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If I were raped today, I would not report it

25th October 2006, 11:49 am by Stan

If I were raped today, I would not report it

Julie Bindel on why she has lost faith in the system

Wednesday October 25, 2006
The Guardian

http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpunishment/comment/0,,1930915,00.html

When I was 18 I worked in a pub, and, one evening, the landlord and his son tried to rape me. Somehow I managed to get away. I didn’t report the incident to the police because, back in 1980, it was widely recognised that women who reported a sexual assault were usually seen as liars. I imagined that the police would have grilled me on why I was upstairs with two men (I was taking a sneaky break and sharing a cigarette with the son), and why I had been drinking (I had had half a pint of lager). For years afterwards, while campaigning against rape and other crimes as a founder of the group Justice for Women, I bitterly regretted not reporting my attackers. My overwhelming feeling was guilt. What if they succeeded next time?

Now that guilt has been replaced by anger. While in the 1980s and 1990s police and public attitudes towards rape victims seemed to be improving, they more recently appear to be ricocheting backwards. So much so, that a couple of years ago I made a pact with myself, which I vowed never to reveal publicly. At this juncture I feel I must, though: if I was raped now, I do not think I would report it to the police.

Those who report their attackers and see their cases either discontinued or the defendant acquitted – as happens with almost 95% of reported rapes – are now faced with the risk of being identified, vilified and even criminalised. Anonymity was granted for rape victims in the 1970s, but last week for the first time a woman was publicly “named and shamed” after reporting a sexual assault. Lord Campbell-Savours, the Labour peer, used parliamentary privilege to identify the woman during a debate on rape legislation in the House of Lords, describing her as “a serial and repeated liar” after a man initially found guilty of a sex attack on her had his conviction overturned. Her identity was then published in the Daily Mail. The woman denies lying, and says the only other allegations she has made are of sexual abuse by her father (who is now dead) and an assault by a boyfriend she had as a teenager.

Then there was the 18-year-old “lap dancer” recently jailed for six months for perverting the course of justice. Various footballers accused of “roasting” women have been exonerated, while the women who accused them of rape are vilified as “prostitutes” and “gold-diggers”. In the past seven years, women have also been sued for defamation by men accused of raping them after their cases were discontinued by the police.

And, given the current media fixation on women bringing “false allegations”, it would be easy to assume our prisons were full of innocent men. In fact, the conviction rate for rape is at an all-time low. In 1985, 1,800 complaints of rape were made and one in four men convicted. In 2003, 13,000 complaints were made but only one in 20 was convicted.

A story I heard recently only confirmed for me that if the situation does not drastically improve, not only are conviction rates going to fall further, but reports to police will too.

Shabnam, an 18-year-old Asian woman, had been drinking in a pub with her friend Simon, before walking to a local park where she agreed to have sex with him. Afterwards, Simon rang a friend, who arrived a short while later with another man in tow. All three raped Shabnam, during which one of the men filmed some of the activity on his mobile phone. When the men left, Shabnam called 999 and reported that she had been raped.

When the police arrived at the park, “The first thing the officer said was, “Ugh! She stinks of alcohol”, says Shabnam. “Once I told them I had been raped before [aged 12], their attitude changed, as if I was a loose woman.”

Shabnam decided to withdraw her allegation and said she had not been raped. “The reason I said that was because of their attitude towards me. They were so unsympathetic, I could not face pursuing it.”

The police escorted her home, where her mother was waiting. “They said me and mum were speaking to each other in our ‘native language’,” says Shabnam, “which we never do. It was as if they were accusing us of trying to concoct a story.”

The officer then asked Shabnam’s mother if her daughter was “mentally unsound”.

The next day, covered in bruises from the attacks, Shabnam went to the accident and emergency department of her local hospital. There she was advised to attend a sexual assault centre, where staff encouraged her to return to the police and make a statement. Police noted that she was under the care of the adolescent mental health services and, after consulting her counsellor, recorded her statement by video, a process reserved for children and vulnerable witnesses. Two of the men were arrested some days later (the police didn’t even bother pursuing the third man). One produced footage on his mobile phone of Shabnam masturbating and giving oral sex to one of the men. Not surprisingly, the men’s accounts differed significantly from hers.

Four weeks after the rapes, Shabnam was contacted by a police officer from the much lauded Sapphire team – set up to provide a specialist service to victims of sexual assault – who asked her to come to the station as there had been “developments”. When Shabnam arrived she was arrested for perverting the course of justice. “I screamed so loudly,” says Shabnam, “that my mother could hear me in the station waiting area.”

Police had decided Shabnam was lying on the strength of the “evidence” captured on the mobile phone, the fact that Shabnam gave inconsistent accounts and because she had laughed intermittently throughout the process. In March, the government proposed that juries should be able to hear expert evidence on the way people behave after a serious sexual assault – for example, it is not uncommon for rape complainants to giggle in the witness box due to nerves and trauma.

“I am convinced that I was treated so appallingly [by the police],” says Shabnam, “because I complained about the way [they had] treated me on the night of the rape.”

Frightened and confused, Shabnam accepted a caution from police, terrified that she would end up in court, with no anonymity to protect her. A few weeks later, she tried to kill herself. “I now want to challenge the caution because I feel I was bullied into it,” she says.

In 1982, a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Police: A Complaint of Rape, showed a rape complainant being interviewed by Thames Valley police. The police officers were shown bullying a woman into discontinuing her complaint against three men, with one saying to her: “This is the biggest load of bollocks I’ve ever heard.” It provoked anger at the system and swiftly led to a change in police procedures. The documentary showed that police were trained to test such claims rigorously at the initial reporting stage in a way that left the complainant feeling humiliated, frightened and intimidated. As a result, police were retrained to handle complainants with respect and with the presumption of belief.

Despite improvements, there remains a culture within the police that assumes that women who report rape are lying. One study found that a third of police assumed that at least a quarter of all reports were false. Research actually suggests, though, that numbers of false allegations of rape are no higher than for any other crime. Assumptions of false allegations are plainly dangerous. One case discontinued by police as a “false allegation” involved a man who turned out to be a serial sex attacker. Eight years later he was convicted of 24 rapes.

A police officer I spoke to, who asked not to be named, said that officers dealing with rape have recently been told to be “rigorous” in their pursuit of false allegations, “and root them out early on”.

Dave Gee, vice chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) working group on rape denies that police have been given such a directive and believes that false allegations of rape are rare. “There is no research whatsoever which suggests it’s endemic,” he says. “Either way, there should be no pre-judging of victims. A report of rape should be treated as rape.”

If more cases such as Shabnam’s occur, we may as well forget about the criminal justice system and train groups of vigilantes to exact revenge and, hopefully, deter attacks. Because if I were raped, I would rather take my chances as a defendant in court, than as a complainant in a system that seems bent on proving that rape is a figment of malicious women’s imagination.

· Some names have been changed.

Category: Gender, General  |  Comment (RSS)

42 Comments

  1. Elaina:

    Finally. Somebody’s saying something here about this fucked-up shit.

    I don’t know how many misguided men I’ve talked to who seem to throw this out as a story/evidence/whateverthehellitssupposedtoprove.

