sexual assault

Pretty Cool Insights From a Mormon Man on Attitudes About Rape -- Another Opportunity to Question Stereotypes

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2012-01-24 23:49

 

Guest-blogger Ziff of Feminist Mormon Housewives wonders

Number of times pornography has been mentioned in General Conference in the past 20 years: 128

Number of times rape has been mentioned: 4

I’ve been wondering recently why General Authorities spend so much time condemning porn use and so little time condemning rape. Porn use and rape seem like related problems: they’re sexual wrongs that men do to women. (I realize they aren’t exclusively done by men or exclusively done to women, but this is their most common variety, and that’s what I’ll talk about.) So why in the Church is there so much focus on one and so little on the other?

Source: Feminist Mormon Housewives

Ziff says he has basically no experience with either rape or porn, and says therefore most of what he says should be considered speculation. And based on some of his speculation you can sort of tell. That said he also drills in very nicely.  From his list of why the church might choose to focus on rape.

6. GAs may blame women for rape, at least to some degree. I think this is evident in the excessive rhetoric on modesty they direct at young women with the rationale that women control men’s thoughts. It’s a short step from blaming women for men’s thoughts to blaming women for men’s actions. Their attitude probably shouldn’t be surprising considering the ages of the most senior GAs: they were raised in a time when blaming women for rape was probably typical.

7. GAs may not realize that most rape victims are raped by men they know. This is pretty speculative on my part, but if GAs are hanging on to the old belief that rapists are mostly strangers lurking in dark allies, they may feel like it’s hopeless to preach to such psychopaths. Again, given their ages, it wouldn’t be surprising if they believed this.

And from his reasons why his church should address rape more directly than it has been.

A. Mormon women are particularly vulnerable to being raped. They are taught to be deferential and submissive.

...

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being tender, kind, and refined. But resisting rape requires toughness, and probably also coarseness and rudeness. Women who are taught that toughness is worldly and therefore wrong are women who are less likely to stand up and say no when their boyfriends or husbands are pushing them sexually in ways they don’t want to go.

B. Mormon women are particularly likely to blame themselves for being raped. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s not much Church teaching out there on the topic of rape. A woman who is raped is likely to find only the old line of thinking popularized by President Kimball that a woman is better of dying than ‘allowing’ herself to be raped. She may also connect the dots as I did in reason #6 above, and figure that she must be to blame for being raped because of what she wore (or if she doesn’t do this, people around her may do it for her).

Both of these teachings are incredibly destructive. Women are not responsible to sacrifice their lives if attacked by a rapist. Women’s clothing choices are not to blame for rape. The last thing women who are raped need is a heaping pile of guilt to add to their pain. GAs’ choice to leave these teachings out there unrepudiated is a choice to let women suffer more.

It's good stuff.  And while he, as a Mormon, is specifically referencing the teachings of his particular church it's really, seriously important not to get caught saying "oh yeah, those whacky, out-of-touch Mormon elders."  Because, duh, the same dynamics affect a heck of a lot of other denominations.

For that matter, as has been much observed lately, the same dynamics affect <em>atheists!</em>  Who may not rail about porn as much but sure as heck ruminate on rape in their own communities.

Speaking of impacts on communities, another of Ziff's speculations ought to make every self-interested heterosexual male take note.  (Emphasis mine.)

Rape is far more evil than porn use is. This is the obvious response to #1. A man who rapes a woman not only hurts her in the moment of the act, he also likely causes her to suffer for a long time afterward. Her experience of sex, which should be such a wonderful way to connect with her partner, becomes laden with horrifying associations. Her ability to trust other people will likely be harmed, making all kinds of social interaction more difficult. Her feeling of personal safety may also be reduced, restricting her ability to go to particular places or to go out at particular times. I can’t see that porn use is anything like as bad as this.

You know, the funny thing about stereotypes is that even nominally "inoffensive" ones like, say, things we "know" must be true about Mormon men given their church's history, can be damagingly off the mark.

