crime

Ten Ways Sexual Assault is Not Like Getting Robbed

Miri, , , , , , , 83 Comments

[Content note: sexual assault]

Anytime someone speaks up about victim blaming and the expectation that women drastically limit their own lives in order to prevent themselves from being raped, someone will appear like clockwork to go, “Yeah, well, shouldn’t people lock their homes so they don’t get robbed?”

I am not an authority on what people should and should not do (besides not rape people), but I would argue that sexual assault has vanishingly little in common with robbery, and preventing sexual assault is not at all like locking your front door.

All analogies are imperfect by definition; if they were perfect, they would not be analogies anymore, but rather comparisons between two nearly or practically identical things. You can always find spots in which analogies fail.

But the sexual assault-robbery analogy fails on so many levels that I believe it to be useless for any sort of explanatory function.

None of this is to say which is “worse.” I’ll leave those pointless exercises to Richard Dawkins. I would personally imagine that most people who have experienced both found sexual assault to be “worse,” but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are sufficiently different that an analogy between them doesn’t really make any sense and is usually only used to silence people who speak out about sexual assault and victim blaming.

So, here’s how sexual assault is not at all like robbery.

Continue reading “Ten Ways Sexual Assault is Not Like Getting Robbed” →

Ten Ways Sexual Assault is Not Like Getting Robbed
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About That "Laughing at Male Victims of Violence" Video

Miri, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 30 Comments

[Content note: domestic/intimate partner violence]

In response to the Rodger shooting, which I wrote about in my previous post, some people have been sharing this video, which I’ve seen captioned as “Watch what happens when a man abuses a woman in public and vice versa.”

The video is a sort of public experiment. A hidden camera records what happens when a man starts getting abusive towards a woman he is with, grabbing and shoving her as she tells him to get his hands off of her. Bystanders confront the man and call the police. But when the genders are flipped and the woman is the one threatening the man and pushing him around, people either laugh or ignore it.

I won’t get into how exquisitely gauche it is to post this link, usually without commentary as though it presumably speaks for itself, in response to a post where people are attempting to discuss misogyny and how it caused the murders of six people and the injury of seven more*. (While I am sometimes able to convince people that their arguments are bad, I’m not sure I am able to teach them the sort of basic empathy that most people master in grade school.)

First of all, men who post this link in response to discussions of misogyny (I haven’t personally seen a non-man do this) prove nothing but the fact that they are so uncomfortable with discussions about violence against women that they need to turn them all into discussions about violence against men. As I have noted before, it is sometimes a good idea to learn how to tolerate a moderate amount of discomfort so you can understand where it’s coming from. This is one of those times.

Second, the idea that this video could possibly be a rebuttal to a claim like “normative masculinity is harmful and leads to the oppression of women and to tragedies like the UCSB shooting” is so simplistic and flawed that it really goes to show how little these folks have bothered to engage with critiques of gender roles and with feminism as a whole.

When I see that video, I don’t see any evidence against my opinions about gender. I see evidence in support of them.

We do not have a culture that encourages women to commit violence against men, but we do have a culture that treats female violence against men, when it does happen, as a joke. Why? Gendered norms. Our descriptive norms say that men are stronger than women and can never be physically harmed by them, and our prescriptive norms say that men should be stronger than women and should never allow themselves to be physically harmed by them.

For reference: descriptive norms are culturally dominant beliefs about how the world is and what people do. Prescriptive norms are culturally dominant beliefs about how the world should be and what people should do. Both types of norms are prevalent in sexist thinking, and they are taught and articulated both implicitly and explicitly to children from birth.

The distinction between the two is important. Our descriptive norms about male strength are partially correct, but only in the sense that, on average, people categorized as male are physically stronger in their upper bodies than people categorized as women. And there are plenty of exceptions, and violence can still be committed by a physically weaker person against a physically stronger one.

But prescriptive norms, as I mentioned, are not about objective reality (insofar as such a thing exists, of course) but rather about dominant beliefs about how things should be, whether they necessarily are that way or not. (But people do tend to believe that their prescriptive norms reflect reality, and most people do seem to not recognize the difference between these two types of norms.) Prescriptive norms are values. People may justify them in various ways, but they will not usually be able to present “evidence” for them, because they are not based on evidence. For example, some people tell me that I shouldn’t lift weights because then I’ll become stronger than many men, and men will not be attracted to a woman who’s stronger than them, and being attractive to men is presumably something I care about. Of course, I already am stronger than many men, and some of those men are even attracted to me, and some of those men are even attracted to me partially because of my physical strength. In this way, many prescriptive gender norms fall apart under the slightest scrutiny.

