Following up on my previous post about problems with blaming the victim: You might have noticed that throughout the post it looked like I was assuming all rape and sexual assaults are committed by men.
Actually, no, I’m not making that assumption at all — if for no other reason then because when I was roughly pre-school age I was physically sexually assaulted by a roughly middle-school aged girl. (And, of course, there are plenty of other reasons.) I also wasn’t making that assumption even the vast preponderance of sexual assaults really actually happen to be perpetrated by men. I wasn’t even making an assumption because narratives about male predation are even more prevalent than actual male predation.
Nope. I made the calculated decision to speak about men in the context of “she asked for it” victim blaming because…
you ready?...
When a woman sexually assaults or rapes someone — a man, another woman, a child, whatever, you know what they don’t say?
They don’t say “well, the victim was asking for it.”
They don’t say “well, she just couldn’t help herself.”
You know, the way they do when a man sexually assaults or rapes someone.
What do they say instead when a woman does it? That she’s mentally ill? That she’s traumatized from her own abuse (as, incidentally, I strongly suspect was the case with the girl who assaulted me.) That, in other words, she was broken, damaged, crazy, or otherwise not an otherwise perfectly normal person who’s hormones just got away from her in the face of irresistable provocation.
In other words when a woman does it there’s never any question about who’s at fault. No question that she deliberated, made a decision, and then acted on that decision. No question that it’s the assailant’s fault and not her victim.
Yes, yes, if you thought about that for very long you notice the bitter irony that whether as victim or assailant rape is always held that the woman is at fault. Believe me that hasn’t escaped me but while it’s not a small issue it’s one that’s heavily dependent on the main point of this post:
Notice how the characterizations of women perpetrators do not mitigate the assumptions about men’s inherent weakness and sub-human dependability and responsibility inherent in the standard “blame the victim” scripts mentioned in the preceding post: in one important regard women are held responsible for their victimization because men aren’t expected to be responsible in the first place.
And, once again, they say feminists hate men!
Thanks for fixing the
Submitted by Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) on Tue, 2010-01-26 12:52.Thanks for fixing the comments thing, Figleaf.
As I said in my quickie email: the case of a male rape victim I know the most about was kind of full of blame-the-victim consequences. I believe I heard about it when the “No Pity, No Shame, No Silence” meme exploded around livejournal a number of years ago.
He was in college, I believe, and wound up pinned down in his dorm room by a woman who had sex with him and later laughed the situation off. Her logic went something like, “Men are all horndogs, so asking one if he wants sex is a waste of time; anyway, he’s this scrawny geeky guy, I was totally doing him a favor.” The social reaction was full of much of the same, plus the declaration that she was totally “out of his league”, and thus he should be grateful for the assault.
I’m not sure this was an assigning of fault to the victim, though, on reflection; it was an erasure of the possibility that there might be fault. It couldn’t be rape, because obviously he wanted any sex he could get and wasn’t getting it because he was a nerd. (And if there was fault to be had, it was his for being insufficiently thankful for sex, not hers for raping him.) Though that is a variety of “he was asking for it” – not by his actions, mind, by simply being male.
For obvious reasons, he did not talk about it much; we are no longer acquainted so I cannot clarify my memory of his story.
[Ooh boy does that ring a bell, D! As I said in my email to you (thanks for the heads-up on comments being turned off) that was sort of the situation I found myself in when I was rescued as a little kid (it was on a back porch, neighbors heard me crying and came to see what was happening.) There wasn’t much talk about it except for a chuckle from one of the dads about how I was “getting an early start.”
The girl, who must have been 10 years older than me, grew up to be Barbie Doll beautiful just a few years later and so I sort of believed the same things too: I should consider myself lucky, she was totally out of my league, how could I have been so rattled when she was so easy on the eyes, etc. It wasn’t till I interviewed the head of a rape-relief program in college that I even understood that either men could be raped or that women could be perpetrators. That kind of opened my eyes, and a whole bunch of unresolved issues just sort of fell into place. I’d thought of it as some kind of “playing doctor” that had gone horribly wrong. It wasn’t.
The most important part is that, as you say, because she was a woman and he was a man there was “an erasure of the possibility that there might be fault.” That happens in all manner of date rape, by the way, but the way we construct gender, and the stories we tell about agency, men who wind up in that sort of situation may or may not be common but they’re at least as vulnerable as anyone else. Thanks for commenting on this! —fl]
I. LOVE. YOU.
Submitted by gidget commando (not verified) on Wed, 2010-01-27 16:14.I.
LOVE.
YOU.