Almost by definition allies aren't soul mates.  (For instance the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were allies in world war two!)  And so almost by definition we're going to have differences with allies that we might not have (or that we at least overlook) in soul-mate affinity groups.  But we can find allies in the most unexpected places.  And we overlook or, worse, alienate allies at our peril.

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Why Adding Men to the New DOJ Rape Reporting Standards Will Increase the Number of "Gray Area" Victims and Why It's a Good Thing

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2012-01-09 15:19

Photo by Flickr user kharied. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user kharied. Used under a Creative Commons license.

One more thing about the DOJ's belated decision to remove gender of perpetrators and victims from its definition of rape.

I'd just add that there's more than a "completist" benefit to more uniform reporting and response to sexual assault and rape committed by men against women, women against men, men against men, and women against women.* One glaring problem over the last three or four decades has been that apples-to-oranges reporting has made it difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

A lot of the so-called "gray areas" of sexual assault and rape -- the social pressure, emotional bullying, taking advantage of the intoxicated, misuse of authority and other power gradients, domestic-partner assault and intimidation, etc. -- have been even more poorly understood in the context of male victims than of female victims.

For years women's groups have struggled to have crimes committed in these so-called "gray area" taken seriously.  It's been even harder to get similar crimes against men taken seriously.  Imbalanced records keeping have exacerbated this, with the result that the extent of the problems of sexual coercion, for both men and women, has been hard to clarify.

We understand pretty clearly that, for women, sexual assault is a lot more than strangers getting the drop on their victims and committing violent penetration (or, in some states, attempted penetration) in the canonical points of entry.  For instance it's generally (if not quite universally) understood that women can be victims of date rape and acquaintance rape, that they can be assaulted while incapacitated, that they can be peer-pressured in ways that amount to coercion.

If nothing else anti-feminists and other boys-will-be-boys apologists demonstrate sophisticated understanding when denying that these non-jump-out-of-the-bushes assaults should be considered assaults.

But outside certain parts of the law-enforcement and assault-awareness communities most people still think of sexual assaults and rape of men in terms of... strangers getting the drop on their victims and committing violent penetration of the canonical points of entry.

Even when it comes to something seemingly as clear-cut as prison assault and rape the narrative relies heavily on the "trapped in a cell with a giant prisoner... his name is 'Bubba'" narratives.

In fact in prison, as in the outside world, sexual assault of men by other men, and of women by other women, are more likely to be "gray area" assaults than the violent assaults of stereotype.  (And obviously "gray area" assaults can be as socially and psychologically as problematic for victims as violent assaults.)

This double standard has been particularly frustrating for men's activists interested in prison reform -- on the one hand they've had to confront stereotypical indifference (or juvenile-humor-like glee!) about rape in detention while simultaneously wrestling with nominal allies who dispute that so-called "gray area" rape is rape at all.

The new, revised standards should help clarify that considerably.

It should also help clarify the nominally eternal argument that sexual predators are almost exclusively male and that victims are almost exclusively either female or minor males.

I imagine that now that the major statistics-gathering institution has correctly broadened its definitions we'll see first, an increase in overall numbers of rapes and assaults and also, second, a fair amount of convergence on the numbers of male and female victims and perpetrators.

I believe these new more clear and more universal acknowledgment of the field of perpetrators and victims is important is that it'll enlarge the pool of people interested in doing something about sexual coercion.  It's been too easy to treat it like a "women's rights" issue (as if that was a bad thing) or a "prison rights" issue (as if that made it better) and into a human rights issue.  The sooner people start getting that anybody can be a victim the sooner we can seriously begin to reduce the overall rates of sexual assault and rape.

And finally, as I've often said, since shocking numbers of perpetrators turn out to themselves have previously been victims taking all forms of rape seriously will help reduce a much-overlooked pool of potential or future perpetrators.

* Recall that most trans people identify as men or women.

