that’s all.

But what they don’t have is foreknowledge of events.

I’m not going to rule out humane execution, because I have my own concept of that which doesn’t jibe with anyone else’s, and I’ll get into that in a minute. But execution needs to be two things to be acceptable. The first is humane, and the second is practical. You could use the most serene painless method of execution in the world, anything from magic happy-drug injections to quick rock smashing, but if it’s against the person’s will, and they have foreknowledge of it, it’s not humane. It’s not just the physical act of dying with that moment in time rat-knowledge of “Oh, this is bad.” It’s the lead up to it that’s inhumane, the psychology of knowing you’re going to be killed when you don’t want to die.

The second thing is the practicality. By that I mean that it needs to be an efficient method for improving society. I haven’t seen any evidence that it is. Adding the death penalty into a case can make prosecutors push for a lighter charge to make conviction more likely. It results in a jury that’s skewed to the rich white guys, as prosecutors weed out those who oppose the death penalty from the get-go. So then you have a jury that’s all for the death penalty … but I’m not sure all those rich white guys are going to be impressed by a claim of date rape. It increases the odds that men as a class will be deciding “when, where and how fast it all happens,” which is what we’re trying to avoid. None of the factors involved in imposing the death penalty make my life any safer. I just don’t see it as a step toward empowering women.

What I’d like to see happen is the Kevorkian penalty. Nobody who gets the death penalty has it imposed against their will – they can have their life in prison, no parole if they prefer, but if they opt in, they are executed. All those public fund-draining appeals are done away with. Those that opt in save the state money. They may suffer less than someone who chose to spend 50 years in jail, and some will complain on those grounds alone, that they didn’t suffer enough. But once they’re dead, they’re dead. I have no compelling interest in ensuring they suffered before dying.

Separate from all that, is Stan’s comment about judges thinking the prison system is cruel and unusual punishment, but not doing anything about it. Judges don’t seem to have a problem with some healthy young buck going to jail. That’s not cruel and unusual. I don’t know the implications of that, except that he’s more likely to be the rapist, the perpetrator of violence, and the judge is okay with that because being the rapist is okay. It’s a very backwards way of looking at things, but it mirrors our society as a whole, where women end up restricting their lives for their own safety, while men who are the threat are free to move around at will. And so we restrict the weaker men from being in prison for their own safety, while the ones who are causing the problems are free, so to speak (like I said, this is looking at it backwards), to move around the prison at will, terrorizing people. In a completely backwards world, instead of keeping the old and weak out, the judge would refuse to sentence physically imposing people to standard prisons, because they’re the ones posing a threat to other inmates. (just idly sorting through that in my mind, don’t mind me.)

I’m with you sister. We may get there from different roads, but I’m with you on that one. Time for “regime change” -so to speak.

yes. we seen to spend a lot of time talking about how to stop men from raping, and how to punish them so that they don’t rape again. but we seem to be in despair, to the point of giving up, about shutting down the systematic propaganda and training system that teaches them to rape. it’s bit like raising a pit bull as an attack dog and then agonising over whether to shoot it or not. it may well be possible to raise men (I do know some, so I have evidence for this outrageous claim) who are not attack dogs.

social norms have tremendous power. some US soldiers in the Pacific theatre of WWII starved rather than eat grubs (insect larvae) in survival situations. the greenland Viking colony starved rather than ‘go native’ and eat fish. we have a mighty wurlitzer spouting pro-rape, anti-female propaganda day and night, on all media (well perhaps less so on radio, but all visual media for sure) socialising us all into the norm of male sexual predation and privilege.

if we could just get people to grok that 90 percent of pornography is rape advertising; that prostitution is rape-for-pay; and that the abuse of power is addictive not cathartic; then we could, IF we had any kind of progressive political power, make some headway in reducing the brainwashing of men into rapists from the earliest age. I’m not saying Utopia Overnight, but if you have a potential or propensity for sexual predation in male mammals — and I think the wiring is there — the smart thing to do socially is to counteract, mute, sublimate and/or suppress it, not to amplify and hyperstimulate it.

