannily well, even if they don’t like the brand name.
Again: exactly. People who’ve got no excuse for ignorance, such as Raging Whatsisname, people who’ve had more than enough exposure to feminism to understand, should they so desire, what they’re dealing with, and who continue to rabbit on about how it’s not all men, it’s not all men, OMG how dare you hint at the implication that it might be all men — we know it’s not, and you know we know it’s not, so why keep going on about it?
And I don’t consider ‘you might alienate men with it’ sufficient excuse. Men alienate themselves, or not. And perhaps the Raging Whatsisname could explain to me how it’s better to attract men to a cause with a sugar-coated lie they’ll easily see through, than to piss them right the hell off by telling them the truth as honestly and straightforwardly as possible. What good’s a lie going to do? Either it’s just to get them in the door, in which case they’ll be inside before they get pissed off and that much more likely to run for the hills when it happens, or the lie’ll get kept up for as long as it can, in which case it’s just putting off the inevitable and turning feminism into just one more way to stroke men’s engorged egos. Does that sound like a great plan to you?
What I really love is the way they go hunting for some extreme view or other held by this or that more or less famous or obscure feminist, perhaps one lost in the mists of time, perhaps a view they have to extract by carefully framing some out of context or hyperbolic hypothetical, and then jump up and down on it saying, “Lookit, lookit, this proves that all feminists are into castration, male extermination, or speaking rudely about men, so there!”
It’s kind of educational, about some of the farther shores of thought. I certainly hadn’t given Mary Daly a moment’s consideration for something like two decades until earlier this week; I imagine that’s the way she’d like it too.
But clearly has nothing to do with what attracts me to feminists and feminism, or why I think feminism is important, or what real feminists tend to talk about in the public forum all day and night, or where the specific policies and movements these feminists I meet every day and try to belong among would reasonably lead.
And the strongest arguments for giving the really wild, extreme feminist rants serious consideration after all are these defensive guys who keep popping out of the woodwork trying to make every advance of women’s rights, however reasonable and straightford on the face of it, contingent on their getting their agenda endorsed and guaranteed. It’s stuff like that that makes me wonder if indeed the long-term outcome might not be the mass extermination of 90 percent of all men, in fratricidal macho pissing contests, and whether the raddled and riddled carcass of our poor battered planet might not be better for it in the long run.
Generally speaking, if it weren’t for these bozos, I’d be pretty optimistic that we will all pull through these hard times more or less intact and together. Considering how close their arguments are to those put out by people with real power, though, it looks grim.
Matthias and/or Jennifer Cascadia-> So is this is sort of a boiling-down to the logical extension of gender norms in order to analyze them?
Because I think I see those threads a lot in the way patriarchists look at gender, but I also don’t think most people who enforce gender norms would actually agree with the overall analysis. Is the idea that this is sort of the unspoken/unconcious ideology of patriarchy? If it is, how is a set of ideas that’s not conciously held by most people so widespread?
I’m really not very well-read when it comes to feminist theory (except in sociology and history), so I’m just trying to make sense of this.
The whole idea of examining the metaphors and way people talk about something really reminds me of Said on “the other” - but Said also has this whole framework for understanding how those ideas are transmitted (through bureaucratic institutions) and how they inform real oppression.
Lab:
My guess is that people weren’t consciously aware of this sort of thing until it was formalized - back when it was just a gleam in it’s Daddy’s eye, one might say - and then only people who consciously rejected it were really aware of it. (Not that conscious rejection frees you from its influence.)
It’s probably best understood as a broad sort of lens through which people contextualize a lot of objective facts, like that women menstruate and the penis is interior to the vagina in intercourse and so on, and also all the weird anxieties of Paul and Augustine about the spirit versus the flesh, into a very specific sexist framework.
There’s certainly the competing discourse within the patriarchy that men are horrible brutes and that women need to control them so that they go and accomplish the great things that only men can do, with “control” meaning “be controlled by.”