    “I mean, I know this guy who knew this guy who’s brother’s friend’s cousin’s uncle got falsely accused of raped and thrown in jail forever and his life was ruined. Ruined I say! And it could happen to any of us at any minute, if we so much as sneeze at a girl the wrong way.” That’s how it usually goes.

    I’d like to smack whatever idiot started this upside the head with a cast-iron skillet. *smacks the patriarchy upside the head with a cast-iron skillet*

    If only, IF ONLY the cost of rape was so high for the men who do it. Jesus knows it’s worse for the women who survive it.

    26 October 2006, 1:40 am

  2. CSP:

    Just to dip my toe in the water here… I will remark that concern for preventing the false allegation of rape/sex discrimination does appear to be a greater concern than actually doing something about the crimes themselves.

    I’m reminded of my first day on the job at a major (very liberal) university working for a female (very liberal) dean who I greatly admired. I was given only one specific instruction on how to do my job that involved interviewing students.

    “Never meet with a female student with your office door closed.”

    26 October 2006, 12:03 pm

  3. eric:

    I agree with main point of what is being written here, but I wanted to add some information that might balance this out a bit.

    I have worked as a criminal investigator for the past eight years, and I have acquired some experience with rape cases. It is true that if a woman is not “clean,” that is to say if she had a beer with the alleged perpetrator, or was dressed revealingly, or did any other of the whole litany of irrelevant things that get used to blame the victim, the state’s case against a man accused of rape will often be significantly weakened.

    However, false rape accusations really do happen. I have seen so many in my short career that it makes me wonder just how many there might be. Neither I nor anyone else knows what percentage of accusations are false, but whether it is ten percent or one tenth of one percent, it adds up to a whole lot of innocent men having their lives destroyed.

    If a man wants to hurt someone real bad, he can go and beat the crap out of them. If a woman wants to hurt someone real bad, she can call the cops with a rape claim.

    Please don’t think I am making light of the real problem of rape in our society.

    But know this: when you hear that some guy committed a rape, there is a real possibility that it is not true.

    27 October 2006, 9:27 pm

  4. Anne Xiety:

    ‘Please don’t think I am making light of the real problem of rape in our society.’

    You are.

    ‘But know this: when you hear that some guy committed a rape, there is a real possibility that it is not true.’

    What, exactly, is wrong with you? With people like you? No, wait!

    What is wrong with men like you?

    Why do you insist, always, always, on making every topic a woman discusses, no matter how personal, no matter how imporant to her/to women as a group (class?), all about men? Everything!

    Oh, and that cute little concept of balance you brought up?

    We live on a planet where everything is in men’s favour. Everything you can think of! Food, money, shelter, law, the courts, you name it, and men have control over it.

    And yet you mention ‘balance’..?!?

    Wow.

    28 October 2006, 12:12 am

  5. Marilyn Farhat:

    The British are still a bit behind with the times where certain legal and criminal matters are concerned, but the story above is an indication of a general trend by law enforcement to minimize what happens to women where allegations of rape are concerned. The same hesitation exists in areas of domestic violence. I was told by cops I know and by the ADAs locally that the DAs are usually hesitant to press charges against spouses, mates, friends, or aquaintances (usually male but also female) because the battered or assaulted party declines to testify in court. It is a catch 22. Society does not favor rape and assault victims revealing their experience and, therefore, the criminals cannot be prosecuted if the victim delines to cooperate. It is a very common problem.

    I think there is also the belief which is partially based in the observation that some women “encourage it” or “ask for it.” When I talk to teenage girls I always remind them to be careful where they “hang out” and how they party and socialize (and let’s face it: this is a culture enamored with loudness, drugs and alcohol, partying and lack of sleep. All are recipes for disaster for both men and women, especially the young ones). “Teasing” boys while intoxicated is not being resepctful of the boys or themselves (I am around teeangers a lot and I listen to their boy/girl relationship stories and complaints. Both sexes talk about fear of rape and being accused of it. Too bad they have to deal with such issues so early in life).

    Girls cannot control what boys will do but they can control their own behavior and how they take care of themselves and how they carry themselves in public and private. Those are safety tips devoid of any moral pronouncements or blame. Those are the things every parent should instill in their child (same goes for boys, of course).

    I also tell the teenage boys that when a woman says “no” it means NO, whether she is joking, unsure, playing around, being mean, or being a plain idiot. Those are the minimum requirements for a respectful relationship. I also tell them to NEVER have sex when they are intoxicated, better yet not to get intoxicated at all (aside from medical and mental health ramifications, something about sex, alcohol and drugs together that debases the act and causes problems, even among married couples. Sex, alcohol, and war are also really really creepy).

    By the way, there are many rapes within marriages that are not reported either because people take sex in marriage for granted and as a right. But that is a topic for another discussion.

    I think many young and older people do things when they are intoxicated that they later regret after waking up from the stupor.

    It is undignified of men to treat the women in their company in such a fashion. It is also very stupid and undignified for a woman to walk into a regiment of intoxicated males and then be horrified and surprised that they did not behave decently. Are women really that naive? But there are deeper psychological issues at play here and they beg to be explored further.

    We are all responsible for all our own actions. Parents and caregivers are also partly to blame. There was a gentleman in another topic who touched upon the issue of parental responsibility in teaching children the importance of proper behavior and in monitoring them at all times (assuming they have caregiver, but that is not always the case). I tend to strongly agree with that, but family breakdown and substance abuse in this culture is exacerbating many of the social problems and plunging people into cycles of disfunctional living that the future generations will find difficult to escape. Add to that the media role in promoting the debasing image of women as sex objects who are only worthy when they are lying flat on their backs and they weigh twenty pounds and are 14 year olds made up to look 30. How sick can a society get?

    We cannot always blame “men” or the women. We cannot blame alcohol either. It is a collective responsibility that starts with the adults who can act as role models. We cannot expect our men to behave admirably towards women when parents are complicit in the process of disrespect.

    We have a long way to go. But with the rise of religious and political fundamentalism and war across the globe, I see us taking a step back where the rights of women and children are concerned, especially in the areas of violence.

    We cannot generalize about all rape cases across the globe. Each case in unique and should be explored and followed up on because the victim needs closure and acknowlegement, the victimizer needs to address his/her behavior to prevent it from happening again and, depending on the circumstance, both victim and victimizer should go through proper therapy to address their particular problems. Those problems can range from addiction to substances, sex, or violence, or addiction to being in a dysfunctional and abusive relationships. Rape is a serious problem that needs to be tackled globally.

    28 October 2006, 12:22 am

  6. Required:

    Actually Eric, if it’s one tenth of a percent (fuck it, even if it’s 10% which I think it complete bullshit) it doesn’t add up to “a whole lot of innocent men having their lives destroyed.” It adds up to about many, many times that many women being raped. The conviction rate for rape in my country is less than 3%. Really, the tiny numbers of men that are falsely accused are the last thing I give two fucks about really.

    It’s not that I think false accusations don’t ever happen. But the fact that when you are presented with a story about a woman who has been sexually assaulted and says she has so little faith in the legal system that she wouldn’t report it if it happened again, the fact that your first response to that is “well, some men are falsely accused”, it’s very revealing. It shows much more concern for the lives of a tiny minority of men than for a huge percent of women.