Let’s take the analysis back up one level and see how it applies to men who are assaulted by women. Descriptive norms say that men are stronger than women and are able to defend themselves against them, which is why a common reaction to male victims is disbelief and dismissal. These descriptive norms are incompatible with the idea of a man being hurt by a woman, so believing him when he says he has would require revising or rejecting those beliefs. But it’s difficult for many people to revise or reject their deep-seeded beliefs, and gendered norms tend to be especially deep-seeded because they are so prevalent, so casual, and taught at such a young age. So, neglecting to seriously interrogate their beliefs about gender, many people disbelieve or dismiss male victims.

Prescriptive norms, meanwhile, are responsible for two other horrible reactions that male victims sometimes face: blame and ridicule. If men ought to be stronger than women and able to defend themselves against assault by them, and this particular man failed to do so, then the assault was his fault. If the mere idea of men being unable to defend themselves against women is ridiculous, then male victims will be ridiculed. Together, descriptive and prescriptive norms about masculinity and strength prevent men who are assaulted by women from being taken seriously and helped.

Back up another level. Why do some people think that the treatment of male survivors of violence is some sort of “counterpoint” to feminist initiatives to prevent violence against women? Because a key component of sexism is oppositional thinking. Namely: men are women are opposites. Men and women play a “game” in which men “win” by “getting” sex and women “lose” by “giving” sex. Anything that’s “good” for women is “bad” for men and vice versa. Giving women more rights–the same rights that men already have–somehow entails “taking” rights or freedoms away from men. Sexism is a zero-sum game.

To people who think this way, it is inconceivable that feminists who are fighting to stop violence against women still care about violence against men and do not want to condone or encourage it. To them, there is no other reason someone would focus on violence against women–not because that’s what they best know how to combat, not because they have personal experience and therefore a personal stake in fixing the problem, not because women are overwhelmingly more likely to be raped, seriously injured, or murdered by men than vice versa. No. The only possible reason must be because they want men to be hurt by women. That’s why they’re trying to stop women from being hurt by men.

This is oppositional thinking exemplified.

In fact, those who fight against the gender roles that perpetuate male violence against women are also helping to stop the mistreatment of male survivors of violence, because these problems stem from the exact same faulty thinking. As I’ve shown, male victims are disbelieved, dismissed, blamed, and ridiculed because men are expected to be strong, stoic, basically invincible. Some people may be more interested in working with non-male survivors and others may be more interested in working with male survivors, but everyone who understands the problem accurately is fighting descriptive and prescriptive norms about gender.

Feminism, by the way, combats both types of norms. The feminist movement has been instrumental in challenging many presumptions about how the world actually works (i.e. women are more emotional than men, women are bad at math, men are “naturally” more interested in sex than women, “virginity” is a thing that exists, etc.) and many presumptions about how the world should work (i.e. women should be “virgins” until marriage, men should not cry or express negative emotions besides anger, women should not have casual sex, etc.).

This, then, is the irony of posting links like this video as some sort of annoying “Checkmate, feminists!” gotcha thing. You may not realize it, but we’re actually fighting the same battle. You’re just so inept that you keep hitting me with friendly fire.

While norms about male strength are addressed and discussed by many feminists of all genders, more men need to recognize these norms as inaccurate and harmful, and challenge them. I see very few of the men who are most concerned about male victims of female violence doing this, probably because they’re not ultimately interested in losing their male privilege. I see no “men’s rights” activism around this issue. All I really see right now is a lot of men*** trying to get in the way of the people who are working to help all survivors of violence, and all human beings.

~~~

*This may end up requiring another post to explain since there’s been so much pushback, but I am continuing to call the Rodger shooting an example of misogynistic violence even though men were also killed. His misogyny precipitated the attack. He intended (and tried) to get into a sorority house and kill the women there. Because they were in his way or because he was so full of fury and violence or for whatever other reason we’ll never know, he also killed some men. Their deaths are as much a tragedy as anyone else’s, and no, it does not in any way diminish that tragedy to accurately identify the motivation for Rodger’s attack.

**Many women who attack men are actually acting in self-defense–a fact which is often ignored when the women are non-white, trans, and especially both. Examples include Yakiri Rubi Rubio, CeCe McDonald, and Marissa Alexander. The Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project details the problem here. While men who are truly the victims of violence by women deserve justice, the intersections of racism and transphobia unjustly criminalize many women who were actually acting in self-defense, many of whom were already survivors of sexual assault and/or domestic violence. Many advocates for male victims conveniently ignore this fact.

***But, of course, Not All Men. Just so we’re clear. I just wanted to make sure I included that in this post somewhere. For the sake of clarity.