We could imagine a matriarchial society in which women Agency or Civilization or something, and men are the unrefined matter that civilization uses towards its purposes. And they’d probably describe sex as consumption rather than penetration, and think of sperm as like, the clay that a potter uses instead of the lightning striking down into the ocean and creating life. And they’d probably still send lower-class males to do most of they dying in their wars, but the context would be that the men are like an ore or something that the female generals and scientists beat down into weapons for them to fight with, so that they women get all the credit as warriors. And pregnancy would begin with menstruation and there might be a little funerary ritual around the period, because those were persons. And they probably wouldn’t even be aware of it all as connected in an overall paradigm, because how else would you understand it?
I don’t know if that helps. Jennifer has presumably actually read SDB, whereas I’ve just become familiar with the critique after reading feminist blogs for a few years and didn’t even know who first formalized it, so she could probably explain it better.
If the use of active language (�Man rapes woman�) somehow blames all men (and I don’t for a minute believe or agree that it does - if you think it does, um, projection, much?), the use of passive language (�Woman gets raped�) shifts that blame onto women.
Which part of “the rapist raped the victim” did you have problems reading?
The problem with “the rapist raped the victim” is that’s just stylistically atrocious.
Here’s why I dislike painting all men as responsible for rape, even if they never have raped a woman, never would rape a woman, and work actively against violence against women:
Where I live, many people view Americans as dangerous greedy racists, and those too cowardly to stop them.
You may not have killed any Iraqi children Aaron, but it’s your fault they’re dying.
You may not have denied any women acces to abortion mythago, but it’s your fault they’re being denied.
You may not have bashed any gays Jack Goff, but it’s your fault they’re being bashed.
You may not have exploited any illegal immigrants ginmar, but it’s your fault they’re being exploited.
I reject these. I don’t believe all Americans are responsible for the bad things done by some Americans, just as I don’t believe that all men are responsible for the actions of rapists, or that all muslims are responsible for the actions of muslim terrorists.
If I’m a guy that sees women as “alien creatures that give me a stiffie) it’s going to be a lot harder to get it through my thick skull that I might share some of the responsibility for that complicity than if I see women as my sisters, recognising the commonality between us.
Then until you get past the “jubbly aliens” thing, you’re never going to get anything else through your thick skull. It’s like bailing water without plugging the hole in the bottom of the boat, or trying to run a footrace with cement shoes. Why care about responsibility for bad behavior towards non-humans or inferiors?
I think his beef is that the “like virtually all men’ part is some what implied.
Time for the lecture on the difference between ‘imply’ and ‘infer’.
Probably - but it does concentrate the issue on the fact that the guy raped someone rather than that he has a penis.
Speaking of which:
Jo Tamar: If the use of active language (�Man rapes woman�) somehow blames all men (and I don’t for a minute believe or agree that it does - if you think it does, um, projection, much?
I nearly missed that - what the fuck?
Alright, Jo - you win. I give up on this thread. I get irritated by being lumped in with rapists (as opposed, possibly, to complicity with the culture enabling it) therefore I must be a rapist as you’re insinuating. You’ve got me dead to rights.
Well done.
Very fucking convincing.
I don’t believe all Americans are responsible for the bad things done by some Americans, just as I don’t believe that all men are responsible for the actions of rapists, or that all muslims are responsible for the actions of muslim terrorists.
Moderate: the difference is that a member of a democratic polity does indeed share some of the responsibility for the actions of that polity. It’s a basic principle of democracy. Addressing that responsibility can be as simple as speaking out against said actions, of course, but in that the government must be accountable to the people, the people must be responsible for holding the government accountable.
Americans are getting there, but so, so bloody late.
Matthias: The problem with “the rapist raped the victim� is that’s just stylistically atrocious.
Probably - but it does concentrate the issue on the fact that the guy raped someone rather than that he has a penis.
Speaking of which:
Jo Tamar: If the use of active language (�Man rapes woman�) somehow blames all men (and I don’t for a minute believe or agree that it does - if you think it does, um, projection, much?
I nearly missed that - what the fuck?
Alright, Jo - you win. I give up on this thread. I get irritated by being lumped in with rapists (as opposed, possibly, to complicity with the culture enabling it) therefore I must be a rapist as you’re insinuating. You’ve got me dead to rights.
Well done.
Very fucking convincing.