    Think about it, the sexual assault stats are up around 30% of women in their life. Let’s drop it back down to 10 for arguments sake. Now remember that most rapes are committed by men known to the victim. It’s not like theirs a tiny minority of men who are super efficient rapists who rape thousands of people. The sad fact is, a lot of men are rapists. Even if we say it’s only 1% of men, again distorting figures to men’s advantage, that’s still a fuck load of rapists. This thing is epidemic. The rate of sexual assaults on women in the general population is higher than in male prisons.

    28 October 2006, 7:56 am

  7. Yolanda Carrington:

    “But know this: when you hear that some guy committed a rape, there is a real possibility that it is not true.”

    But 98% of the time it is true, Eric. But the problem is that 95%, people assume the woman is lying. As a criminal investigator, why do you think that people assume women lie about rape?

    And dude, you’ve got to know this statement is problematic: “If a man wants to hurt someone real bad, he can go and beat the crap out of them. If a woman wants to hurt someone real bad, she can call the cops with a rape claim.”

    If I were assaulted, I wouldn’t want you anywhere near my case.

    28 October 2006, 8:27 am

  8. Yolanda Carrington:

    “It is undignified of men to treat the women in their company in such a fashion. It is also very stupid and undignified for a woman to walk into a regiment of intoxicated males and then be horrified and surprised that they did not behave decently. Are women really that naive? But there are deeper psychological issues at play here and they beg to be explored further.”

    Marilyn, on this passage and your entire post, two words: Rape culture.

    28 October 2006, 8:32 am

  9. Audrey:

    Eric’s comment is so filled with tragic irony that it’s hard to find an appropriate response. Presented with an article about women dropping charges and denying anything happened because investigators assume they’re lying anyway, our resident investigator chimes in to say he feels it’s quite likely women are lying, and in his experience women turn out to be lying. Eric, that’s the point of the article – if you treat women like you think they are lying, women will tell you “forget it, it didn’t happen” so they can get the hell away from you. I would. We aren’t idiots; we know the overwhelming odds against a successful prosecution to begin with.

    Your attitude is analogous to torturing people, then claiming the program is a success because a significant percentage of the tortured provided “intelligence,” all the while completely ignoring whether the intelligence they provided was accurate or just made up to get out of the situation.

    Also from the irony department, if the right ever successfully manages to outlaw abortions except in cases of incest or rape, the issue of false accusations (which I would then see as a form of medical self-defense) will get real interesting, as will that practically nonexistent conviction rate. I can envision women getting pissed enough at the system at that point to take some serious action, if their medical options depend upon the court system working – not just working, but working within a reasonable time limit (3 months, not a year).

    28 October 2006, 11:07 am

  10. Elaina:

    *Rolls eyes* another thread invaded by a patriarchy-apologist. This time one with “creds.”

    I think that the sentence that Yola highlights here is a good example of something that’s disrespectful enough to be plonk-worthy. So plonk.

    28 October 2006, 12:18 pm

  11. Stan:

    Eric, you are as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.

    Woen in the US are estimated to be raped at a n average rate of 1.3 per minute.

    That comes to almost 700,000 a year.

    This is using the male-dominated standard of what constitutes rape, for which the bar of proof is very high. This number does not include sexual asault and attmepted yet “incompleted” rape. Those numbers are well into the millions.

    One third of women living in the US will ber assaulted sexually in her lifetime (a conservative figure). The US rape rate is 4 times higher than Germany, 13 times higher than England, and 20 times higher than Japan, for those of you who want to drone on and on about how liberated American women are.

    One out of seven women who are raped, is raped by her own husband. This is almost impossible to provein court, not because it doesn’t happen or because of false reporting, but because this culture supports rape except in very specific conditions… and the culture of rape as well as its rape-regulation laws implicitly recognize a male entitlement to the bodies of women.

    When surveyed anonymously, college males admitted in one out fo 12 cases to themselves having committed raep, by its legal definition, at least once.. though most of them didn’t believe they had raped anyone.

    Statisics show that around 15% of actual rapes (not including technically “incompleted” rapes) are ever reported, and that figure goes down dramatically when an acquaintence commits the attack… which is in the majority of cases.

    The FBI estimates false reports (which include those categorized as false because the rape was “incomplete”) at 8%, and that is no bastion of feminism, but a whiteboy enclave from hell. More credible sources put tha figure at 2%; but even that does not tell the rest of the story.

    Falsely reported cases of rape vitually NEVER win, and 54% of all rape cases that make it into court result in dismissal or acquittal. These stats do not hang on whether the attack happened or not, but on a very low bar to establish victim consent, and a very high one to establish perpetrator intent (“I didn’t know she wasn’t consenting.”).

    It’s amazing to me, how the victim always gets the script flipped on her. When workers are abused, the bourgeoisie is the victim. When people of color are oppressed, white folks will claim to be victims. When women are raped (and live under the constant threat of rape as a method of patriarchal social control), men will somehow manage to paint themselves the victims.

    It’s also difficult to find a male who abuses his female partner who doesn’t feel that HE is the offended party.

    And, Marilyn, men most certainly are ALWAYS at fault in rape. There are no exceptions. Ever.

    I get so tired of hearing even some anti-rape advocates saying “rape is not sex.” This describes the fault line that separates the liberal from the radical. Sex, as it is constructed in patriarchal society, with masculinity defined as aggression, is exactly what rape is. Rape is the highest form of patriarchal sex, as surely as imperialism is the highest form of capitalism.

    I’m glad Anne Xiety is posting. I googled her and ofund one of her comments on a post from WomensSpace (highly recommended), where a fake ad was placed for Male Doms, and the responses were quite illuminating about what “sex” means for a hell of a lot of men.

    28 October 2006, 2:09 pm

  12. James M:

    Geez, what is up with this string of comments? Astrological alignment? Jungian synchronicity? I don’t often encounter this “oppressed male” victimhood shit in my circle, so I have to wonder where it’s coming from. Wherever its provenance, I feel the need to try and counter it from a male’s point of view, especially since the women here seem to get the disproportionate workload involved in debunking this shit, and they’re obviously tiring of it.

    I’ve written a lot about my “Eureka!” moments. Here’s another one, with regards to rape: I regularly run or bike through the Oakland and Berkeley hills, and in my naive way, for a time I would make a point to make eye contact with people I passed along the path — male and female — maybe smile if I was feeling up to it. I was raised in a small town in the South, and this was what we did, and I didn’t want to fall into that typical metropolitan sense of atomization.

    As anyone who lives in a city, particularly a woman, can imagine, I didn’t often get a reciprocal response. This was bothersome, because I couldn’t understand it. Then one day, I went biking with a female friend, and the change in people’s appraisal of and reaction to me was night and day. People, especially women, were not only smiling and making eye contact, they were stopping to chat us up. I realized then that my female companion was vouching for me as a non-threatening male, and then the realization hit me: How much of the time women live in fear, much of it probably submerged and barely conscious, of male violence. All the damn time, except when in the company of “trustworthy” males, or away from males altogether.

    The realization was staggering. So I have a recommendation: Before any man goes off into a flight of self-pity over his imagined victimhood, spend a little time in this kind of consciousness. Walk a mile in those shoes. False accusations do occur, and nobody here can rationally deny that, but why bring that up? Why worry about the men whose lives are supposedly “ruined,” when we have half the population living in a state of constant vigilance like this, and the justice system is obviously weighted to deny their claims? How many more of their lives are being ruined?

