Wed, 2010-02-03 00:27

Britni Daniell of Oh My God That Britni’s Shameless and Champers of Champagne and Benzedrine have been having a really good extended conversation about the reality underlying the shorthand phrase “all men are potential rapists.” Oh yeah, and the considerable heat the phrase generates.

Lately (in A Different Defense of Schrodinger’s Rapist for Britni and On Missing the Point for Champers) the friction has stopped producing as much heat and is starting to produce more light instead.

It’s started enlightening me anyway.

Here’s Champers

The large part of the ongoing discussions involve people either defending the phrase ‘All Men are Potential Rapists’ or arguing about how stupid, offensive and inadequate it is. Sadly, this has meant the the meat of the discussion – about how women feel that they’re forced to view every man as a possible sexual predator – has been utterly ignored.

He said it here.

Actually not so much ignored as set aside in order to spend a lot of time saying, basically, “did not/did to.” Which is the nature of a lot of blame-assigning arguments.

Champers’ proposed rewording, one that I also agree wouldn’t apply the “wait a minute” brakes when men hear it, goes like this

To a woman, any man could potentially be a rapist.

I don’t know if you want to call that a semantic difference, or a perspective difference, or a more traditional-gender-friendly difference or what.

But I think it’s a really big difference.

The biggest difference, by the way, is that whatever else you can say about it, that construction steps around the considerable problem of reflex reaction to stereotyping, period, let alone the problem of feeling stereotyped.

At least as importantly, at least to me, is that it’s spoken from the perspective of a woman trying to make the distinction (“to a woman…”) rather than from the perspective of the man who (even if he really is a rapist!) is going to either be put or actively go on the defensive.

Actually let me make that last point another way: by saying “to a woman, any man could potentially be a rapist” is also way harder to refute. For one thing there aren’t a lot of ways to say a woman couldn’t feel that way. And if you foolishly do go there you’re immediately obliged to explain not why you’re not a rapist but how she could be mistaken for her feeling. And… I’m pretty sure a minute or two after you do you’re going to find yourself saying something like “...well, I see your point about…”

Which, when you think about it, is the purpose of good rhetoric.

One further, minor adjustment I’d want to make to that restatement though.

To any onlooker, any man could potentially be a rapist.

That might generate a little more resistance but there’s a point: I might know (accurately or mistakenly*) that I’m not a rapist. But unless I’m someone’s conjoined twin it’s exceedingly unlikely that I can be sure the next guy to my left or right isn’t a possible rapist. Unless you settle for complete extremes (all for, say, Andrea Dworkin, none for, say, Heather MacDonald) then pretty much however you define it some men are rapists** and the vast, vast, vast majority of them don’t exactly advertise it. Which, after all, is the problem noted in the statement in the first place.

Point being that constructing it more broadly strengthens rather than weakens the assertion. And, even better, increases rather than decreases sympathy for the position.

The final benefit of the restatement, either Champer’s specific version or my more general one, is that it locates the problem where it needs to be: a subjective problem for women based on an objective problem in assessing men.

It just feels more like you can do something with that. Do something, anyway, beside insist till you’re blue in the face that a) not all men are rapists (which is perfectly but unhelpfully true) b) that some women are rapists (also true but unhelpful), c) it’s sexist (true under some, but not all, definitions), or especially d) I have a totally socially-conditioned reflex against stereotyping of which “all men are potential rapists” is only a single instance. Oh, and also something even less-helpful than usual, e) to go all Freudian and start proclaiming what awful penalties should be rained down on men if and after they’re caught and convicted… since first of all that’s too late and second of all it doesn’t address anything at all in Champer’s statement of the problem: the penalties simply couldn’t be more draconian than the have been at times in the past and guess what? It was still the case then that “to all women, any man could be a potential rapist.”

Which leaves us with what, exactly? Well, it leaves us, us men especially, pretty much where we are now — not really doing anything about it. Or it leaves us with a good idea where to look for solutions: on the subset of men who are dragging all the rest of us down with them.

(Incidentally, because that whole “well women can be rapists too” keeps coming up, and because some people are going to very reasonably point out that there’s probably no way, ever, to stop all men from being rapists, I’ll just pitch for a combined objective: I’ll say that the problem as stated will be largely resolved if the objective is simply to get the rates at which men are rapists down to the rate at which women are now. At which point, whatever that might be, we can at least stop talking about it as if it was a purely gendered issue and start talking about it as a general one… that, I’m guessing, would tend to have more general solutions.)

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Footnotes:

* Important note: by linking to bmkinney I’m not at all agreeing that the correct construction is to require proof of a negative. —fl
** This is still true even when, as many people reflexively posit, women can be rapists too. —fl