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Passing Along Thanks from Just Detention International -- *You* Made a Difference for Imprisoned Victims of Sexual Violence

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-12-30 16:48

Not too long ago I posted about a Just Detention initiative designed to send words of encouragement to victims of prison-based sexual assault and rape during the holiday season.

I just wanted to pass along a note I received from Just Detention International.

Hi Figleaf,

Just Detention International Logo. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Link to Just Detention International This is just a quick note to thank you for your piece about the Just Detention International holiday card campaign to survivors of sexual abuse behind bars! We received several hundred cards from your readers, and they are still coming in. Overall, we now have well over 1,400 wonderful holiday messages. We can’t thank you enough for helping us spread the word! We’ll be sharing responses from survivors who received the cards next month and would love to share them with you and your readers as well. Just let me know if you’re be interested.

Hope you have a great holiday!

The note was to me but really, the thanks go to the hundreds of you from here and the Tumblr blogs that reposted it. A little bit of effort goes a long way.

If in the future you wish to do more than send holiday wishes to victims of sexual violence in jail, prison, and juvenile and immigration detention the contact for that organization, once again, is

Just Detention International
3325 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 340
Los Angeles, CA 90010
(p) 213.384.1400
(f) 213.384.1411
www.justdetention.org
www.twitter.com/JustDetention
http://www.facebook.com/JDIonFB

To the extent we desire a just society we should also have just detention policies. The policies we tolerate reflect on us, not on those we detain. And to the extent we hold others accountable for their crimes and transgressions so should we be held accountable for their treatment in custody.

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Still Not a Joke -- Good Awareness Campaign From Just Detention International

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2011-12-18 19:11

It's so easy to joke about prison rape.  It's so easy to say "HIV infection?  Well, that's what you get for... kiting that third check?"  It's so easy to imagine that (thanks to Rule #1 and the dominant women as the no-sex class paradigm, when "safely" imprisoned with other women and with predominantly female prison staff that rape is the last thing women prisoners need worry about.

Photo from JustDetention.org. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy Photo from JustDetention.org. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy

Photo from JustDetention.org. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy Photo from JustDetention.org. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy

Photo from JustDetention.org. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy Photo from JustDetention.org. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy

Through their Send a Holiday Message to an Incarcerated Survivor of Prison Rape campaign you can send a 250 character message to a survivor through Just Detention International. You won't know them, and they won't know you, but writing the note, knowing it's for a real human being who's survived sexual assault in prison makes the issue vivid, direct, and real in a way that just thinking about it, or even donating, doesn't. Think about it.

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Three Penn State Paradoxes

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2011-11-10 18:36

Just how weird is it that nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, those boys had to have done something to get themselves raped." Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, after so much teasing you can't really expect a horny man to control himself. Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, they only 'cried rape' the day after because they regretted what they'd agreed to do the night before." And you sure don't seem to be hearing anyone brassing on about the need for awareness classes or self-defense classes or what-not-to-wear classes or 'don't walk alone' classes for boys. Not where the expectation is on boys to be on the defensive, to be perpetually vigilant, to be sure not to go around "asking for it."

You don't hear anyone opining that "sure, they're a little young, but since they'd have been 'giving it away' for nothing before too long anyway there's no real harm done."

Seems kind of funny to me, you know?

Kind of a paradox, really.

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that in the Penn State case.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable expectation to impose on victims of sexual predation.

This evidently doesn't become clear when victims are women or girls. 

So however horrifying the Penn State case might be, or the Boy Scouts cases, or the Catholic Church cases, or the Republican congressman cases, it seems like there's some kind of teachable moment there.

Know what I mean?

---

I gotta back up here and repeat something I mentioned only in passing above.

Nobody seems to be giving this guy Jerry Sandusky a pass for "doing what comes naturally."  Nobody's tisk-tisking about how he was just "thinking with his 'little head.'"  Nobody's going "well what can you expect, a man can only handle so much temptation!"

Not the way they'd typically give him a shrug if it had been the more typical "coach treat:" cheerleaders.

Another kind of paradox, eh?