If I were to rewrite the ad I’d have multiple people at computers, typing, uploading pictures, webcams, chatting etc. As the people work the things that normally protect privacy, backpacks, purses, wallets, window shades, maybe even bedroom walls, become progressively less opaque until they are completely see through. Perhaps there would be a few benign passersby who notice the changes (I’m thinking a little kid poiting out to a parent “hey look! that backpack is see through!”).
The main message -when you post information online you no longer control who can and can’t see it- gets through without singling out any one group, or normalizing harassment. People know well enough why information should be kept private. The ad just needs to be a reminder that it won’t be private anymore if it’s online.
Where I live, many people view Americans as dangerous greedy racists, and those too cowardly to stop them.
You may not have killed any Iraqi children [USAian here], but it’s your fault they’re dying.
You may not have denied any women acces to abortion [USAian here], but it’s your fault they’re being denied.
You may not have bashed any gays [USAian here], but it’s your fault they’re being bashed.
You may not have exploited any illegal immigrants [USAian here], but it’s your fault they’re being exploited.
Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.
We [all US citizens] are all complicit in the actions of our fellow citizens and our governments because there is no way to live outside the world we create. The question we’re grappling with here is how best to respond and act to change it so that these and other tragedies can be averted in the future.
If you’re still hung up on avoiding blame, and as a result, any responsibility for your own actions or incations in addressing these and many other injustices, that’s your problem. I don’t have to mince my language because you have trouble with your consicence.
And I obviously failed at the block quoting. Sorry.
You may not have bashed any gays Jack Goff, but it’s your fault they’re being bashed.
What Nell said. That’s why we have to actively work against these atrocities.
Wayward said:
Dear sweet assfucking Jesus on a pogo stick, you ARE kidding, aren’t you? You HAVE to be.
Have you forgotten the almost immediate storm of “She’s lying, she’s just trying to extort money from those fine young men, nothing happened!” shit that the defense attorneys, the media, and everybody and his flying monkey flung around when the Duke case first came out? Even before the mishandling by the prosecution?
Have you forgotten all of the “Oh, their poor reputations, their lives are ruined!” pity-party in the media following the charges being dropped?
And have you forgotten that bloggers here at Pandagon, and on other feminist sites, predicted that this would happe because it always does? Rape cases are always like this. Even when the rapist is convicted, people will often still believe that the victim was somehow to blame. To this day, you can still find people who think Desiree Washington was just a golddigger, and Mike Tyson didn’t do anything wrong.
THIS is what you call “generally seen as guilty”?
For the sake of St. Fuck of Fucksenbourg, you have GOT to be joking. If you are not joking, I posit that you have got your head shoved so far up your ass that you have passed all the way through the vortex, emerging in an entirely new, intestinally-based reality.
Just another ‘what Nell said’: What Nell said. Xe speaks for me in every little word.
(Joins the Nell chorus.)
You know, admittedly I am not Catholic nor Anglican, but I have never heard of that particular Saint before … what are they a patron of?
;)
He’s a Discordian saint, the patron saint of fivenication. (It’s one better than fournication, you see.)
Quoth Aaron: “Use those vaunted, cherished testicles of yours to put on some big boy pants and get the fuck over it […].”
One of the blamers at my place nominated this comment for inclusion in the “Dear God, what about the men?!” section, a page of remedial feminism written mostly by feminist-friendly men to which I direct clueless dude motherfuckers who write stupid shit on my blog.
Linked and loaded! Thanks, Aaron.
So in other words you don’t actually care about changing the attitude of the people who actually commit rape? As far as I can tell, this kind of attitude is why a lot of anti-sexual assault activism is unsuccessful. First off, because as a man, it’s extremely easy to see messages about sexual assault and say “oh, I’m an enlightened man, so I clearly don’t have to worry about this”, and secondly because there’s rarely an attempt made to reach out to the obviously “unenlightened men” (a brush which is often painted pretty broadly and not always for the right reasons).
I’m interested in building a better world. If you’re interested in viewing the world as it is now as immutable and unchangeable and dealing with it - well, go right ahead and do that, but don’t be surprised when it doesn’t change.
I was a member of a yahoo group and one guy there started getting nasty when responding to my posts. So, I quit the group. Unfortunately, I do a lot online, so it’s not hard to find me. He found my blog and started commenting on it. When Blogger beta came out, I started a new blog, and I was free of this guy…for a while.
