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I have done sweet FA of my homework this weekend, because my motivation, frankly, is hovering around zero. I've also been reading the fascinating posts on Shapely Prose this weekend about women, harassment, and what we do about it.
The post series started off with Sweet Machine deconstructing - more in sorrow than in anger, in an entry called Would It Kill You to be Civil - the recent xckd cartoon featuring male and female figures not talking to each other on the train. The punchline boils down to the fact that the female really did want the guy to talk to her, and SM pointed out that buying into the standard fantasy of "she really wants it" wasn't such a good thing in this instance.
So, that lead to a monster thread, with a few people wondering why SM had problems with the strip, and literally hundreds of others enumerating the many and constant attempts by mainly men to pester, harass and otherwise make women feel unsafe on public transport and many other environments.
That led to a discussion sparked by some men wondering just what they can do to stop women feeling unsafe. In the interests of non-flippant discourse, everyone refrained from re-posting the Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work, and guest poster Starling did an entry a couple of days later called Schrödinger's Rapist; or a guy's guide to approaching a woman without being maced. Wow. That certainly brought them out of the woodwork, despite the fairly stringent moderation that the Shapely Prose posse do in the comments. Personally, I think "Schrödinger's Rapist" is a particularly elegant way of describing the syndrome where you don't want to engage in random conversation with random men due to the likelihood of their outright harassing you, or simply refusing to STFU and go away. The thing is, we are not blessed with psychic powers, and random dude who does not get the hint to leave it be, or refuses to kindly fuck off when invited to might simply be clueless, or might actually be dangerous. Who can tell, except from the displayed behaviour?
So, the resulting comment thread had a bunch of (mainly) guys blaming the victims, minimising, denying (more on this later), deploring the fact that they apparently can't talk to random strangers any more (according the feminist police) ,and generally refusing to take responsibility. There were accusations that all us paranoid feminists were painting all men as rapists - hello, why would anyone bother giving advice to men on avoiding been seen as engaging in pre-assault behaviour if we assumed they'd be assaulting us anyway? There was a bit of "what about teh MENZ?", with the responses that, of course, patriarchy and oppression fuck up everyone. And intersectionality, handled well by Kate Harding:
Now, all of this has been underpinned by the concept of rape culture, which is basically the fact that women are seen as commodities and without true agency. All sorts of things like "battle of the sexes" jokes, giggling at men who get assaulted by women, sexist advertising, rape being used as a method of aggression and punishment, yadda yadda yadda, all feed into it. Personally, I think that term is not the best, since it describes an effect of misogynistic culture, but I suppose it's a snappier phrase. It does have the advantage of highlighting the embodied aggression that is the underlying currrent of what "rape culture" describes.
Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville posted Rape Culture 101 article, which was great. If you want to know all the nuances of the term, that is the place to go. However, there was one aspect I do disagree with, and which I called out in the comments. She quotes the following assertion: It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent.
My problem with it is, naturally, that sex often is violent. Plenty of people who deem themselves to be 100% vanilla will have "rough sex" more or less frequently. Violence can be hot. NON-CONSENSUAL violence, not so much. Recognising that voilence is part of our psyches is not a bad thing - what may or may not be "bad" is the manner in which it is expressed and depicted. Or perhaps contact sports contribute to rape culture as well (hah, certainly plenty of sportsmen do, but that's a slightly different kettle of fish). Well, we'll see where my objections go at the OP. A good discussion of it from the kinky side of the fence is over at SM Feminist, particularly a guest post by Mz Muse called "BDSM: a class act?", but there are a few others tagged with "rape culture" over there.
Finally, I want to get back to some of the denial tactics employed at the Shapely Prose posts. More than one male commenter objected to the statistic of 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted, which could be extrapolated to imply that 1 in 60 men are rapists (generously assuming that one man will commit ten assaults). Some guys stated that tarring so many men with the rapist brush is bad, and by the way, the stat is talking about sexual assaults, not rape.
Dear fuckheads. Yes, it is a continuum. Yes, "sexual assault" can be used to describe someone rubbing up against you, feeling your tits, patting you on the butt, all the way through to actual penile penetration in one orifice or another, with or without accompanying beatings, torture and injury.
( Cut for graphic triggering remarks on childhood sexual abuse )
The post series started off with Sweet Machine deconstructing - more in sorrow than in anger, in an entry called Would It Kill You to be Civil - the recent xckd cartoon featuring male and female figures not talking to each other on the train. The punchline boils down to the fact that the female really did want the guy to talk to her, and SM pointed out that buying into the standard fantasy of "she really wants it" wasn't such a good thing in this instance.
So, that lead to a monster thread, with a few people wondering why SM had problems with the strip, and literally hundreds of others enumerating the many and constant attempts by mainly men to pester, harass and otherwise make women feel unsafe on public transport and many other environments.