that means meaningful sanctions for rapists, and it means sanctions against those who promote and advocate for rape. fire, crowded theatre, etc. and it means establishing the anticapitalist notion that some things cannot be paid for — there is no amount of money that is a fair price for a rape…

in the short term, with a population of rape-educated males on the loose, defending women (self defence training, legal advocacy, shelters, antirapist media and fiction — counterpropaganda) are all high priority. so is economic empowerment and security for women, so that they are less vulnerable to male coercion and extortion.

if the pharma corps could come up with a med that selectively targeted misogyny we’d be cooking with gas — but of course, who would fund the development of such a “useless” product and how would men be persuaded to ingest it?

btw I think one reason why rapists get roughly treated in prison — and I think reports of this selectivity may be exaggerated when we consider the epic scale of prison rape and abuse, nonselective and random — is that hetero male prisoners are aware of “their” women (wives, girlfriends, daughters) “on the outside” without them, without the “male protector” that the male mafia sets women up to need. so the rapist in prison can be seen by other male prisoners as a threat to “their” undefended women. rape is a crime in patriarchy only when the woman raped belongs to another man. it’s a crime of property. the verb itself comes from the latinate root for “to carry off; to steal.” rape is the theft of another man’s woman. and thus the vindictiveness of male prisoners, separated from “their” women and insecure about their ownership of their women in absentia, is explainable without the puzzlement that we would naturally feel on seeing prison rapists get all righteous and pissed-off about civvie rapists…

This to me is emblematic of the very serious problems that plague feminism. Hello! Women ALSO expropriate the sexuality of men, and it no more *defines* “man” than it does “woman.” Yes, women’s expropriation has been organized as well: by biology and by the informal societies of women the world over. I’m sure some even have written treatises (easy to hide, men generally don’t read women’s stuff much). Sorry, there are no innocents, just the hard-pressed and economically depressed.

Orgasm (fake or real) is a woman’s way of endearing herself to a man she wants, for whatever reason she may want him (tall and strong, rich and well-educated, or simply good daddy potential). Anyone can intuit that her reason is to make the man feel good about himself as a lover to her, because she needs him -biologically, economically, etc.

_Sperm Wars: The Science of Sex_ (1996) by Robin Baker is illuminating in this regard. It’s an imperfect book -too culturally myopic for one. But the main idea is interestingly presented. Humans, so it turns out, aren’t really all that in charge of their behavior when it comes to sex –primal forces are diligently at work upon us. I can’t remember now how he explains homosexuality, but its presence in nature is clearly not accidental.

However, even though faking it may have biological and economic advantages for the women who do, that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a price to pay. Inauthenticity. Guilt by complicity.

It’s true, many women don’t have the luxury of any of it. They are at the bottom rung of the economic ladder and must attract a man and keep him around, however possible. It can be a very real question of survival. It seems to me the focus here may be on that end of the spectrum. If so, that’s cool.

But, not all women are in that position, and they can’t be ignored. Too many women are risk averse; their precious security is too often their one and only priority. Feminism must deal full force with women’s complicity and the very real obstacle it presents to equity of all kinds. The question is not only how men benefit from patriarchy but how women do too. Well, maybe I’m the only one that thinks that change is required of all.

I have requested _Death of Nature_ from the library. Am I the only one interested in a group-read?

Is the whole “what we should do with “the rapists” conversation getting a little bit fractal, or what? Is that just me?

I have a brief moment now that I’m supposed to be on my dinner break, but I had to say something to this.

Maybe my horizons aren’t broad enough, I dunno. I mean, I’ve done activism against the death penalty and I understand how fucked-up the death penalty is in this fucked-up country. And retaliatory, vigilante bullshit is for the ghost of John Wayne’s charicature. Yeah. I get that. I get the WHY of that.

At the same time, this rape shit has got to stop. It IS regulated, it is brushed off, it is cast aside as a crime that’s “not the worst thing,” when indeed it IS the worst thing for many, many women, and children, and some men. But it’s mostly women who suffer from it. Every day. Many women. All year long.

It’s not the only damn thing that makes up these punitive sanctions that Stan’s talking about. Assault, sexual or not, of women and children by men, child physical and sexual abuse that’s perpetrated BY MEN- and I think it’s kinda hard to deny that men are the folks doing this in most cases. We are still fucking exploited, and it ain’t abstract, we’re trained from an early age as to how to accept the exploitation, and the motherfucking beat goes on and on and only occasionaly skips.