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that about this guy Jerry Sandusky.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable pass to grant perpetrators of sexual predation.

This evidently doens't become clear when a perpetrator's victims are women or girls.

---

And I gotta touch on one more thing I almost completely glossed over above.

Nobody seems to be saying "those boys have had their precious jewel flowers taken from them."  They're not saying "nobody will want them now."

Which is kind of odd because, you know, when <em>people</em> are sexually assaulted and raped it generally has kind of a negative impact.

Another one of those paradoxes, only this one lands harder on boys and men in the sense that we have approximately zero social scripting for helping them work through that kind of violence.

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Very Cool Clarification of Sexual Harassment vs. Sexual Assault by E.J. Graff

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2011-11-09 12:16

You probably already know that an individual implying that if you want a job you've got to "work for it" while pushing your head towards his groin is sexual assault rather than sexual harassment.

What you might not know is just how despite sorta-similar labels the transgressions themselves are very different.  E.J. Graff has the scoop. (I've rearranged for clarity.)

A number of observers, including the Prospect's Pema Levy, noted that this appears to go beyond sexual harassment to sexual assault. Beyond? What do people think sexual harassment is? It often involves sexual assault.

These are different terms and different framing for what's often the same action.  Let's be clear, both about the distinction and the overlap between the crime of sexual assault and the civil-rights violation of sexual harassment.

But the difference is:

  • One is an criminal accusation against an individual while
  • the other is a civil allegation against an employer.

 

  • An individual can be arrested, indicted, and prosecuted under criminal law for sexual assault.
  • An employer can be sued for sexual harassment if one of its employees uses his (or occasionally, her) supervisory authority to threaten, corner, grope, grab, and assault those he supervised.

 

  • sexual assault is a crime committed by an individual;
  • sexual harassment implicates the employer for the failure to offer male and female employees an equal chance at earning their paychecks.

 

  • Sexual assault is illegal under every state's statutes and is almost always prosecuted by a district attorney.
  • Sexual harassment is a charge filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—remember, it's an employment problem—and brought into federal court by private lawyers (occasionally, but very rarely, the EEOC wil join in the case).

Source: TAPPED

There's more if you follow the link.  And Graff, who's reported extensively on sexual harassment in the workplace (the only place it can happen, remember) does a very good job explaining why people suggest Presidential candidate Herman Cain may have been pressured to resign his job as head of the National Restaurant Association.  And explaining that if he was then it would have been related to an alleged pattern of harassment rather than one specific instance of alleged assault.  But I digress...

Mostly I just wanted to point out the clearest description of the difference I've heard yet.  And to point out that folks in the press and elsewhere who keep suggesting that sexual assault is just a "bold sexual advance" ...just a difference of degree... from sexual harassment need to stop.

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Emily Dugan on Yet Another Horrific Consequence of Virginity Fetishism: Rewarding "Bridenapping" Rapists

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2011-10-13 05:25

Reading Emily Dugan's piece in The Independent about the practice of "bridenapping" around the world it seems kind of important to note that, over and over and around the world from Somalia to Sarajevo, the mechanism that seems to make bride kidnapping work is the notion that once a woman is presumed to have been "taken," even against her will, she's too tainted, damaged, or unclean either for her family to take her back or for anyone else to agree to marry her.

What on the Great Blue Marble is that all about anyway!?!?! And all for the hypothetical value of a sliver of vestigial tissue in whole human beings who are entirely competent, capable and often even ( in Dugan's case from Kyrgyzstan) college educated and working!

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Sounds Like MTV's Teen Werewolf Reboot Might Want to Teach Girls All the Wrong Lessons About Boys and Romance During Puberty

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2011-06-20 23:40

So on the cool pop-media analysis blog Overthinking It, a blogger named Stokes pulls some cool insights into a reboot of the schlocky 80's movie Teen Werewolf and its 2011 reboot as an MTV series. First insight was that werewolf stories are metaphors for the myriad disruptions of male puberty, from crazy hormone-driven emotional fluxes to disturbingly rapid growth to unwelcome physical reactions to, well, hair growing all over your face. The second was that while the original Teen Wolf saw transformation more as a metaphor for boys' uncontrollable awkwardness, the reboot has a much darker view of emergence into manhood.

