Yeah, But Who's Gate? Part 27,629

I gotta admit, I'm having a tough time figuring how you're rebelling against a system at the exact same time you're enabling and enacting it.

I sat, I thought about it -- and I confess, had to set aside a perhaps reasonable or perhaps unreasonable anger at the mere suggestion that physically and sexually assaulting a woman, for any reason, let alone for trying to keep herself from being further assaulted was seen by anyone as a rebellion of any kind -- and I still can't get there.

It sounds to me kind of like saying that if I stone an adulterer, in doing so I am rebelling against the doctrine which tells me to stone them. Patriarchy very much includes solid ideas and enactments of protecting the "good" women while punishing the upstarts, or those who behave in such a way, be it by not putting out when that's wanted or by defending oneself against what men want, so as to no longer be good or following the rules.

If anyone was rebelling in this situation, it wasn't the men.

[I'm pretty unbelievably angry about it too, Heather. And yes, I do think people can be so blind to their own fucking privilege they can think that way, just like they think they can genuinely believe invading Iraq was "self defense." I didn't mean to say I think they're *right.* I just think that's what *they* think they're doing. And it just feels *so uphill* from there just to get to the surface. It's a very hard feeling. --fl]

Hmm... I don't think that's quite right. If they're rebelling against anything, it's the consequences of patriarchy, not patriarchy itself. If that's the case, then their response is sort of like overdosing on aspirin to stop a migraine when the migraine is being caused by brain cancer. It may provide temporary relief, but it doesn't actually solve anything, and might even make things slightly worse in the long run. And it may even prevent them from looking for the real problem.

[What's important isn't that they're rebelling against their own fucking system. It sure as Hell does matter that that instead of burning cars or other stupid acts they're hurting *people.* But the thing is if there's *any way* to *raise consciousness* then a) they wouldn't, b) they'd be fucking horrified and disgusted with themselves instead of acting like they "took on the man" while hurting the same people in the *class* that they'd probably just be classmates with *as individuals,* and c) they/us would stop making matters worse and start helping to tear down the system that's supposed to be all about benefitting them/us/me! And yes, I'm sick about it. Because yes, as it stands it obviously makes things *a lot* worse and maybe less obviously prevents them from looking at the real problem. It's *amazing* how systematic lies can do that. %#@%!@$. Thanks, Nightfall. --fl]

So Figleaf, if a man from the crowd stepped forward to defend the woman being assaulted, would he be enforcing the patriarchy (slaying dragons and all that)? I think, Figleaf, that men who assault women are enforcing the patriarchy, not rebelling against it. Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong, I'm sure you will.

You know what, Figleaf? You can say that things like this piss you off, but you have no idea what it is like to be a woman who stands just barely over five feet tall.

[I'm not going to say you're wrong. I will say that I'd rather men *stood by* the woman and really gave her their backs instead of just doing a swoop-in-and-rescue. But anyway, (it's almost a week later now) I was so upset when I read about that I just couldn't imagine *what* they thought they were doing. (What they *were* doing was never in doubt. I want to know what they *thought* they were thinking because *something's* gotta go here.) Thanks, Mag. --fl]

It looks like I may be your sole supporter Fig, but I do see what you are getting at. I'm not sure I would say rebelling against patriarchy exactly, because I think that you have to be aware of and recognize something to rebel against it.

But the costs of patriarchy to men are very real, and tend to be distributed unevenly (this is not to deny that all men reap some patriarchal privilege). If women are set up as gatekeepers to sex, and some men resent the competition they are supposed to engage in to get sex, then they may well take the resentment out on the women by demonstrating their power to compel rather than compete. Since patriarchy is the cause of the model, then in some sense they are rejecting that model, albeit in a self-defeating way.

I take it some of the negative reaction is because people often see rebellion as a good thing, or at least if x is bad then rebellion against x must be good right? But I suspect this is not always so.

[Yeah, I *really* don't want to be giving those guys credit for anything. More sort of the opposite where they're so well indoctrinated they can walk into a situation based on something that makes most of us miserable and... not just stand up for it but stand up for it *the way they did!* I mean, sweet mother of pearl! I think about stuff like that when Twisty Faster says patriarchy won't disappear till all of humanity (and not just men) are extinct. Anyway, thanks, E. --fl]

Honestly, some of my reaction to this isn't about the way I value rebellion, but that I have been in the company of rapists while they were raping me.