Unfortunately, the thing that’s good about the internet…building community, linking to others who link back to you, feeling like you’re part of something…is what is bad about the internet. Although, I had a new blog, I ended up commenting on another blog (and clicking my name took you to my blog) and this asshat found me again.
So, I imorted my blog to Wordpress, which I like so much better, b/c I can see the person’s IP address when they comment. I have the option to keep my blog from showing up in searches, too, which is great. So, I contacted everyone who reads me regulary to tell them my new address and I asked the people who had me blogrolled not to link to my blog anymore. My traffic will probably go down, but I need to get away from this guy.
He doesn’t do anything threatening. He just knows I don’t like him, but he keeps on insinuating himself into my online life. He won’t e-mail stalk me, b/c then I’d have his e-mail. He just posts anonymously to blogs and forums and never links to himself.
The lack of respect is appalling. “I don’t care if you want to be rid of me. Fuck you. I’m gonna keep coming back and coming back.” I think the guy may be insane. He’s over 50 and lives by himself on a farm in rural Pennsylvania.
Shorter trolls: Women who do things like have a MySpace page should expect men to harass and assault them. But saying that it’s largely men who harass and assault women is really, really oppressive.
Come back when you’re less emotional and apply some logic to your arguments, trolls.
I’m at a loss to understand what reaching out to unenlightened men should comprise other than - women are not property and no means no - or why a self-described feminist blog is supposed to to this outreach.
labyrus, I think you have a category error.
No, labyrus is right, I think. The enlightened feminist men who we’re not talking about when we talk about men who rape and harass women should do more than just reach enlightenment themselves; they should also do what they can to shed some light on their people. See, for example, Chris Clarke’s advice to men on how to not be a jackass. It’s more than just women are not property, it’s that women are full-fledged human beings with all the rights pertaining to that status.
Though you’re correct in saying that it’s not the function of a feminist blog like Pandagon or I Blame the Patriarchy to raise men’s consciousnesses (though it’s a happy side effect if it does). Whatever happened to self-reliance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? Hop to it, men!
rrp and moira: Thanks for your responses. They made me think.
Nowhere did I say it should be the explicit purpose of Pandagon or any other feminist project to reach out to men. I do think that anti-rape activism that isn’t reaching out to men who (for lack of a more sensible-sounding way of putting this)are a high risk of raping people is mildly useless seeing as they’re the ones who are actually raping people.
I think taking the attitude that “Well, if a man isn’t going to listen and immediately understand what feminists say about rape, he might as well fuck off” is unproductive from an activist standpoint. Intellectually, it’s very reasonable, but I tend to see feminist discussions about rape not just as intellectual discussions, but as a way of generating awareness and dialogue in the hopes of preventing rape. If a feminist blogger doesn’t want discussions on her blog to be that, that’s fine with me. But if only women and so-called “enlightened men” are ever really involved in these discussions then they’re nothing but talk. They aren’t contributing to actually stopping rape, which I think, if it isn’t, should be a goal for people.
(That said, there’s plenty of really good reasons why a group of women talking about sexual assault might not really want to include men, especially men who “don’t quite get it” into that discussion. The whole idea of safe spaces is one I do respect and I think individual bloggers should always be in control of discussion on their blogs.)
I do certainly agree that pro-feminist men need to be more pro-active in terms of activism, especially since I think we’re often in a better position to actually change the minds of other men than a lot of women. That’s propably something I should be more vocal about.
I’m actually hoping to get a couple things going in that direction in my community (a zine about masculinity and gender and possibly a men’s discussion group similar to the “Philly Dudes Collective”, who put out an awesome and really inspiring Zine). I think it’s totally reasonable when it comes to activism, when someone’s being critical of someone else, to have a “put up or shut up” kind of response. So I suppose until I get at least one of these projects going perhaps I should shut up.
Labyrus. While I can appreciate that idea very much and the good which it produces, I can also appreciate letting other women know that it’s acceptable to TELL MEN THAT THEY ARE ASSHOLES AND WE REALLY DON’T NEED THEM ANYMORE.