~~~

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About That "Laughing at Male Victims of Violence" Video

Masculinity, Violence, and Bandaid Solutions

Miri, , , , , , , , , , , 77 Comments

[Content note: violence, guns, mass shootings, misogyny]

We’re all familiar with the pattern now: a solitary young white man goes on a shooting rampage. People die. The media describes him as “crazy,” “disturbed,” “troubled,” “insane.” Everyone collectively bemoans the failings of our mental healthcare system, presuming that its failure is relevant here. People with mental illnesses cringe at the reminder of what our society thinks of them. A few people advocate stricter restrictions on guns. The victims are buried and memorialized, the killer’s parents shunned or comforted, and the killer gradually forgotten.

And it happens over. And over. And over. Again.

Whatever depth there is in this analysis is limited to the parts of the internet where I live. You won’t see the anchors and talk show hosts on CNN or MSNBC or, obviously, Fox News, wondering what it is about white men that produces so relatively many mass shooters–relative to other gender/racial groups and relative to other countries. They will talk about one of two things, mostly depending on their party affiliation: gun control or mental healthcare.

And it’s so difficult to ask them to talk about something else because we should be talking about gun control and mental healthcare. More and better gun control and more and better mental healthcare would vastly improve quality of life in the United States, and maybe in the right combination, could even prevent many of these shootings.

But wouldn’t it be better to fight the ideas and beliefs that lead to violence?

There’s plenty of evidence that Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old white man who murdered six people and injured seven more in Santa Barbara yesterday, felt entitled to sex with women and hated them for denying it to him. In a YouTube video uploaded just a day before the mass shooting, Rodger said:

You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime because I don’t know what you don’t see in me, I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it. [laughs]

On the day of retribution, I am going to enter the hottest sorority house at UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see inside there. All those girls I’ve desired so much. They have all rejected me and looked down on me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance toward them, while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.

I take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male. [laughs]

If this weren’t terrifying enough, OllieGarkey at Daily Kos points out that the YouTube channels to which Rodger has been subscribed included well-known men’s rights activists. According to David Futrelle, he was also a commenter at PUAHate, a misogynistic forum that has been down since the shooting. On one forum post, Rodger wrote:

Women have control over which men get sex and which men don’t, thus having control over which men breed and which men don’t. Feminism gave women the power over the future of the human species. Feminism is evil.

Rodger’s various online postings have all the language of sexual entitlement and misogyny: “get sex,” “breed,” “alpha male,” “slut,” “not fair.” I’ve heard this from many men who have assaulted or abused me or others. It is not uncommon.

I’m going to say something that should be obvious: a minority of men think about women in quite this violent and hateful a way. An even smaller minority act on that violence so brazenly. But many men violate women’s boundaries and autonomy constantly, and all men are socialized to think about themselves, about sex, and about women in similar ways.

In the coming days you will hear all about mental illness. (This is because most people only talk about mental illness when they get to blame an act of violence on it, and not when millions of people are merely suffering in silence.) You will hear about how the mental healthcare system failed Rodger, how mental healthcare is too expensive, how there aren’t enough mental healthcare professionals, how insurance coverage is fucked up, how medication doesn’t work or doesn’t work well enough or works too well, how irresponsible parents don’t get their children mental healthcare quickly enough.

You will not hear that, while 2 percent of violent acts can be attributed to people with mental illnesses, people with mental illnesses are four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than people without mental illnesses. You will not hear about the ways in which people with mental illnesses are discriminated against for many reasons, one of which is that they’re believed to be inherently violent, partially because of how the media focuses on mental illness in the wake of every single mass shooting. You will not hear that Black people who commit violent acts are never presumed to be mentally ill; they’re just presumed to be Black. You will not hear about how it’s only “terrorism” if a brown person does it; the fact that it’s politically motivated and intended to terrorize a particular group of people is not, apparently, enough. You will hear a lot about “not all men,” but you will not hear that misandry irritates and misogyny kills.

You will not hear that boys and men are taught to believe that they are entitled to women’s bodies in uncountable ways, every day, in every setting, by their parents and by the media and by everyone else. You will not hear again about the boy who stabbed a girl to death for refusing to go to prom with him, or about this entire list of women being hurt or killed for ignoring or rebuffing men’s sexual interests, or the constant daily acts of violence to which women are subjected for exercising their right to autonomy.

And before you call Rodger “crazy”: it is not actually “crazy” to believe stuff that’s been shoved down your throat from birth.

I wish it were. It’d be nice if humans reasoned rationally by default, that if you grow up with people telling you things that don’t make sense, like religion or that sex is dirty or that women owe you anything at all, you’d just go, “Well, that makes no sense!” and refuse to ever believe it.

But we didn’t evolve that way, at least not yet. Unless we work very hard at it, we’ll inevitably believe what we’re taught so incessantly, as sexism is taught to all of us. Yet we are all capable of rational thought if we work at it, which is why I hold Rodger and all other men who believe in their conditioning and subject women to violence fully accountable for their actions.