This is fucked up and calls for very fucking decisive action that might not look pretty or sit well with folks’ notions of “ideal” or “progressive” or even “humane.”

Back when I was dating the ex, we had a boa constrictor. We had her for a few years. Her name was Eve and we decided to get rid of her when we brought cats into the house. Anyways. She ate rats.

Here’s the thing. You really aren’t supposed to give a pet snake live rats. Well, it’s best not to, a lot of vets and snake-folk agree, because live feeding has a tendency to make the snake more aggressive than perhaps it should be if it’s living in a glass tank inside your home. If a snake starts out eating live animals, it’s very very hard to get it to convert to the frozen “ratsicles” that they sell at the reptile store. Our pet snake, Eve, was started out on live mice from baby snakehood, and she outright refused anything that was thawed. We tried to convert her. For a LONG time.
She wouldn’t budge. We didn’t want a wild crazy boa constrictor on our hands, and we didn’t want a STARVING boa on our hands, either, so we compromised.

We’d kill the rats, right before we fed them to her. Humanely. Quickly. A smack on a big rock was all it took. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to have to do, and I was kind of relieved when we gave the snake away and I didn’t have to do it anymore. But it didn’t scar me emotionally for the rest of my life, either.

*sighs, ’cause this is such a hard topic*

The whole point of my mentioning that is to say, to just put it out there in a very theoretical and hypothetical way, that, I’m sorry, as much as I agree wholeheartedly with the analysis of the prison industrial complex’s effects on society and the ways that prisoners are mistreated and hurt and abused by this system, as much as I agree that the death penalty under capitalism is an atrocious mark on the face of human rights and human dignity, sentient creatures can be put to death humanely.

They’re not, a lot of the time, but it CAN happen.

I can very clearly see the wedge, the tool that this system IS in regards to keeping men and women apart on these issues. Men get fucked over by the prison industrial complex. Yeah. Women and children live in their own little home-style prison-industrial complexes at home, and in the greater community where they aren’t EVER guaranteed safety from rape, assault, and abuse. Am I right so far?

The system that we’re talking about, which is fucked up and not answering anybody’s questions, which shouldn’t really be a surprise because it never has and has never considered ALL of us to act as subjects within it, the majority of us are simply objects within it- is fucking with ALL PARTIES INVOLVED. That’s why it can’t be trusted, to provide any sort of protection from harm or justice or anything like that. It IS the wedge that makes us all act like wedges against ourselves and our sisters and brothers. And it keeps giving males, especially white males, the green light to rape us. The law’s ineffective in the actual prosecution phase most of the time, and the juridical system, while admitting to it’s own flaws, just says that the crimes of rape and abuse just aren’t important enough to risk the lives of the perpetrators.

Ok. That said, are we noticing here that the person, the survivor of the crime, whether it’s molestation, rape, assault, or any of the proscribed “beat my woman until she’s fucking broken” sorts of avenues- the survivor has BEEN PUNISHED FOR SIMPLY EXISTING AS WHO SHE IS- and she’s BEEN CONDITIONED to recieve the abuse again.

Is this making sense to anybody?

Whether or not women do the crime, they end up doing time, one way or another. We need to fucking arrange our priorities, first, before we start talking punitive judgements, I guess.

I just don’t see us as in a material realm where we can live out our ideals. Something’s gotta give somewhere. I’m not saying we can’t try to do that, nor that we should give up on a future (one in which all of us will probably be dead already) where humans can do that.

I can only speak for myself, here. But I gotta say that I’ve spent the vast majority of my life trying to play both sides of the fence, OUT OF NECESITY, not by choice. I STILL have to do it, because men hold the power in our society. I am fucking sick of that. I will not do it when I’m trying to think of ways to stop the wholesale exploitation of women, and the phyisical abuse that most of us have to endure in order to prep ourselves for whatever form of exploitation the fucking capitalist, white-supremacist, patriarchy has in store for us.

And I’m not talking about vigilanteism. But if women’s liberation is concretely a goal or whatever, we can’t keep putting the suffering of men that results from them breaking the liberal laws that their big, white brothers made- we can’t keep prioritizing THAT when we talk about how to stop rape and abuse, and ultimately women’s oppression.

The world is running out of the resources that humans live on. People are running out of oxygen. Much of this is due to imperial exploitation of the ecosphere, a phenomenon that is much like the exploitation of women by men. It’s the same power, fucking the earth, fucking us, fucking everyone who isn’t part of that power.

