Random raves

It doesn't mean that women are labelling all or even most men as rapists. It certainly doesn't mean they are labelling YOU as a rapist - if that's the case, and they are speaking up, they won't be faffing around with that term - they would just say that "you're a rapist/abuser/creep". Simple.

But here is a nice concise definition to help explain the concept:

["Rape culture" is] referring to the culture that makes rape incredibly common, blames the victims for putting themselves in a position where they could be raped, and teaches women to avoid, at all costs, making a fuss over things that make them feel threatened, because they won’t be taken seriously anyway. It’s the culture that lets men get away with doing the things that make women feel threatened, because their feelings are so much more important than the women’s feelings.

To add to that, it's not just women (and trans* and gender-ambiguous people) who are subjected to the fallout of rape culture. It's the men who are supposed to believe they "can't help themselves". It's men being told that women have amazing skills at reading body language that men can't attain [1]. It's the decent guys who are supposed to yuk along with their mates making the shitty unwanted sexualised jokes and remarks [2]. It's being tarred with the same brush as that minority of men who go beyond the jokes and skeevy behaviour to actual sexual assault. As Kate Harding says:

...You and the guys you hang out with may not really mean anything by it when you talk about crazy bitches and dumb sluts and heh-heh-I’d-hit-that and you just can’t reason with them and you can’t live with ‘em can’t shoot ‘em and she’s obviously only dressed like that because she wants to get laid and if they can’t stand the heat they should get out of the kitchen and if they can’t play by the rules they don’t belong here and if they can’t take a little teasing they should quit and heh heh they’re only good for fucking and cleaning and they’re not fit to be leaders and they’re too emotional to run a business and they just want to get their hands on our money and if they’d just stop overreacting and telling themselves they’re victims they’d realize they actually have all the power in this society and white men aren’t even allowed to do anything anymore and and and…

I get that you don’t really mean that shit. I get that you’re just talking out your ass.

But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.

And that guy? Thought you were on his side.

And that is rape culture - the guys who do this shit thinking you and society in general [3] ARE on their side, implicitly. That "most guys" would do the same thing if they weren't too "pussywhipped" by "PC" or fear of the law.

Actually, most men don't rape, not because they are afraid of the law, but because they are decent. It's very simple. But given the constant harassment of women and other marginalised groups on the street, on public transport, at parties, at clubs, in the work place (if it's one of those work places), the low-level crap is part of the culture.

And that culture helps enable the men who do actually do the rapes and assaults because of the reluctance of us in society to follow up on the small shit and "have each other's backs". How many times have you laughed off some obviously-unwanted shitty remark or grab that a mate made? Every one of those occasions was when you had his back, not hers. It adds up.

And for the guys who get all up in arms and say "I'm not like that wah wah wah", well, if you're NOT like that, then any post on the internet discussing the problem is not about YOU. Really and truly. Does that help you focus on the actual problem now?
 

[1] Actually, men read body language with no problem pretty damn well constantly - you know when some dick at the pub is starting up the "are you looking at me?" routine, without him saying a word. You can walk into an office or a building site and spot who the bosses are. Etc etc.

[2] Sure, sometimes it's not unwanted, but there's a time and a place and the right jokes and right people.

[3] Yeah yeah, some few get prosecuted for rape - a minuscule proportion of the actual offenders.

At 03:04 PM (the permalink to the comment doesn't seem to work for me), after a bit of thread-drift, Essie Elephant wrote apropos Jane Eyre: "It’s not a particularly feminist piece - read it today and you’ll think that it’s okay for men to keep their insane wives locked in the attic, for them to sexually harass the help and treat them like shit in order to provoke sexual tension and jealousy, and that it’s perfectly acceptable for missionary men to condescend to complete strangers, as long as they are women." ... "I tend to think that Austen et. al. is just something that can fall either way on the feminist scale, depending on how you chose to view it. And I think both views are correct."

I'm sorry, but what? WHAT? This person has obviously never heard of social mores, of it being a book ahead of its time in terms of (proto-) feminist sensibility, and actually, I don't recall Rochester "sexually harassing the help" until Jane expressed her own feelings to him. It was perfectly fine to lock insane people in your attic, and in fact would be considered to be the humane thing to do (rather than lock them up in an asylum). Of course, Rochester's motivations are a bit more complex than that, as is shown. Finally, there is the fact that the condescending missionary is portrayed as being a total tool, for chrissakes. There's more discussion on it downthread, but it seemed that this person was not going to be budged on his/her recollection of the novel's themes.

While I totally can relate to the fact that most things are relative and there are a myriad shades of grey, what the fuck is going on with the fence-sitting remark that "both views are correct" in terms of where the book can be situated on a feminist continuum? Seriously, bullshit. It either predominantly is, or it isn't. Forget this "both views are correct" crap.

I totally agree that a lot of it can be seen to be uncomfortable in terms of modern sensibilities. There is classism and racism. We don't generally lock madwomen up in our attics these days. The men are mostly arseholes and the women are treated like crap from our POV, because, hello, we are still not living an a post-feminist society, and they certainly weren't then. Jane often expresses her feelings towards Rochester in what could be seen to be submissive terms (like "master"), although I'd argue that "acts of service" are included in the "five love languages" that have been discussed everywhere for a reason (and it definitely seems to be one of Jane's predominant "languages", which she uses to express her feelings for everyone, male and female, that she cares about); and also, that a word like "master" has become somewhat less nuanced over the last 150 years.

But I can't see how, even if you aren't willing to contextualise all the foregoing in its era, you can't see the embodied feminism of the book. Despite all the propaganda of the time, with its assertions that women were the "weaker vessel" and inferior to men in every way, except, perhaps, in "moral suasion" (and the book is a little too early for that), Jane asserts her equality to Rochester as soon as she admits her love for him. In fact, by feeling equal to him, she can love him. She does this throughout - she feels that she is the equal to all the members of the aristocracy, the men, everyone she encounters. She states that her heart and her feelings are the same as a man's. It's an incredibly powerful notion for a woman of that time to assert her equality so positively (if silently, in the main, due to her position).

In addition to Jane's fundamental expectation of equality, every single time that Jane is confronted with a dilemma, she asserts her right to make her own choice. The words "choose" and "choice" are extremely important throughout the novel. She does what she thinks is right all along, and she is very conscious of exercising her choice. And of course, the notion that women could actually assert their own choices was pretty revolutionary in those days. It doesn't matter that Rochester and St John argued and tried to convince her that her choices weren't correct. See above about it not being a post-feminist society now, and certainly not then. And neither of them succeeded in persuading her to change her mind once it was made up, for the record.

There's also the aspect that as the whole book is about Jane observing and commenting on the various injustices that she is subject to, it is political, in that "personal is political" vein. No, she's not lobbying for votes - it's 50 years too early - but she's certainly not sitting there saying that injustice and oppression should be women's destiny (unlike the prevailing view of the time).