    Also, on the topic of “free speech” — this is directed more at the Jim / Consumer line of commentary, but applies generally: Just like I don’t walk into an advanced nuclear physics lecture with my degree in audio engineering and start lecturing the professor, I sure as hell don’t presume I have anything to teach a black woman about racism and sexism. Yolanda experiences more of that in one day than I will in my entire life. She is the teacher. We do well to listen, to her and all the other women here, and we shouldn’t be surprised if we get the boot for our presumptuousness in lecturing someone who knows far more about discrimination than we do. The day someone criticizes my audio production technique because I’m a white male, is the day I’ll feel justifiably slighted and discriminated against.

    (sigh.) That’s pretty much all. Just wanted to encourage a little humility from certain of the male commenters. It seems very lacking.

    28 October 2006, 2:48 pm

  13. Yolanda Carrington:

    Thank you James. ;)

    love, Yolanda

    28 October 2006, 5:06 pm

  14. Julian Real:

    Eric writes:
    However, false rape accusations really do happen. [...] whether it is ten percent or one tenth of one percent, it adds up to a whole lot of innocent men having their lives destroyed.

    JR: Eric, you come across as a male supremacist/misogynist jerk. Is that your intention?

    I once facilitated a group of (grown, adult) child sexual abuse survivors. I am one also. It was a mixed gender group. It turns out one of the women in the group was lying. She made up a story to get back at some guy she disliked in high school. (She confessed this to several of us after leaving the group.)

    What happened to her and “the accused”?

    To him: his life was not ruined or “destroyed”. He was really pissed off and sent his male friends after her, to teach her a lesson. They stalked her threateningly for a while, then backed off.

    She lives in fear. He lives a life that centered for a while on revenge against her, violent revenge. But he’s allegedly “moved on” to do other things. So this horseshit about “MEN’S LIVES RUINED AND DESTROYED BY WOMEN’S (and children’s) FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF RAPE” is really just a misogynist, misopedic myth that men tell each other, while real women and girls and boys are being systematically raped, incested, molested, and otherwise sexually assaulted by men.

    You have revealed the deepest concerns of your heart, and they do not lie with the raped of the world, but with those undocumented mysterious allegedly real men whose lives have been ruined and destroyed. Just a clue: rape ruins and destroys lives, Eric–of the raped. Being falsely accused DOESN’T. Who am I to say that? Read on:

    A number of years ago I was the primary babysitter to two siblings, a girl and a boy. Their mom was my friend and their dad was divorced from her and remarried in a virulently gay-hating section of the U.S.

    Once, while her kids were visiting him, for a whole year, my friend/their mom mentioned to her ex that I was gay. My friend was an actor. She was about to open in a play, and before she went on stage (opening night) she was served papers, stating that her ex-husband was suing for permanent custody based on the fact that I had sexually abused her and his son. She immediately felt like vomiting.

    Had the son made any claims of this? No. Did I ever sexually abuse the son? No. Was there any evidence I had sexually abused the son? No. Before the case went to trial, my friend was put through a living hell because of his homophobic histeria, so despondent and depressed she barely survived the period leading up to the trial, thinking, in that part of the country, especially, a homophobic judge might just agree with him. But she went to that gay-hating section of the country, and the judge looked over “the evidence” and told her ex-husband, the homophobic/misogynist asshole: “You’ve got to be kidding. There’s no evidence of abuse, and in fact, looking over all the letters the babysitter and your son have written to one another since he’s been in your care, this seems like a healthy, wonderful child/babysitter relationship. I’m throwing this case out immediately.”

    The son and I continue to have an excellent relationship (he’s in his twenties now), as I do with his sister and their mom. Neither he nor his sister have much to do with their asshole dad.

    My female friend’s life was almost ruined, Eric. Not mine. I was incredibly upset by his dickhead behavior, but my life was not “ruined or destroyed”. So stop spreading this misogynist/misopedic CRAP. Thank you.

    Btw, misopedic means “child-hating”. It’s real, unlike your histerical allegations about what happens to men who are falsely accused, and you misogynist assumptions about what women do when they’re pissed off at men for being dickheads.)

    I welcome you to join something called “reality”.

    28 October 2006, 6:29 pm

  15. Yolanda Carrington:

    HELL YEAH JULIAN!

    28 October 2006, 7:20 pm

  16. Elaina:

    Stan, Julian, and James- thanks. Y’all give me hope.

    Anne Xiety- you completely rule.

    That’s all for tonight.

    28 October 2006, 10:12 pm

  17. Required:

    James M your post was very good.

    Stna I am interested in hearing more about what you said regarding “rape is not sex.” “Rape is the highest form of patriarchal sex, as surely as imperialism is the highest form of capitalism.”

    I find this interesting. I remember seeing a postcard by some group that said “saying rape is about sex is like saying hiting someone with a rake is about gardening.” I think the point that they were making was it’s motivated through hate, not sexual desire.

    But I think that’s wrong. It’s motivated by sexualised hate. If it was just hate, you’d punch or kick the person. Seems really fucking bizare that you’d pull out your penis if their was nothing sexual about the interaction.

    29 October 2006, 3:42 am

  18. Stan:

    Exactly why the twinned issues of rape and pornography are at the very center of the radical feminist description of gender as a class-system (in the marxist idiom, two groups of people, bound together as a unity-of-opposites, in an interdependent relationship charcterized by domination and subordination).

    In the analysis of economic class, we have to unpack “the commodity” in order to remove the veil from material exploitaiton and the psychic alienation that goes with it.

    In the analysis of gender, we have to unpack “desire,” which has heretofore been delcared off limits by enlightenment modernism (liberalism), and assigned to the “private” sphere, or to the realm of individual “rights.”

    Men who rape have orgasms. The claim that rape is not sex serves to reinforce this idea that there is something called sex, desire, love, et al, that is not implicated in gednered power and masculinity defined as aggression and the humiliation of the Female Other. That’s why we see men who rape called rapists in a way that suggests they are members of a different species, Homonculus rapus.

    29 October 2006, 8:52 am

  19. Required:

    “In the analysis of economic class, we have to unpack “the commodity” in order to remove the veil from material exploitation and the psychic alienation that goes with it.”

    I don’t get this, which means I don’t get the next bit about unpacking “desire”.

    “The claim that rape is not sex serves to reinforce this idea that there is something called sex, desire, love, et al, that is not implicated in gendered power and masculinity defined as aggression and the humiliation of the Female Other.”

    What do you mean by implicated? This is a really tricky topic to get my head around, which probably means it’s important. Are you saying that some try to make an unrealistic distinction between rape and sex to conceal the fact that consentual sex under patriarchy has many of the same characteristics as rape? I don’t feel completely satisfied with that answer because I think it relies on people having an understanding about patriarchy that I think is beyond them. Maybe not.

    I sought of understand what you are saying about desire being ‘off limits’ in a liberal world view. I got into fierce debate with a good friend of mine about the movie The Secretary. Without putting my slant on it, the film is about a man and a woman in an S&M relationship. The movie presents them as being ‘rebels’ that the rest of the world just can’t understand. My friend ate it up. The more I tried to explain that this was as a hateful as making a film about a happy African field slave, the more she thought I was a repressive puritan trying to dictate what people should and should not be aroused by. That was a very stressful time, but we’re still good friends.