But women aren’t supposed to do that. We’re supposed to be reasonable about the fact that men have mistreated us for oh, about 6000 fucking years. We’re supposed to give them a cookie for being interested in considering the possibility of perhaps maybe rethinking one or two little things ABOUT THEMSELVES WHICH MAKES THEM ACT LIKE ASSHOLES.
I keep asking different women why they put up this shit, and the only real answer seems to be “because I like teh cock” or “I don’t know how to fix a leaky faucet”.
My god, but women have a low opinon of themselves. ibtp
Oh. “most of them”. I still blame the patriachy though.
So I’ve sent in my comment to Daily Mail, I don’t know if it’ll be published though since I do not know what kind of newspaper it is, and I’m discouraged by the headlines that was shown after I submitted my comment:
Thank you for sending us your comment.
Your comment will be reviewed shortly. Comments may be edited and not all will be published.
Today our readers are talking about…
23 comments: How women are ruining the BBC, by Sir Patrick Moore
14 comments: Trinny and Susannah grin and bare it
13 comments: Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness set to share power at Stormont
11 comments: Doctors call for ‘rationing’ of NHS services
11 comments: Britons have more faith in used car salesman than politicians, says study
….
My comment:
“Horrific issue, I’m glad that you brought it to light, and that the article both condemn the action and the lack of criminal investigation on the part of the authority. I however, will take exception to the choice of the title, “The moment a teenage girl was stoned to death for loving the wrong boy”, do you realise then, the focus is shifted, to what the victim did, and not what the murderers did? It became the fault of the victim for choosing to exercise her right to love whom she wish, and not the fault of the those men intolerant of her rights and moved to violate it.
This shift in focus in the headlines (http://pandagon.net/2007/05/07/women-are-to-blame-for-everything-including-and-especially-male-abuse-towards-them/), is akin to reporting that initial murder in Hamlet as: King Hamlet was poisoned to death for sleeping unguarded in the courtyard.
- MG”
Respect Ad for the Internet Age:
An Ass: Hey Sarah
Sarah: Hey, do I know you?
An Ass: Um, no, but I know /you/, I’ve saw your page.
Sarah: Cool, did you like it?
An Ass: Yeah, I’ll fuck ya.
Sarah: Sorry, you can watch but you can’t touch, that’s why I posted only pictures.
An Ass: Cause you are a fucking cocktease? *is now menacing*
Sarah: Wait what?
An Ass: You tempt men with your offers and then you don’t put out.
Sarah: When did I offer anything?
An Ass: The pictures.
Sarah: …are there for all people to enjoy /visually/, I’m sorry for you if you suck at reading things.
An Ass: *threatens*
Sarah: Hey mall security?
An Ass: *is arrested* (and if mall security does nothing, complain corporate, if corporate does nothing, hit the media until you find someone who’ll print the story)
*now that Sarah realise what the coach was talking about*
*telephone rings*
Sarah: Hey, sorry if I’m bothering you but I’m a student from your husband’s school.
The Missus: Oh, is something the matter?
Sarah: Well, I found out something interesting today, there were some really nasty rumours about his interest in high school girls.
The Missus: “Why I never -”
Sarah: Check his internet history and come watch him watch the cheerleaders sometimes, goodbye!
A Message For Internet Users: The people you’ve read and seen pictures online of are real people with real feelings. Stop being assholes or no cake.
A Message For All Grown Men: Lay off the high school girls ESPECIALLY if you mentor them, or no penis.
- MG
So in other words you don’t actually care about changing the attitude of the people who actually commit rape?
Why do you think rapists’ attitudes will be changed by saying “Don’t say bad things about men, you might hurt some poor man’s feeeeeeelings”? Do you think rapists and their Walter Mitty buddies will turn into devotees of feminist theory if only we are careful not to mention that most rapes are committed by men?
RM, you know what, I’m white, and I don’t stick out my lower lip and stomp my feet when somebody points out that, in the US, whites have an overwhelming amount of race privilege and most race-based hate crimes are committed by whites. I don’t say that those foolish black people are alienating well-meaning white people by pointing out white racism. I don’t try to work in Personal Issues about Islam. I don’t jump up and down shouting that nobody has mentioned that some blacks are racist too.
What was that Malcolm X said about throwing rocks at a pack of dogs?