Well. Except the earth is where everything fucking comes from, and when the (male) ruling class fucks with the ecosystem enough, erasure of the species will happen. It happened to the fucking dinosaurs, why not to us?

The thing that’s unjust is that men as a class are getting to decide when, where, how fast it all happens. Even if they say that jesus is gonna come from the sky, they don’t believe that the world will end that way, what the fuck ever- and isn’t it telling that those in power WANT us to think these ways? Apathy equals abuse at this point, complicit abuse.

Women need to have the chance to step up and take power. We need institutional fucking power, y’all- because, well, the boiz have been running the show and we can see where it’s going. The Rape and Abuse Industrial Complex is there to stop us from having this power. If the power can’t be given to us, we need to take it.

In theory.

Hypothetically, the program we need is the one that leads to that. In my humble opinion. Theoretically, she hypothesized.

Egad. Another goddam diatribe. If I don’t go now I don’t get to eat.

Tomorrow I’m going to Orlando!

First, thanks for your post! I found it to be very thoughtful, asking many good questions, raising many good issues on this subject. The castration solution is not a solution to rape, it is a solution to perhaps lowering testosterone levels in some men, which is not a “remedy” for rape, unless it can be shown that testosterone levels are very causal in rape happening. As far as I can see, this sort of strategy, whether effective in some cases or not, not only requires the rape of someone FIRST, as you well noted, but also disguises rape as somehow a “biological” problem, rather than a political one. I know lots of high testosterone guys, and most of ‘em are anti-rape, and haven’t raped (to my knowledge). I knew one big tall beefy testosterony guy, who had a lesbian mom. He had pasty pale skin and dark hair and eyes and a relatively deep voice. He used to wear black clothing a lot, with hardcore metal bands in white on his torn t-shirts. He grew up poor in rural Amerikkka. In high school–already taller and larger than most males there, he used to approach bullies who were picking on “fags” and say, ominously: “I don’t think that’s such a good idea” with a serious look on his face. The bullies would scramble and tended not to bother other kids in that high school.

As someone who supports the radical feminist effort to end all male domination of all women, trans folks, intersex folks, queer males, boys, and weaker hetero males, as well as institutionalized whitemale domination of most of the planet, I think indulging those sorts of remedies and perspectives is dangerous, and, as you say, not really going to stop any single man from committing a rape.

RE:
I guess after spending time around so many of them, hating them and hurting them, I’ve come closer to trying to examine reconciliation more closely than punishment. This doesn’t mean I don’t think as much about the horror this man has inflicted to the survivor as I do about the man and whether or not he can somehow be a productive human being. Contrary, the reason I think of these things is to try and understand ways to prevent these crimes.

Just a thought: Have you read the work of James Messerschmidt? He writes about conditions and causes of boys and men’s violence, and has clearly been paying attention to what feminists have been saying about this issue for the last thirty-plus years. Stan probably knows of others who are dealing with this very issue in their writing: how being gendered affects and creates gender violence, in short. See:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/102-3305713-4143335?url=index%3Dstripbooks%3Arelevance-above&field-keywords=messerschmidt%2C+james

RE:
So I ask, after my rambling, whether or not anyone feels that rapists being punished not only by state for their crimes, but also by nearly everyone around them for the duration of their imprisonment, is just and good?

I think, as you note, the racism and classism of the “criminal” justice system, needs to be remedied, and that, in the mean time, the best interests of the raped should be prioritized, which DOESN’T happen when usually whitemale judges let usually white and non-poor molesters, rapists, and incest perpetrators go free. Sometimes even when a rapist/sex offender is in jail, the child or woman cannot sleep well at night, and never feels safe, unless or until the man dies (if they are “lucky” enough to only have one perpetrator, which is not the case with most women I know). That’s sort of how I felt. When my cousin handed me the obituary of the man who sexually assaulted me when I was 12 (it was perhaps 15 years after the assault that she handed it to me), I felt a sense of safety that I didn’t realize I WASN’T feeling before that moment. But, I am male, and now an adult who is not in prison, I do not have to fear rape the way every “free” woman I know does, very consciously or not. That women experience rape in a context where harassment, objectification, fetishization of female body parts, and a multi-billion dollar industry selling the idea to men that women love rape, means that much more needs to be cut out of society than men’s testicles, eh?