    I could get her to see how violent pornography influenced men to be aroused by violent sex, but I couldn’t get her to then make the leap that violent sex (even if it’s “pretend”) surely must do the same thing. Every time I tried to draw the connection she’d just say “Yeah, I don’t know,” never wanting to trespass on the sacred ground of “desire.”

    Still I don’t quite get what you mean by “unpack “the commodity.”

    29 October 2006, 9:31 am

  20. Stan:

    Sorry Required.

    I argue so often with fellow marxists on gender that I have fallen into the habit of using the Basic Principles, so to speak, a a way of connecting feminist “knowledge” to marxist “knowledge.”

    One of the most valuable philosophical contributions of Marx was his critique of Enlightenment (and capitalist) self-assuredness about having discovered something called objective reality… in economics, this translated into quantifying the market with the categories of supply and demand. Marx said that this was a magic trick, no more objective or “scientific” than the belief in religious artifacts and fetishes.

    In order to unmask the realities that bourgeois economics concealed (the bourgeois [owners of the means of production] buys and sells, and so the preoccupation with supply and demand is a reflection of the bourgeois’ standpoint). Marx adopted another standpoint (that of the wage worker) in order to critique the claims of Economics (Capital is subtitled A Critique of Political Economy).

    Then Marx took a close look at The Commodity. It turned out that once one takes a close look at this seemingly banal thing, it was actually quite complex (like “time,” eg), and as Marx kept unfolding the “contradictions” contained in The Commodity, it unfolded into an entire social system, one in which The Commodity has come to regulate our social lives.

    It was a brilliant work, Capital, and it turned into three volumes that started with unpacking The Commodity. It’s been getting extended upon ever since, as has the method and its insights… especially the insight that a dominating fraction of society underwrites its own power by generating a form of knowledge that simultaneously reproduces and conceals social power. That same method and insight is used to powerful effect by, one of my own favortie examples, Catharine MacKinnon in works like Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, where rape and pornography are shown to be more than mere instances of individual misogyny or (yikes) exercises of “free speech,” but that closer examination (unpacking) of how these issues are framed, understood, and discussed, coneals and reproduces another kind of power: that of men over women.

    The combination of male hegemony within the left leadership, a powerful political bias toward male stakeholders in the working class, and the suggestion by radical feminists (many of whom emerged from a marxist tradition) that Marx missed the boat on gender (he did) which did not sit well in an ever more orthodoxy-bound movement that had begun to treat Marx as an omniscient demigod… all led to leftist hostility to the radical feminism that was its natural ally, imo.

    Anyway, sorry for the confusion.

    29 October 2006, 12:01 pm

  21. Julian Real:

    Hi Required.

    I agree with you. As Catharine A. MacKinnon noted, sex is whatever a society sexualizes. This takes away the idea that there is something, sex, that were it not for social forces, would exist in a lovely free form, or a lovely married form, depending on where you fall on the whitemale political spectrum.

    The whitemale supremacist Left prefers to conjure up the Bonobos, as their “sexual ideal” free of social constructs, and the whitemale supremacist Right not only places humans above other animals, but has us dominate, domesticate, and kill them, according to God’s will. Which is not to say they don’t trot out some non-human animal species from time to time that (“heterosexually”) mates for life. Usually not the praying mantis, however. See this image for the reason:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Female_mantis_devouring_male_So_Calif.jpg

    The fact that whitemale supremacist men on the Right and Left use force/coercion/predation/meaningless consent, institutional and/or interpersonal, to obtain what we men call sex, is something conservatives and liberals (again, defined by dominant whitemale cultures) would rather not discuss: we are too busy raping, molesting, incesting, procuring, buying, sharing, and killing women and girls and boys (and sometimes other men) because it is sex for those of us men who do it. If it causes erection leading to orgasm, in men, men call that sex. That is THE definition of sex, for men, as I understand it. For heterosexist men THE definition of sex may also be “heterosexual intercourse”.

    That domination and submission are erotic to so many of us, not by virtue of being descended from God or Bonobos, btw, means that sex is rape for some men, and other men pretend those men are another species, forgetting about the time when they/we fucked or attempted to fuck someone who was drunk or asleep, or the time when the other person was still during the act and we didn’t know (or care) that she was having a flashback to when she was incested, or the time when we coerced her to do something we liked a lot in pornography, or the time we were really angry and really turned on and had sex, or the time when we knew we had social power over someone and used that to our advantage to obtain sexual pleasure from some other person whose name we don’t remember.

    When feminists used to say rape is violence not sex, what they meant was “from the perspective of the raped”. MacKinnon has clarified the radical feminist position, in both Feminism Unmodified and Toward A Feminist Theory of The State. Andrea Dworkin digs into this much more profoundly in her amazing book, Intercourse, which few men dare to read, let alone comprehend: she doesn’t say all rape is sex and all sex is rape; she carefully and thoroughly describes what sex is in a patriarchal context: what patriarchy, or male supremacy, makes sexy and calls sex. She names it as men name and experience it, earlier in the book, and names it as too many heterosexual women experience it, in the latter part of the book. I know one woman to took a year to read that book, furious with Andrea most of the way through, because it spoke truths she did not want to admit were truths.

    As MacKinnon also notes, there are men sitting in prison right now wondering ["Why am I here for doing something all the guys I know do?"] She says it makes sense they’d be scratching their heads about that, given what so many men do, that we don’t fess up to.

    I have chosen first celibacy, then asexuality to not be part of that patriarchal sexually active world. I recommend it, as a lifelong practice, to all men, especially all heterosexual men. I promise all the men who do take up asexuality: your testicles won’t explode. But I’m not liable if, for some other reason, they do.

    29 October 2006, 5:53 pm

  22. eoinmonkey:

    Dont know if anyone in the outside world follows Australian news, so heres whats causing a fuss over here right now. Plenty more stories where this small piece came from, just do a quick search:

    “CANBERRA, Australia – Australia’s most prominent Islamic cleric declared Friday that he would not resign for suggesting that women who don’t wear head scarves invite rape, saying he would only leave his post “after we clean the world of the White House first.”

    Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali apologized Thursday for comparing women who fail to wear scarves to “uncovered meat.” He has been banned from giving sermons for two or three months by the governing association of his Sydney mosque.

    Al-Hilali’s remark about the White House was his only comment to reporters outside the mosque who asked whether he would resign. His words drew cheers and applause from supporters.”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15440835/

    Any thoughts?

    29 October 2006, 6:51 pm

  23. Required:

    Yes I do have some thoughts on that actually. I think what he said was fucked, bottom line. However the media response to the comments reveals a deep racism and hypocrasy in Australian culture (I live in SA).

    What he said (the comment I heard talked about revealing clothing not just not wearing head scarfs) was a comment that the vast majority of Australians would agree with. It’s also a sentiment that has been up held in Australian courts. You couldn’t have been raped, look what you’re wearing. Where was the media outcry when this happened?

    Also what is disgusting is in my view it’s getting priority of a very embarrasing scandal. A dozen 14 year old boys from Victoria, raped a mentaly disabled girl and filmed it (porn) and sold it to their class mates. Many people bought their DVD Cunt: The Movie, before the police finally intervened. Anyone who has a copy is in possesion of child pornography. What the fuck do you do when the children start making pornography?