In the original movie, this would have been fodder for the comedy of humiliation.  Oh no!  SHE’S GOING TO REALIZE THAT I HAVE AN ERECTION!  Must… fight… embarrassment!  And the important lesson, of course, is that eventually you have to realize that these sexual drives are part of who you are, and if the girl likes you enough she’s not going to mind even a little.  But in the darker and edgier Teen Wolf reboot, the threat is not that she’s going to notice — rather, it’s that he’s going to lose control and tear her limb from limb.  Taking its (deeply sexist and problematic) cue from the Twilight series, Teen Wolf: The Next Generation suggests that teenaged boys are seething cauldrons of hormonal lust that are always a whisker away from exploding into a whirlwind of passionate, bodice-ripping… well, rape.  There’s not a nice or polite way to put it; that’s what the subtext is about.  And it’s meant to be sexy, which is kind of gross.

Source: Overthinking It

It's a very cool insight. First, because of the possibility that werewolf stories could be used to help young men through the transition into getting a handle on their new assets and liabilities. As Stokes puts it,

The old Teen Wolf movie is fundamentally about being unhappy with the very bodily nature of one’s own developing body.  It’s not body horror in the classic sense, where what you are becoming is abominable and terrifying to look on.  Rather, the monstrous body is funny looking. Not terrifying but mortifying, embarrassing.  Teen Wolf is also about getting past that – realizing that along with funny odors and hair-every-which-where, puberty also maybe gives you some enhanced basketball skills.  And maybe members of the opposite sex aren’t as weirded out by your new body as you are yourself. And eventually once you’ve grown up completely, you start shaving and wearing deodorant, and your testosterone-crazed fight-or-flight reflexes calm down a little, and you make out with your childhood friend rather than the unattainable cheerleader type, opting for love and companionate marriage rather than a more juvenile romance based on lust and status.

The second insight, the one that ties in with the Twilight series, is that instead of providing boys with proxies that can help them resolve their own issues the new series serves the purpose of teaching girls to process their feelings about boys in decidedly anti-feminist ways.  Because that whole "ZOMG, if he didn't control himself literally every second Edward could totally rip her throat out... because that's what love is" is... sort of the worst possible gender expectations-setting you can imagine.

Because, seriously, it sounds like the 80s version had it exactly right.  The self-control most boys are struggling with is the intense desire not to humiliate themselves with testosterone's... um... byproducts.  If the message girls are getting instead is that boys are struggling not to (romantically!) massacre them it's...

It's going to create some disconnects that just aren't going to serve either boys or girls once they do leave puberty.

Oh, and extra credit in the "wrong message" department?  In the new version not only does becoming a werewolf fail to make the victim even more of a confused loner than he was before...

I find most of the “good side” of the protagonist’s wolfification pretty ugly to begin with — there’s nothing wrong with enhanced senses or physical speed in and of themselves, but he quickly and cheerfully uses his gifts to turn himself into a fratty douche.  The character’s name is Scott, but I kept wanting to call him Chad, or possibly just “Broseph.”   Who knows, maybe over the course of the series he’ll learn a valuable lesson about not being a hyper-competitive Type-A jagoff all the damn time.

In other words it turns you into a privileged asshole who... will rip his girlfriend's throat out any time he actually loses control.

Charming!

 

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Holy Cow, Did You Hear About the Graphic Male Rape Scene in "Get Him to the Greek?" Probably Not Unless You Read Feminist Blogs

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-06-17 15:12

trigger alert

Heads Up: This is a long post with lots of triggery stuff about representations of sexual assault in movies, particularly in comedies.  There's a clip of from the movie at the bottom of the post.