RE:
Is there reconciliation for the worst offenders who strip so much away from victims? Or do we swiftly and deftly eliminate them and hope we don’t get one wrong some day?

I’m not comfortable with it being framed up in that either/or way. Can some rapists become non-rapists? Of course. Plenty of men rape once or twice, then meet a feminist or nonfeminist self-respecting and empowered vocal woman who teaches them that forced sex is not OK, or that fucking drunk women is not OK, and then they humanize themselves and go on to be non-rapists. Surely there are more options than “reconciliation” and “elimination”! How about removing them from society if they are a (rapist) danger to any woman, or child, or man, or “other”, while working on dismantling and transforming these gendered/sexist social binary/hierarchical systems and sexxx industries which teach men that rape is sexy?

RE:
Does taking away any and all ‘power’ a rapist might have mean they will not rape?

Only if they’re in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives.

RE:
And finally, does the fact that women are suffering terribly and unarguably at the hands of men mean that the perpetraters of this strong-arming must pay at least equally for there to be any sort of justice?

I don’t understand justice this way: as “getting even”. As Andrea Dworkin said in a speech to 500 anti-sexist men (see: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html ):

‘I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn’t just an idea. It’s not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with all those statements like: “Oh, that happens to men too.” I name an abuse and I hear: “Oh, it happens to men too.” That is not the equality we are struggling for. We could change our strategy and say: well, okay, we want equality; we’ll stick something up the ass of a man every three minutes.
You’ve never heard that from the feminist movement, because for us equality has real dignity and importance–it’s not some dumb word that can be twisted and made to look stupid as if it had no real meaning.

As a way of practicing equality, some vague idea about giving up power is useless. Some men have vague thoughts about a future in which men are going to give up power or an individual man is going to give up some kind of privilege that he has. That is not what equality means either.

Equality is a practice. It is an action. It is a way of life. It is a social practice. It is an economic practice. It is a sexual practice. It can’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t have it in your home if, when the people leave the home, he is in a world of his supremacy based on the existence of his cock and she is in a world of humiliation and degradation because she is perceived to be inferior and because her sexuality is a curse.’

I leave you with that.

Thanks again for sharing what you did here.

Julian

On another note, this notion of justice as punitive — and I am aware of how many contradictions are raised by raising this — goes right back to the very narrow definition of rape that tries to define rape as a pathology that is loss of control at a key moment, instead of the outcome of a system of control of men over women.

Rape is not outlawed; it is regulated. It is the punitive sanction for uppity women as well as the collection of a sexual entitlement that is assumed for all men.

As far as the idea of capital punishment goes, I could go on at length about why I oppose that, how it’s ineffective as a deterrent, how it increases violence in society, and how it’s applied in a racist manner. Aside from all that, the extra financial burden of the extended legal process is not free – for each person who gets executed, there are X amount of people going without health care or food stamps, because somebody thought it was more important to exact the ultimate revenge on a criminal than it was to take care of someone who was sick or hungry.

There is a strong perception that convicted rapists suffer in all kinds of ways that are not proportionate to their crime. (Note: I am not agreeing with that sentiment; I’m just stating that it’s a perception.) Juries don’t want to convict rapists because their perception is that they will get excessively harsh (cruel and unusual) punishment in jail. Judges often won’t send them to jail if they are convicted precisely because the prison system itself is so violent. There is either no jail time, or all-out torture. So the judge sets the sentence in consideration of the fact that there is no middle ground.

In a local case involving people I know, a man was convicted of molesting his granddaughter. The judge sent him right back home to the same house where they all lived together, because he was too old, according to the judge, to survive what prison had in store for him. In the recent case of Richard Thompson, who sexually assaulted a child, he was given no jail time because he was “too short” for prison. While I think the ruling was wrong and abhorrent, I have some sympathy for people who think even the most vile of our criminals don’t deserve to be sentenced to an environment like Abu Ghraib. If I’d been in the judge’s shoes, I’d have sent him to jail, but I couldn’t have passed a polygraph claiming I’d done the right thing. If the people in prison weren’t so busy practicing their Ninja Moves on the rapists locked up alongside them, both those men would be behind bars right now.