That led to a discussion sparked by some men wondering just what they can do to stop women feeling unsafe. In the interests of non-flippant discourse, everyone refrained from re-posting the Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work, and guest poster Starling did an entry a couple of days later called Schrödinger's Rapist; or a guy's guide to approaching a woman without being maced. Wow. That certainly brought them out of the woodwork, despite the fairly stringent moderation that the Shapely Prose posse do in the comments. Personally, I think "Schrödinger's Rapist" is a particularly elegant way of describing the syndrome where you don't want to engage in random conversation with random men due to the likelihood of their outright harassing you, or simply refusing to STFU and go away. The thing is, we are not blessed with psychic powers, and random dude who does not get the hint to leave it be, or refuses to kindly fuck off when invited to might simply be clueless, or might actually be dangerous. Who can tell, except from the displayed behaviour?
So, the resulting comment thread had a bunch of (mainly) guys blaming the victims, minimising, denying (more on this later), deploring the fact that they apparently can't talk to random strangers any more (according the feminist police) ,and generally refusing to take responsibility. There were accusations that all us paranoid feminists were painting all men as rapists - hello, why would anyone bother giving advice to men on avoiding been seen as engaging in pre-assault behaviour if we assumed they'd be assaulting us anyway? There was a bit of "what about teh MENZ?", with the responses that, of course, patriarchy and oppression fuck up everyone. And intersectionality, handled well by Kate Harding:
To the representatives of Dude Nation, if it helps, remind yourself that this is not just a man/woman thing. It is an “assessing the threat of a more privileged person” thing. I, for instance, am Schrodinger’s White Supremacist to every POC I meet, Schrodinger’s Homophobe to every gay person, etc. (If you’re white and straight, so are you! Welcome to the club!) Now, because I’m a woman, I’m statistically much less likely to get violent — but enough white, straight women are hateful assholes that I can’t fault anyone who does not share my various layers of privilege for assuming that said layers might, in fact, make me an asshole!
Nobody owes you their trust. And people who belong to oppressed groups have a damned good reason to be wary of people who don’t belong to the corresponding privileged ones — which means yes, those of us who have the privilege will sometimes have to prove ourselves. Is it unfair? Well, shit yes, systematic oppression is unfair in many ways, most of them far more damaging than that one.
A couple of days later, Fillyjonk put up another post soliciting responses from women who hadn't ever been harassed by men. As she observed in another entry, there seemed to be quite a bit of denial from some of the women commenters, but there were 80-something comments in total, with somewhat more than half being genuinely from women who had experienced NO harassment. Given the thousands of page views on the post, it came in at less than 2%.Maybe that many women are immune, but even so, think about that number. It's horrifying, really.Nobody owes you their trust. And people who belong to oppressed groups have a damned good reason to be wary of people who don’t belong to the corresponding privileged ones — which means yes, those of us who have the privilege will sometimes have to prove ourselves. Is it unfair? Well, shit yes, systematic oppression is unfair in many ways, most of them far more damaging than that one.
Now, all of this has been underpinned by the concept of rape culture, which is basically the fact that women are seen as commodities and without true agency. All sorts of things like "battle of the sexes" jokes, giggling at men who get assaulted by women, sexist advertising, rape being used as a method of aggression and punishment, yadda yadda yadda, all feed into it. Personally, I think that term is not the best, since it describes an effect of misogynistic culture, but I suppose it's a snappier phrase. It does have the advantage of highlighting the embodied aggression that is the underlying currrent of what "rape culture" describes.
Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville posted Rape Culture 101 article, which was great. If you want to know all the nuances of the term, that is the place to go. However, there was one aspect I do disagree with, and which I called out in the comments. She quotes the following assertion: It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent.
My problem with it is, naturally, that sex often is violent. Plenty of people who deem themselves to be 100% vanilla will have "rough sex" more or less frequently. Violence can be hot. NON-CONSENSUAL violence, not so much. Recognising that voilence is part of our psyches is not a bad thing - what may or may not be "bad" is the manner in which it is expressed and depicted. Or perhaps contact sports contribute to rape culture as well (hah, certainly plenty of sportsmen do, but that's a slightly different kettle of fish). Well, we'll see where my objections go at the OP. A good discussion of it from the kinky side of the fence is over at SM Feminist, particularly a guest post by Mz Muse called "BDSM: a class act?", but there are a few others tagged with "rape culture" over there.
Finally, I want to get back to some of the denial tactics employed at the Shapely Prose posts. More than one male commenter objected to the statistic of 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted, which could be extrapolated to imply that 1 in 60 men are rapists (generously assuming that one man will commit ten assaults). Some guys stated that tarring so many men with the rapist brush is bad, and by the way, the stat is talking about sexual assaults, not rape.
Dear fuckheads. Yes, it is a continuum. Yes, "sexual assault" can be used to describe someone rubbing up against you, feeling your tits, patting you on the butt, all the way through to actual penile penetration in one orifice or another, with or without accompanying beatings, torture and injury.
( Cut for graphic triggering remarks on childhood sexual abuse )