    This is so outrageous. But all we can focus on is the “evil muslim.”

    I feed really empty thinking about it.

    29 October 2006, 8:12 pm

  24. eoinmonkey:

    I agree: my first thought (I currently reside in melbourne, but am British), and the comments I have made to people about both the Mufti and the Werribe incident, is that it another golden opportunity for Australia to dodge the gender issue by blaming “bad individuals”, instead of seriously fucked up societal standards. Its like every time that moron Mal Brough brings up child abuse in Aboriginal communities- he is talking to white Australians first and foremost, and revealing more about their attitudes than he is about anything to do with “the Aboriginal problem”.
    Although, as someone points out today in the letters to the Herald Sun (dont worry, i didnt buy one, just read it over coffee): At least now Muslims who dont agree with this sort of foul woman hating bullshit are speaking up, and pointing out these officially sanctioned rancid old Male clerics dont speak for them.

    30 October 2006, 12:30 am

  25. Katie:

    Eric, what’s your opinion on the research that false rape accusations are at the same rate (2%) as false other (any-gender) crime accusations?

    I’ll dig up the research when I have time, but let’s say that it’s accurate, for now.

    Would that change your opinion about what you wrote?

    1 November 2006, 9:48 am

  26. Katie:

    I found it! It’s the Department of Justice that that statistic comes from. And here’s the person I learned it from’s commentary on that:

    “The DOJ reports that only 2% of women falsely accuse rape. The other 98% that report rape, have been raped.

    “HOWEVER, because only 1% of rapists ever see the inside of the courtroom, and only 1% of that 1% ever see the inside of a prison, the myth is perpetuated that men are innocent, and women liars instead of being indicative of how woman-hating the system and our culture are.”

    Eric, I’m curious to hear your reaction to this analysis of why people say things like what you said on this blog (that is, a statement that worries that a significant number–say, over 2% (or any percentage higher than liars about other crimes)–of women lie about sexual crimes committed against them). Do you agree with my quoted author that your “common sense” view of the way things might go in the world might be severely distorted by your knowledge of the results of trials, rather than reflecting reality?

    1 November 2006, 12:40 pm

  27. Katie:

    “Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1995) Uniform crime reports. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Justice.”

    That seems to be the one that says something like 2%-8%. Still trying to find out if that’s the one that says that other false crimes are at the same rate, or if that’s another report.

    Also still looking for page numbers for ya.

    1 November 2006, 12:48 pm

  28. Julian Real:

    To Katie, Eric, Eionmonkey, and Required:

    Thanks for posting that, Katie. I’m going to spread that around, as this CRAP needs to be told.

    Eric, I also await your answer to her important question. I hope you’re still around to answer it.

    Eionmonkey, I think it is generally racist of white folks to post shit about sexual violence within communities of color, unless the connections are clearly made to how that links up with whitemale supremacy… and even then. White men do so much damage to communities of color, including perpetrating sexual violence against especially women, girls, and boys of color, that it seems to me that discussing what is happening by men of color is a racist deflection from that global reality–that white men are responsible for, collectively.

    And, Required, can you post some links here to the articles/info on the gang rape case by 14 year-old white boys in Australia? What race/ethnicity was the victim? I’m interested in learning more about that, and thanks for mentioning it.

    3 November 2006, 7:59 pm

  29. Required:

    Julian,
    She was white. She was also mentally disabled.

    http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/10/24/1161455722271.html

    “Prime Minister John Howard said today the DVD incident probably resulted from peer pressure and a lack of parental guidance.”

    It’s too infuriating.

    4 November 2006, 7:01 am

  30. Sam:

    The underlying problem in these politically visible cases, it seems to me, is that the issues are put at the level of “social problems,” which trivializes the matter or simply neatly tucks it away into an appropriate category. What people in such cases fail to face up to is that the average treatment of women signals a really profound and dangerous pathology in relation to human nature, and as such has severe consequences in almost every aspect of human life. Our politicians, who are not exactly deep thinkers, seem more or less incapable of really understanding and assessing, especially as denial of a problem gets more votes than the acknowledgement of one. At any rate, the societal pathology in question–and it is practically worldwide–is obviously not resolvable politically, as it involves a deep change of heart and mind, a radical shift in understanding. What men don’t realize is that their view and treatment of women is a mirror of their own souls: dehumanized, debased, and morally deeply unsound.

    4 November 2006, 1:46 pm

  31. Sam:

    Excerpt from an article:

    “Sex” Party

    In a presentation on the feminist critique of pornography at a college, I described some of the routine body-punishing types of sex that are common, especially in the genre known as “gonzo,” the most harsh and overtly cruel type of sexually explicit material. A young man from the audience waited until the rest of the folks who had questions were gone and then approached me cautiously, saying he wanted to challenge some claims I had made.

    The student said that he watched gonzo pornography regularly and thought I had distorted the reality of such material. None of what he watched, he said, sounded like what I had described. “The stuff I like — it’s just movies of people who liked to party,” he told me.

    I asked him to tell me more about what he watched. As he talked, it became clear he was describing exactly the kind of material I had discussed, and I could see the realization emerge in him: My assessment of the rough and degrading nature of that pornography was accurate, and he had simply never recognized it. When he mentioned a type of sex he liked to watch in pornography called a DP — double penetration, in which a woman is penetrated vaginally and anally at the same time — it really started to dawn on him: In these scenes, the sex was defined by men’s sense of control over, and domination of, women.

    I pressed a bit more. What kind of things did the men call the woman during this sex? I asked. As he started to reproduce some of the terms — all names meant to demean and insult women — it became impossible for him to avoid the conclusion that the pornography he had been consuming is not just sex, but sex in which men act out contempt for women.

    At that point, he stammered, “But I don’t hate women. I love women. I wouldn’t use pornography like that.”

    That contradiction wasn’t going to be worked out in the moment. Instead, I told the student that I wasn’t arguing that he hated women but was simply pointing out he had been getting sexual pleasure from pornography that expressed hatred for women. Why had that misogyny been invisible to him? Why had he been unable to see what was happening on the screen and imagine how women might feel about such degrading treatment?

    The answer is simple enough: The privileges that come with being a man in patriarchy had undermined his capacity to empathize, allowing the sexual pleasure he felt to override his humanity and making it difficult for him to put himself in the place of a woman experiencing overtly cruel and degrading treatment.

    The Consequences of the Death of Empathy
    by Robert Jensen
    http://www.dissidentvoice.org
    October 31, 2006
    http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct06/Jensen31.htm

    4 November 2006, 3:17 pm

  32. Marilyn Farhat:

    Men ARE always at fault in actual rape cases of men on women, yes. Ultimately, it is THEIR responsibility since they are the aggressors and they are the ones who need to stop the act. There is no justification for the actions of any rapist. However, it is important to understand ALL contributing factors in order to try and prevent most of those rapes in the future. Saying it is a “culture of rape” as if it is a qualifying statement means nothing. Ultimately, everything we do as individuals or groups is rooted in culture and its values, and our own personalities.

    There is a culture of rape but I would hesitate to separate the culture from the individual. Culture is not something out there that is separate from human beings. And we need to start focusing on solutions to the problem.