Myth, don’t put fucking words in my mouth. Either actually read my posts or don’t respond to them. I think I was pretty clearly not saying what you think I was saying.
Johana - I think you’re dead wrong because you’re basically implying that rape can be stopped without men’s involvement - by making women say “no” more forcefully or more or whatever. That’s victim-blaming. It’s victim-blaming surrounded by feminist rhetoric, but it’s victim-blaming nonetheless.
Consider the police blotter section of any newspaper.
1. An unidentified man raped a woman between 12am and 1am last night in the Edge Park area.
Or
2. A woman was raped between 12am and 1am last night in the Edge Park area.
In what way does sentence 1 blame all men? What’s so terrifically offensive about pointing out that, although sentence 1 follows journalistic and stylistic rules more closely than sentence 2, most articles about this hypothetical situation would lead with sentence 2? And that this is true to the extent that sentence 1 seems a little odd?
Compare:
1. An unidentified man robbed three customers waiting to use an Edge Park ATM at 10:45 last night.
2. Three people were robbed while waiting to use an Edge Park ATM at 10:45 last night.
It doesn’t feel quite the same to me for some reason. And no-one would say that robbery sentence 1 makes all men feel like thieves.
Phoenician, you are WAY touchy about this issue. Perhaps it’s because police blotter reporters the world over have been scrupulously sparing your feelings.
From the article Anorak posted (or posted an excerpt from, possibly, but that looked like a whole article to me):
The woman was pulled into the car, which took off at high speed to another part of the city where she was sexually attacked, and then dumped.
I fix:
“The two men pulled the woman into the car; the men took off at high speed to another part of the city where they (still the men) sexually attacked raped her and then dumped her.”
Interesting that the article’s author even holds the goddamn car more responsible than the men who did the raping.
[…] 1. Your angry feminist link for the day. […]
“As an intellectual exercise, try to rewrite that ad. Keep the “you have to watch out for evil fuckersâ€? moral, and make it NOT blame the victim. I don’t think it can be done. I think using a boy as the lead character would’ve been better as it would’ve stripped away side issues leaving the point of the ad standing clear.”
You actually have two possible messages here, or at least two ways to present the same message. You have “watch out for evil fuckers” and you have “if you want information to remain private, don’t post it on the internet. The only good inoffensive way to present either one is by using a montage with a variety of people, female and male, of several ethnic backgrounds.
If your concern is to remind young women that there are creepy fuckers out there and you don’t care whom you offend, you could easily rewrite the “watch out of evil fuckers” one by using another stereotype.
(Fade in) Overweight, middle-aged guy sitting at a computer, only lighting is from the monitor, guy is clicking through [mock-up myspace analog site to avoid lawsuit for using actual myspace site].
Announcer: ‘Hundereds of millions of people visit online communities every day.’
(Pan in to screen as guy clicks link to pg/pg-13 photo of teenager; slowly pan out to sillouette of guy in light from monitor, back to camera, moving arm as if masturbating)
Announcer: ‘Do you know who’s reading your blog?’
The teenager in the pickture can be of either sex, depending on who is your target for the ad campaign.
For the other ‘don’t post private info on the internet’ version of the ad, show a person or several people uploading pictures of a social security card, drivers licence, birth cirtificate, credit card, etc. (choose one: “Announcer: You wouldn’t post these pictures on the internet, why would you post these?”, and roll shots of suggestive pictures. OR “Announcer: You wouldn’t post these pictures on the internet, why would you post any other private information?”)
As a side note, I don’t think we’ve examined the very real (and perhaps more dangerous, from a culteral standpoint) posibility that the Ad Council isn’t pushing a conscious agenda. That they are in all seriousness and with only the very best of intentions trying to protect young women from takign actions which will lead to their persecution and harrassment in our society without realizing that they are reinforcing the harrassing behavior by absolving the harrassers of blame.
[…] I agree with these final remarks 100%. Via a serendipitous mislink from Pandagon to a crosspost on Hoyden about Town [back]A cursory search turned up this study in which advice offered by the researchers proved to be ineffective in reducing rates of sexual victimisation, however I can’t tell from the abstract how closely the researchers’ advice matched the ‘traditional’ advice under discussion here. [back] […]