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.

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.

Lisa Wade says

Her Dad corrects her, saying “Boys, well, boys want both…”

But her Dad is wrong.  Boys in the U.S. are taught from a very early age to avoid everything associated with girls.  Being called a “girl” is, in itself, an insult to boys.  And the slurs “sissy” and “fag” are reserved for men who act feminine.  So, no, boys (who have learned the rules of how to be a boy) generally reject anything girly.  (Indeed, this was one of the themes of Jimmy Kimmel “bad present” prank played by parents on their kids.)

The girl’s Dad, however, articulates a symmetrical analysis. The idea is that there are gender stereotypes — ones that apply to boys and ones that apply to girls — and that both are inaccurate, unfair, and constraining.  His mistake is in missing the asymmetrical value placed on masculinity and femininity.  Boys and girls are simply not positioned equally in relationship to stereotypes of femininity and masculinity.

Source: Sociological Images

 

What I sort of want to know is... given how totally full of awesome this kid is at, what, age three or maybe early four, why on this big blue marble would anyone mind being associated with girls, being a girl, being mistaken for a girl, admiring the dickens out of girls, and so on. And why would anyone waste an average of .5 liters of tidal volume wishing they had more sons instead of daughters, or selectively fucking aborting daughters, etc.?

You know what's really great about that video? She could have been my daughter at that age, who certainly made observations that astute. And you know what's great about that? Neither the girl in the video nor my daughter are curve-bending prodigies -- they're perfectly normal, perfectly sensible human beings who are special as possible to their loved ones but nothing like unique. Which is good because if they were prodigies there might be some excuse for excepting them but still grubbing every other human with XX pairing at the 23rd chromosome.*

Instead girls rock because people rock. Sure, some rock more than others... because some people rock more than others. Still no cause for culturally drowning girls... and only girls, naturally... in a deep pink sea.

* For starters. There are plenty of other ways of designating "girls" for the purpose of discriminating. But XX chromosomes are pretty representative so let's start there.

So I've been thinking a lot (a lot) about issues of consent, of sexual abuse, of "gray areas," of stereotypes and assumptions, and, especially, about accountability. Last summer, here on this blog, at No Seriously, What About Teh Menz, and in various comment threads around the intertubes, I started digging deeper into what I saw as just one or two incidents of violent sexual assault I experienced as a child -- one at age four at the hands of a ~12-year-old neighbor girl, one around age 14 at the hands of a ~17-year-old neighborhood bully.

The more I've been digging into it the more I've come to realize that, you know, I grew up in a culture that was pretty rife with sexual abuse -- enough so that I only really registered the above-mentioned incidents. But the kid who was the closest thing to a best friend in elementary school? Duh, let's see, he and his sister were foster kids who's father taught them all about "corn-holing" and "fuck-rubbers?" Gee, only this summer did it occur to me to wonder why they were foster kids? The core of the new-to-town teens I hung out with in late high-school and after I dropped out but before I left home? The variously emancipated and/or runaway boys and girls who at times seemed voraciously sexual(ized) but spoke in fluent 70's-era "sexual liberation?" The ones who's attitudes and behaviors deeply influenced much of my own early sexual aspirations? It only recently occurred to me that a contemporary assessment would be that they'd been groomed to the nines both by adult influences. And speaking of grooming and sexual abuse, how about the handful of distinctly predatory adult "youth counselors" (inside a much larger group of entirely decent, appropriate ones) who advocated boundary-crossing in ways that, while not necessarily unsound advice overall, nevertheless advanced their own "hands on" agendas with various "promising young people?"

Let's not even talk about the barkingly predatory "pre-date-rape" alcohol, cocaine, and Quaalude drenched college music bar culture I lived and worked in where it seemed at the time to be perfectly "cool" for more experienced bar patrons and bartenders to take over-intoxicated young men and women home to "crash." Where what this year would be called morning-after gaslighting was considered just helping the erstwhile partner get "perspective."

And all that's got me wondering where have those early influences left me!?!?! What else has been done to me? What else have I let happen? What else have I done in all earnestness? What impact have I had on others?

It's been bugging me a lot. Sort of a hard, fast replay of the old Will Rogers line, which I cite frequently, that "it's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you know that just ain't so."

Anyway, while I could launch into how my latest runaway train of thought about consent and assumptions has been accelerated by Clarisse Thorn's controversial but excellent exploration of forgiveness vs. accountability in On Change and Accountability, or how it was set rolling by Rachel Hills' Best of 2010: “But women don’t rape!”: sexual pressure, rejection and the male sex drive discourse, and how at the moment I'm feeling a bit like the only people one should really trust in sexual situations are the meticulous negotiation fetishists in the kink community (for instance see item #4 in Andrea Zanin's Expectations of Dominance: Picking Through the Tangle.) But I'm still not feeling completely collected about it, and besides, at the moment I'm feeling all Maslow's hammer about unstated assumptions that can interfere unspoken and even verbal consent... and so at this point any conclusions I draw are likely to be, um, over the top.

So instead I'd like to point out this cute little 2004 video short Jason Reitman and his then-partner Michele Lee called "Consent." It's not perfect (the text "romance deserves better than this" at the end of the credits is a little ambiguous) but it nicely captures how little we're able to communicate with simple yeses, nos, and you-want-tos.

YouTube link via Caitlin.