Summary: This one's about a particularly graphic one played for laughs in last year's Judd Apatow vehicle, Get Him to the Greek.  Looks like dozens or hundreds feminists from minor Tumblr blogs to the L.A. Times stood up for the male victim.  For all the "but men get raped too" derailment you see when feminists mention women victims the man-o-sphere remains remarkably silent.

Asexual activist Ily digs into the (top grossing!) 1947 Bing Crosby and Bob Hope misogyny and date-rape fest Road to Rio and then lobs the ball back into the 21st Century's court with a dissection of Judd Apatow's extremely popular Get Him to the Greek.

[F]ast forward to recent years. "Road to Rio" would probably not be written. Of course, the 40's were just more sexist times...right? However, today, we're expected to laugh at a man being raped (not to mention having his bodily integrity violated in countless other ways). Stuff like this has led some people to believe that feminism has gone too far, and now women are holding privilege over men. But I don't think these folks are aware of why we are supposed to find male rape funny. I think it's for the same reason that we're supposed to find men in dresses funny--being raped is feminizing, and therefore embarrassing. At the same time, men are so sex-crazed that being raped (at least, by a woman) is not a big deal to them emotionally. There are a few assumptions here:

...

So yes, I believe that bell hooks was very much correct. Patriarchy does hurt everyone. In a truly post-feminist world, Jonah Hill's friends in Get Him to the Greek wouldn't have laughed off his rape experience. He could have admitted that yeah, there were times when he didn't want sex*, and the other men wouldn't have mocked him for that. And we, the audience, wouldn't be expected to laugh, either.

Source: Asexy Beast

And who, you might be asking, would be making fun of men being raped? In, um, certain quarters the knee-jerk reaction is that it could only be feminists. In this case? Not so much. But they'd be so far wrong radar couldn't find them: the movie was made by Judd Apatow's all-men, no-women-at-all creative team of directors, writers, and producers.  Director? Nicholas Stoller. Writers?Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel. Producers? Judd Apatow, David L. Bushell, and Rodney Rothman. Co-Producer? Jason Segel. Executive Producer? Richard Vane. Associate Producer?Phil Eisen.  Not a feminist in the bunch.  Not a woman in the bunch.  Not even a "feminist man" in the bunch.  It's dicks and balls all the way down till you get to the casting coordinator.

And oh well, one might be inclined to say, it was a comedy for goodness sake, maybe it was portrayed as daffy slapstick. If one did one would be disappointed. While the event is supposed to be just one more bit of physical comedy that befalls a sad-sack character from a police-procedural standpoint it wouldn't be a minor incident at all!

Instead, when the Arron character is physically incapacitated by alcohol but still able to clearly express his absolute lack of consent the woman pins him down, exposes herself to him when he manifestly does not want her to, aggressively and repeatedly forces his attention up her skirt, yanks off his pants, straddles his groin, pulls a large phthalate-laden dildo out of her purse, aggressively rubs it in his face, slaps him with it, forces it into his mouth, and then reaches back and jams it between his legs in a manner that strongly (if anatomically-improbably) implies she's inserted it in his anus.

The most disturbing part to me about the scene is the breezy familiarity with which it's set and directed, as if the producers were... a little too familiar with the way rape committed by drunk people on drunk people actually goes.  (And no, this isn't accusing Apatow, Stoller, or Segal of committing gross sexual assault on drunken victims.  They may have or they might not.  If you asked me I'd guess one or more of the creative team has been on the receiving end either from another man or from a woman.  And, sort of like the victim in the film, they're not resolved to it because of a couple of really fundamental misconceptions of who can be perpetrators and, even more particularly, who can be victims.)

One thing that doesn't seem realistic? Right after the anal penetration the camera cuts away to what appears to be the Arron character's love interest, wearing hospital scrubs at a desk in what appears to be a hospital nursing station, is listening to the entire event on her cell-phone. Her reaction? To shake her head angrily, hang up, and move to put away the phone.  Ha ha, just one more way that poor schlub Aaron I'm pretty sure

And who do we find writing critical reviews of this movie? Ily, an asexual woman,

Alicia Sowisdral of Feminist Review.