And -- while mileage may honestly vary -- as I understand rebellion and have experienced rebellion, rebellion is not what I saw in their faces. Rebellion is about the refusal to accept or submit to authority: when a guy has a few buddies or a weapon or the upper hand and is assaulting or raping a woman, he's not rebelling against her authority, because she doesn't have any, even if he thinks she may have some kind of dominion over his or male sexuality in some way. I also can't see how he'd be placing her as some sort of representation of a male-dominated culture or system, and I have a tough time swallowing the idea that the woman being assaulted is just a non-issue or that it isn't in some way personal. He is ENACTING his own authority, proving his own authority to BOTH her and whoever else: and boy howdy do you feel that when you're being raped or beaten by someone else. It's the most distinctive flavor of the whole thing, IMO.

So, to be clear, my anger wasn't just with this whole situation (I'd read about it last week, and while the mortification isn't going to wear off, it's not fresh), but with your suggestion that rape or physical assault of women and girls is somehow about rebelling against patriarchy. I feel like you also have this idea that rapists, when raping, are all angry and GRRRR and so forth, when plenty of the time, they laugh. A lot. They smile. They elbow each other approvingly. They are, in fact, having a good time.

Not just because it simply makes no sense to me, as again, I don't see how you rebel against something through acting in a way in direct accord with it, but I just can't for the life of me see how a rapist or an abuser sees an 11 or 12-year-old girl (that'd have been me) as some sort of symbol of the patriarchy to rebel against, or is gang-raping her with his friends because they're all so pissed off at or oppressed by other men, and because I think that in order to have any sound idea about what motivates a rapist, you've just got to see a few of them -- hell, even one of them -- at that moment to earnestly get it at all.

Hell, maybe I just plain resent a man -- even one I like and who is a friend I cherish -- looking at this story and making it about how men are oppressed.

[While I didn't see it as making men look oppressed I can totally see how it looked that way. And for that I'd like to apologize personally to you in addition to my general apology to everyone, Heather. I have had experiences with sexual assault but they were not the kind you experienced. And while I've been the target of bashing where the young men laughed and nudged each other and said shit to each other like "...or I can do it like *this,*" that wasn't sexual assault. And I still feel, though I don't know how to do it yet, that while the guys who actually did what they did, to you, to me, to everyone, have made their beds, there's still *something there* that can sidetrack that. And knowing there has to be *something* I feel particularly sick when things like this happen. Thanks for coming back. --fl]

Figleaf, I think your thoughts on entitlement are going in a helpful direction. But I agree with Heather and Nightfall and Sugar Mag - I'm completely unconvinced that rape is a rebellion against patriarchy. I've responded in a post of my own, but the gist of it is that I can see how at least some rapists might have beefs about feeling excluded from the perks of male privilege. That's not at all the same, however, as rebelling against patriarchy.

Heather - you have more direct experience with this than I do, since I've never been the target of a violent assault - but it does seem to me that resentments about one's *perceived* oppression/lack of privilege can play a motivating role. It's a matter of *perception* - not necessarily *actual* oppression. And I'm not saying at all "oh those poor menz" (which I don't think figleaf is saying at all, either). I'm just interested in dissecting how rapists think, and whether you think those sorts of resentments are relevant or not. My own (relatively mild) experience says yes, it's relevant, but that's just one data point - the guy in question was seething with resentment toward his ex-wife and wouldn't accept "no."

[Thanks for the invitation to just examine entitlement, Sungold. Because it was the realization that there could be different kinds of it, and that different kinds might be tackled different ways... including recruitment and/or subversion... that got to me in the middle of writing this post. Which *originally* was just about how stuff like the U-Conn business demonstrates that the whole "gatekeeper" business is a warm wet fresh load of no-win lies. --fl]

If there's one thing I'm familiar with, it's the context of discourse about male sexuality on a college campus, and the mandatory rape prevention seminar. And this whole thing smacks to me--as the graduate of a university with its own well-lighted, well-patrolled "rape trail" (and yes it was known as such) and statistically-significant, endemic on-and-off-campus stranger-and-acquaintance rape problem at the time (early 90s)--as an amateurish, facile enactment of low-grade patriarchal power on a woman's body. I think viewing it as student-on-student assault short of rape opens up an optic where what the assailants were getting at ("THIS is assault") is a kind of spectacular, scopophilic assertion of power that suits fl's reading much more than rape as such, where we can bring in Brownmiller and all the rest and kind of put the anger/rebellion thesis away in the context of systemic oppression.

If it IS assault as compensation, it's a very weird dynamic--but a very collegiate one. In an atmosphere of total sexual scarcity--because that IS the atmosphere of the average man, if campus surveys are to be believed--reclaiming one's own agency by objectifying someone in the way you've already been told by TPTB is the "worst way" seems possible.
There's an explicit class dynamic to street harassment as well, and it also fits the same "poisoning the well you're not invited to drink from" dynamic. So yes, certainly, this is read by the male participants as rebellion, because ("THIS is assault") it's a discursive intervention, scopophilic and symbolic, into the field of a hegemonic (and not only incidentally feminist) discourse on sexual assault and sexuality on campus.

reCaptcha "plea obnoxious". Indeed.