    The vast majority of women do not report rape (fear of death in certain societies, humiliation, fear of loss of children or economic security) and many of them do not know they have been raped (they do not know what rape is because they have lived in sexually violent relationships, somethimes starting with their fathers, most of their lives and think it is normal). The question to ask is: how do we, as men and women, enable those who have lived in violence most of their lives, to have the power to remove themselves or be removed from it? How do we make it more difficult for the rapist to commit further rape? Most true rapists strike multiple times, whether against their wives, or agiainst girlfriends and strangers, or against children (many have dozens or more than a hundred victims).

    One third of women in the US will be abused at least once in their lifetime, usually by a male relative or boyfriend.

    I work in the mental health field with rapists and am very familiar with the PATHOLOGIES that cause rape, the culture that enables it from all aspects, and their effect on the victims. Most rape victims are related or close to the rapists (except the pedophiles and sexually violent predators where the relationship has to be specifically cultivated or victims stalked for the purpose of rape). Most human beings are NOT rapists, although most human societies are male-centered in power and genealogy. Certain variables that contribute to the emergence of rapists, family upbriginging and culture are only two of many out there.

    There are also different forms of rape, rape in war as revenge, as booty, and as purely psychopathic behavior, and rape out of rage and anger. We saw a lot of that in Lebanon during the Civil War, and much of it under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

    What I find disturbing is the tone of the discussion that somehow there is this hate relationship between men and women, usually on the part of men and the focus on blame as opposed to understanding. It is difficult for men to completely empathize with women in general and the same is true of women finding it difficult to empathize with men and their experiences in some areas. Being open-minded (different from making excuses) is essential to understanding and problem solving. There IS a power struggle between men and women that will be difficult to eradicate. That is the nature of things. What is needed is a way to temper that struggle and make it less destructive and detrimetnal to women and children. We rarely talk about children because in the “culture” of everything they still do not count. They have no political or economic autonomy or power, they are abused far more than women are by both men and women, they do not lobby or vote, and they are “owned” by someone else. THAT is a global atrocity that needs to be addressed especially that children across the globe are being raped en masse without much publicity. Many are forced into militias, sex camps, long hours of labor, sevitude, and many are doomed to a life of malnutrition and poverty. Visit the UN webisite at some point and look at the statistics and conditions. They are horrifying. Many of those children will grow up to be rapists and adult victims (if they live long enough).

    Women who are emotionally and physically abused may also enable the victimizer to target the children if the victimizer is part of the family relationship. They become codependent and make excuses for the abuse of their own children.

    It is very frustrating working with people who come from a purely theoretical background. I had the same issues with the “academic elites” who theorized about everything from Marxism (I was trained in that tradition), to war, to rape, to violence, with little consideration to the individual and with little actual experience in the problems they talked about.

    Unfortunately, the psychology of human behavior is underutilized in the real world and is only used in forensic settings and in business and marketing strategies. I left the field of anthropology for that reason. I was completely dissatisfied with the approach and misuse of collected information and was horrified at how everything was reduced to a “cultural” approach. But I may be in the minority.

    There is much out there on the impact of violence and rape in war and other situations, but the information is rarely used for planning purposes.

    The law enforcement system in the US is in need of fixing where sexual assault is concerend to aid the victims. However, it is plagued by short-staffing and a rise in the incidence of violence, including the number of broken and dysfunctional homes. There are horrible abuse cases they have to deal with and they have to prioritized.

    Acknowledging the different facets of a problem in no way minimizes its impact on the victims. Focusing on one aspect only does a great disservice to them and does nothing to alleviate the problem. Denying individual responsibility and initiative is very simplistic and is detrimental to everyone.

    5 November 2006, 4:08 am

  33. Stan:

    Marilyn,

    Raised in a marxist tradition, as you say, it is interesting how little of it you retain in your analysis, on preicisley the points where a “materialist conception of history” has such profound implications for understanding patriarchy.

    Interesting, but not too remarkable. This has been the blind spot of many male marxists, if I might kick that horse carcass one more time. When we say that “this is just the nature of things” (as both Marx and Engels did about sex, even though their entire method rejected “naturalizing” explanations of social power), then you imply that male power over women is a consequence of nature in the same way that a Law of Nature is not permeable to intervention. This is a hugely consequential belief, widely shared in this society, and goes to the heart of patriarchy’s extreme durability.

    The old marxian organizing principle that “ideas become a material force when they are grasped by the masses,” might well be re-stated, in a more simply-declarative sense, as “ideas that are shared by the masses have great material force.”

    That’s why you point is well taken from this end, that social commentary too often ignores the psychic dimension of behavior. The problem I have, at the risk of sounding overly “academic,” is that there is another “idea shared by the masses that has material force” (in the continual reproduction of social power) that underwrites intellectual controversies like nature-nurture, culture-psyche, et al, which conceals what is shared on both sides of these controversies, which are essentially false dichotomies: that is, the idea that reality can be reduced and atomized and subdivided into neat categories that exist independent of each other — a mechanistic fallacy at the heart of that same scientific orthodoxy that is the foundation of liberal modernism.

    This is something more deeply embedded in our psyches, and shared culturally, than a concept or idea, it is an epistemological impression that presents itself to us (psychically, since all direct experiences are physically generated from within human bodies) as irreducible… just the way things are… natural… “the nature of things.”

    Once we accept (by default) that reality consists of parts, then that core belief unfolds itself into the larger material-ideational architecture of liberal society. That society is maintained in very signficant ways by philosphical idealism, that ultimately ignores systems of social power and transfers responsibility to individuals, eg, white supremacy is disappeared and replaced by individual bigotry — it is not systemic any longer, but an indivdual pathology.

    I sense this same approach in your remarks about patriarchy and rape. There seems to be an implicit denial that men are not merely unequal to women (as in having more of something than women), but that men-as-a-class directly dominate women-as-a-class, in a thoroughly structural hierarchical social relation. Like economic class, this is a relationship of mutual dependency… men need women to do all the stuff women do to maintain men’s power, and women need men for financial security, protection from other men (the protection racket), etc etc etc. A SYSTEM in which one class of people’s status is in relation to another class of people (factory owner/factory worker…. socially-constructed male/socially constructed female… left/right… up/down… the unity of opposites) on an axis of domination/subordination, is a SYSTEM of structural antagonism. It is not personal hatred, though that is an expression of the system, but a situation where the interests of the two conjoined and mutually-dependent classes of people are against one another, as-a-class. In the marxist idiom, this is a social “contradiction.”

    The suggestion that while the “problem” of rape is “cultural” (only one dimension of the social system of patriarchy), the solution is somehow “individual,” again transfers the responsibility to individuals, making men nicer and (worse) jumping onto the extremely slippery slope of women “being less provocative.”

    I have to wonder, since a huge percentage of college men report in surveys that they have committed rape (by its technical, legal definition), and since one out of three women reports having been assaulted sexually, we can then assume that “rapists” constitute only some tiny fraction of “men.” That math doesn’t work.

    When we refer to “rape culture,” we are using linguistic shorthand for an important point that has been made here and elsewhere (and which consistently meets resistance): NORMAL male sexuality is constructed as aggression. Norms are social, not biological constructs. Norms support existing social systems of power. Rape is not prohibited, except in its most narrow definitions (which has come to be penetration, that then must disprove consent and prove intent). If we define rape as male eroticization of domination and aggression, then we have a rape culture. It’s important. It tells us something very important. it tells us that rape is not pathological. Therein lies the core problem.