Sarah M at the feminist anti-rape site SaferCampus said

I’m pretty used to rape being used as a punchline, especially when men are the victims. This usually comes in the form of jokes about prison rape, but I’ve also seen more than enough films in which a guy is basically forced into having sex with a woman or is really uncomfortable with it (like, he’s in a relationship and she’s seducing him!) and it’s supposed to be funny because ya know, women can’t rape men LOL! And prisoners deserve it! That’s bad enough to me. But this was just so beyond explicit—the guy is sodomized with an object while saying no and then uses the word rape to describe it—that I was genuinely shocked. I actually can’t even imagine an explanation of how this is funny outside of the fact that a man being raped is SO IMPLAUSIBLE to folks that it’s just laughable. You’re not watching a “rape scene” because call it rape all you want, it couldn’t be real rape, so it’s funny.

Lauren Brachman at Equal Writes put the consequences in black and white

[I]f that is the way we view rape and sexual assault, aren’t we doing a disservice to men? The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) reports that 1 in every 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Do we emasculate the men who survive sexual assault because our culture constantly reminds us that real men do not get raped? Are these assaults as funny as the rape of Aaron Hill in Get Him to the Greek?

You might argue that women are not the only assailants of the sexual assault committed against 3% of all American men. Often, men assault other men. But don’t worry – Get Him to the Greek is an equal opportunity exploiter! Aldous Snow, one of Green’s “best friends”, also assaults him. This time Aaron Green is coerced into inserting a balloon of heroine into his anus. Later Aldous Snow digitally penetrates Aaron Green, violently ripping out the balloon. Was there an outcry in the theater when we all witnessed this assault? Not that I could over hear over the laughs and guffaws of my classmates.

I found a Tumbler post that's nested three deep with women harshly attacking the idea that rape of a man could ever be funny, with the angriest denunciation of playing male rape for laughs coming from a (now deactivated) Tumblr blog called thehumorlessfeminist.

Sigh.

For all the men that show up saying "but men get raped too" anytime someone starts complaining about rape culture in movies you'd think there's be a few more men chiming about, you know, men actually getting raped in movies.

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The Difference Between "But" and "And" in Debates About Gender and, Say, Sexual Assault or Domestic Violence

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2011-06-16 13:38

So I was walking home from the grocery store just now thinking about gender assumptions, sexual assault, and domestic violence (as I've been doing more lately.) And just as I turned down the block towards my street a thought popped into my head.

The thought was "If it took me 26 years to learn that women can sexually assault, how many women fail to recognize they're doing it?"

Without knowing the answer that led to a whole 'nother thought. One that's actually so useful that in a way it doesn't really matter what the answer is.

The thought was that over and over we see men derailing DV and assault threads with But this or that happens to men too. Which then throws up this extraordinarily predictable spiral that ends in whole rafts of did-not's and did-to's and other hard feelings.

And the answer, it occurred to me, is that what we really need, what would really alter those conversations, would be to stop saying, say, "But men get raped too."

And change it to "And men get raped too."

Because, seriously, when your real goal is to overturn rape culture it seems like you want to include as many people as possible. You want to identify as many victims as possible. You want to mitigate, divert, or reform as many perpetrators as possible.

I mean, look at the ridiculous disconnect between women's and men's activists. They're all so busy disputing each other, and privileging themselves, and just generally derailing each other that no conversation takes place at all.

At all!

Do more men or women commit sexual violence? Do more women or men commit domestic violence? I think those are entirely the wrong questions because then the focus is just on comparison instead of change.

The right question to ask, then, is do men and women commit sexual and domestic violence, period. And the answer is overwhelmingly yes.

So.

What do you want to do about it?

Keep arguing over which yardstick to use?

Keep arguing that, no, in this one particular biological sex matters so much more than any other consideration?

I don't think so.

Not if you really want to stop it. Instead of complain about it.

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