[Oh yeah, and don't even start on the bonding/cowardice/resentment inherent in catcalling and other forms of street harassment. In a much earlier incarnation as a drop-out college-town construction worker and college-town beer-bar bartender I understand *exactly* what that business is all about... what went through my mind and the minds of the men I hooted and whistled with... and it's *not* very pretty. Highly "entitled," yes, but not at all with a self-sense of empowerment. Which is part of why this story shook me up so much. --fl]

I'm with you Sungold, when it comes to the idea that some rapists may well be motivated in part by THINKING they are oppressed and don't have privilege. And two of the three Groth typologies of rapists -- the anger rapist and the power rapist -- do include flavors of that.

But I didn't hear in this that Fig thought it was about their perception (I'd say delusion, when we're talking about men being oppressed in regard to rape -- when they are not the victims, but the perps -- or sex): I heard it as an actual. And in this case specifically, where much of the group assault had to do with a woman not playing the right part by defending herself and trying to protect herself, it just seemed especially IRrelevant, since again, they were following most of the rules of patriarchy to the letter, not resisting that authority. I can see scenarios in which I'd be in greater agreement about that perception playing a greater part, but this ain't one of them.

[We're at least in the same book (even if we're not on the same page) in the sense that it sounded like what happened in the second, passers-by assult (which is what really freaks me out) was a straight-up Groth-style power play, as in "you think your claim gives you power, I'll show you power." With the expression of sex being mainly the gold-standard currency of humiliation. Rather than try to pull my ass out of it's sling, I'll see if I can't find some other way to express the jolt I got which was that *to* the extent there's resentment of... call it the "freudian-style 'fathers'" who control men's "access" to women, and even though that resentment's *completely* embedded head-first and ankle-deep in male supremacy, I still think it means there's an exploitable instability in there somewhere that could be shaken out *before* it came to the total bullshit that went down at U-Conn. Thanks, Heather. --fl]

Just to be clear, if I had it to say over again (and I actually will try to say it over again when I have actual, useful internet access) I'd use *very* different terms.

Because rebellion, especially with it's more contemporary connotations, really isn't the right word. But one of the things I've been trying to reconcile has been the different perceptions men and women have of sexual dynamics -- for instance how it can *possibly* be that men imagine women are "gatekeepers" when, as in cases like the on in this post, that it's just infuriatingly beyond mockery.

And it's hard to dig into in a room full of strangers where the machines are starting to shut down, but whatever... convulsion motivates men to think they're entitled to "show her what real assault is" it's just (oh damn it the machine's going down) whatever it was those men thought they were doing just wasn't it.

More later...

Ok, I'm back online thanks to a favor from someone I'd never met before. It'll still be a while before I've got enough peace and quiet to develop what I've been trying to say but for now...

I think the word shouldn't have been so much "rebelling" as "revolting." In both major senses of the word.

The important thing isn't to explain, and certainly not to justify but to figure out how to *use* the perverse sense of... I dunno... *freudian* male... rejection or convulsion or... impotence or whatever the heck real thing I've barely got a fingertip on for something more useful than violently and/or threat-of-violently making everyone miserable.

More later.

reCaptcha: ceaced prize!

Figleaf, I don't think changing the word makes that big of a difference (as much as I appreciate the double meaning of "revolting"). I think the bigger question is really whether these guys are fighting against something, or shoring it up - which may be a false dichotomy; they may be doing both at once. And if indeed there's some element of rebellion/revolt/resistance, then *what* are they fighting against?

Maybe the word "impotence" provides a clue. Maybe "entitlement." Maybe the intersection between the two?

You know, you don't have to come back with a fast response; maybe it's good to sleep on this (or be out of battery power for a day). It's not like it's a simple problem. If it were, it might be solved by now.

Happy Recaptcha: some loving (!)

[Yeah, it's somewhere near the intersection of impotence and "entitlement to take" rather than what I always think of as "entitlement to *receive.*" Hmm... Definitely thinking more about this, Sungold. I appreciate the coaching. A lot. --fl]

I'm sorry, but my head just exploded.

There is one aspect to rebellion that could be considered here, and that was developed and examined by Daryl Koehn in The Nature of Evil: people who are demonized by a system (or perceive that they are) sometimes decide to embrace that demonization as a way of striking back at that system. The key element would be the overall way in which male sexuality is viewed.

If that is dominantly as a negative, or as a potential threat, we would have a situation in which both a rebellion against and an embrace of could occur simultaneously.