    And women and children both count. The difference is — and this is important, too — extended infant dependency for humans is biologically determined by neotany; women’s social dependency is constructed by constructing grown women as children.

    5 November 2006, 9:31 am

  34. Elaina:

    Stan did a good job of breaking that down. But I also have to highlight, and I might be kinda sticking my neck out here, but I have to point out that while many women don’t have the “experience” of doing psychological work with people who rape and the victims of those people, it’s not really safe to presume that we have “no experience” with these topics (i.e. rape and abuse.) The experience I speak from is a practical/lived experience, and the reason I’m here is trying to figure out a way that girls and other women can live in a world where they don’t have to learn from the same kind of fucked-up, damaging, wounding experience.

    You don’t have to be a social worker to see the way the rape culture works. That’s because it IS a culture, and it’s everywhere we look. When we see women infantilized and sexualized and/or girls and children sexualized and fetishized in our popular media, when the “hot” celebreties all happen to be dressing and doing their makeup like porn stars, etc. and so forth ad infinitum, when photo spreads in commercial fashion magazines marketed to teenage women only differ from porno spreads in that the genitals of the models are covered, etc. and so forth some more; these are not just random blips of immoral “personality” traits or what have you. It’s too widespread to not be systemic. It’s not accidental, either. To claim that it is doesn’t just deny a material reality (the pornography industry rakes in obscene amounts of money every year at the expense of our humanity) but it takes the power to fight it away from us.

    The law enforcement system is a tool of a bigger system that is not actually there to aid in our liberation, it is designed to keep us in a situation stable enough to maintain control over our movement,our environment, our adherence to what the bigger system wants from us. It can’t be “fixed”. And I fear that it will just continue to get worse. This is why it’s so easy for men to get away with rape; it ain’t worth the pain that comes from reporting it, one, so many women don’t; and all the other junk stan just said re: burden of proof and where it lies.

    You start out as a liar. Hell. You can’t even really prove shit with the scientific method. How the hell are we supposed to “prove” anything in a court of liberal law, where there’s a way to talk over every point that is being made?

    Anyways. Gotta go look at a farm that I might move to.

    5 November 2006, 2:25 pm

  35. eoinmonkey:

    “Eionmonkey, I think it is generally racist of white folks to post shit about sexual violence within communities of color, unless the connections are clearly made to how that links up with whitemale supremacy… and even then. White men do so much damage to communities of color, including perpetrating sexual violence against especially women, girls, and boys of color, that it seems to me that discussing what is happening by men of color is a racist deflection from that global reality–that white men are responsible for, collectively.”

    Julian Real; my name was spelt correctly at the end of my post.
    Second, try to be a little more careful with the accusations you throw around. I merely asked what people thought of the situation, without feeling the need to add any editorialising of my own.

    6 November 2006, 1:19 am

  36. Julian Real:

    Thanks so much for that information and the link, Required!

    I really appreciate it, and am sending it out to lots of people, so they can know about this atrocity.

    Julian

    6 November 2006, 10:34 pm

  37. Required:

    T’so’kay,
    I’m sure if you search on Google (does everyone know they supply dissident lists to the Chinese government? Good.) Australian. google.com.au .

    Everyone kept asking, “do you think it was influenced by Jackass?” It was influenced by PORN!!!!! You fucking morons! There just aren’t enough slaps up side the head to go around.

    8 November 2006, 9:35 am

  38. Yohan:

    By Required:
    “But know this: when you hear that some guy committed a rape, there is a real possibility that it is not true.”
    But 98% of the time it is true, Eric. But the problem is that 95%, people assume the woman is lying. As a criminal investigator, why do you think that people assume women lie about rape?
    —————————————-
    Required:

    Criminal investigators have to check carefully the allegations of a victim. They do not presume, that rape allegations are wrong from beginning on.

    I wonder from where you got your 98 % and 95 percent?
    Type in for a search at yahoo or google something like ‘false rape allegation’ …you would be surprised, how many allegations are nothing but a fake. In USA 100s of CONVICTED ‘rapists’ were released, as DNA cleared them / they are innocent – after serving sometimes decades in prison.

    In some countries ‘victims’ of hoax-crimes are kept responsible to pay back the labour costs of the police investigators. I think, this is a good idea.
    False rape allegations should be considered as a very serious crime.

    Police investigators cannot accept a claim to be true solely out of the fact, that the report is done by a woman. They have to ask questions about what happened. Police investigators MUST verify if a report is true or not.

    You belittle men, who are victims of false rape allegations – Obviously you find nothing wrong, if a woman shows up with a false rape claim.

    Justice cannot go the way you like…sorry.

    3 December 2006, 10:56 am

  39. Required:

    That was not me who said that. Regardless we’ve already had this discussion. Mighty moderator Gods please wipe this fool from the forum so your peaople may be left in peace.

    3 December 2006, 11:44 pm

  40. Lya Kahlo:

    Yohan – you might want to actually read the studies that put the percentage of false rape reports above 8% (as reported by the FBI).

    http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/crimprof_blog/2004/12/2_false_rape_st.html

    Second, we must not be fooled into confusing false rape reports with false allegations. They are not the same thing. A rape report can be deteremined to be “false” despite the women having been acutally raped.

    4 December 2006, 2:09 pm

  41. Yohan:

    Thank you for this link, it was interesting to read through all these comments.

    6 December 2006, 9:07 am

  42. yancey:

    Women are not stupid. Women are not helpless.
    We lie, we cheat, we steal, we curse, we do all of the things that men do. True, men get away with rape sometimes. Its horrible and I despise it. There is nothing to justify it. But lets stay in touch with reality. The reason we look like liars to men when rape issues come up, is not simply because we are women and they are men. They are fully aware that whats going on is more than a sexist issue.
    I am still young but have spent a couple years as a women’s activist, fighting to put women on the same level as men on the food chain. In the past, any issue that made men appear superior to women infuriated me.
    I knew for a fact that we had all the capabilities of men to function in the modern business world. Simply because we are smaller and weaker, we have been made to look helpless and unable to function up to men’s standards. I KNEW this was bullshit.
    But the knowledge that women and men are equal on that level implies something that most women fail to acknowledge. And that would be the other side of the spectrum. Yes, we can perform just as well as men. BUT, we can also cheat and decieve just as well as men. Men are becoming aware of that. Thats why public attitudes towards rape are “ricocheting backwards.”
    Its not just rape either. Its all criminal action involving females. Go on google and read the rate at which female prison populations are growing. They are booming. Do you see what the problem is? Women want their cake and want to eat it too. We are being offered more business opportunities than ever before. Its very possible that our next president is going to be a woman. But at the same time, we are no longer considered helpless when it comes to crime and misbehavior.
    The best thing our legal system can do is ignore gender issues and look at the facts. If there is no evidence of rape, you cannot make those accusations. Thats just the way it is. If it is evident that a man raped a woman, don’t exagerate it any further than what the facts present. Get that man off of the streets to avoid further offenses.
    I hope everyone opens their minds to the things I have said here. Quit hating the other gender. We are all human beings. Let’s work together. Thanks for reading.

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Yancey is a man.

    29 December 2006, 3:19 pm

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