A very good therapist could have helped Rodger with this process. Maybe. But when mass shootings happen and everyone bemoans the fact that the shooter didn’t go to (or wasn’t helped by) therapy, they never seem to ask themselves what this therapy would entail. You don’t go to therapy or go on medication and suddenly become happy. What you have to do is unlearn the maladaptive and harmful ways in which you’ve learned (or been taught to) think. For someone like me, this means learning not to be so afraid and not to treat every minor setback as the end of the world. In Rodger’s case, this might’ve meant learning how to be okay with not having sex with women for a while, learning the social skills to eventually find and keep a partner, and, most importantly, learning that women do not owe him a single damn thing. With that realization might’ve come freedom.

In other words, the way to help Rodger would have been to help him unlearn what he never should have learned in the first place. And there’s no guarantee that even the best of therapists could succeed at this; everyone in the field knows that sometimes clients are just beyond help (at least by a given therapist) and that it’s tragic and sad and don’t we wish we could’ve caught them earlier?

What if our culture had never taught Rodger these horrible beliefs?

What if our culture didn’t still treat women as possessions?

What if our culture didn’t emphasize hypermasculinity and getting laid at all costs?

What if, what if, what if.

So everyone’s going to blame our faulty mental healthcare system now. But let’s do a thought experiment.

A child is born in an area with terrible preventative healthcare. They don’t receive a single vaccine, and they are never taught about healthy eating, hygiene, and exercise. Nobody models good health for them, nobody teaches them in early childhood about the importance of washing your hands. Getting medical check-ups and physicals isn’t even an option. They have no idea what a healthy blood pressure or heart rate might look like. As far as this child knows, a doctor is where you go when you’re so sick you’re dying.

At 22 years of age, this person is now so sick that they’re dying. They have had a horrible diet for their entire life, and they have never treated their body well. They have suffered from increasingly worsening symptoms for weeks, but didn’t realize that they needed to see a doctor. The disease they have is one that they never received the vaccine for. Finally, at 22 years of age, this person goes to the hospital, and the doctors do their best but are unable to save them. The person dies.

Do you blame the doctors who tried but failed to keep this person alive? Or do you blame the entire system, the fact that there was never any preventative healthcare, the fact that they were not given a vaccine and they were not taught the skills to make contracting diseases less likely?

The type of masculinity that young boys are taught is not compatible with mental health and with ethical behavior. Full stop. We’re fortunate that so relatively few will take it to the lengths that Rodger did, but I don’t know a single man who doesn’t suffer as a direct consequence of it. I know few who have never made others suffer as a direct consequence of it. We need to inoculate boys against this harmful and maladaptive thinking rather than teach it to them.

Improving and reforming and revolutionizing mental healthcare is important, but it’s too important to discuss only in the few days after a mass shooting has happened. If this is something you care about, join me in discussing it all the damn time.

Remember this: by the time someone is in their early twenties and spewing hatred and bitterness, it may very well be too late. It’s never too late, however, to work harder at unlearning the lies we are taught about gender.

Masculinity, Violence, and Bandaid Solutions

Hate Crimes, Google Glasses, and Victim Blaming

Miri, , , , , , , , 30 Comments

I have a piece up at the Daily Dot about a woman in San Francisco who was attacked because she wore Google Glass to a bar, and referred to it as a “hate crime.” So many issues to pull apart! Here’s an excerpt:

[C]alling something a “hate crime” adds a certain tone of immediacy and violation to it. I’m not surprised people often call things hate crimes when they’re not. Being mugged or even assaulted isn’t that uncommon, but being a victim of a hate crime is very uncommon—especially if you’re an affluent straight white person. Our criminal justice system is centered on perpetrators, not victims. There is no justice system to help victims of crimes restore a sense of safety and bodily autonomy. We have an institution to punish criminals, but not to support victims. Maybe referring to one’s experience as a hate crime is a way to garner sympathy that may otherwise be difficult to come by.

But “hate crime” does not mean “the perpetrator hates who I am as a person.” It doesn’t mean “this felt especially bad.” It means that the crime was committed with the intent of harming a person who is a member of a social group that has historically been subject to stigma, prejudice, and discrimination—not just on the interpersonal level (as occurs when, say, a white person dislikes a black person), but on the institutional level (as occurs when, say, black people are more likely to be arrested and convicted of crimes that are more likely to be committed by white people). The reason “hate crime” is an important category of crime to define and track this way is because it’s important to understand the effects of institutional oppression, especially since promoting hate against these groups encourages further attacks against them.

Do Google Glass wearers, or technology enthusiasts more broadly, fit into this category of groups? The answer is clearly no. They have not historically been denied rights according to other people. They do not suffer from poverty, sexual assault, violence, abuse, or unemployment at significantly higher rates than other people. They are not generally considered unfit to be friends, partners, parents, employees, or tenants. They are not targeted by the police for unjust stops and searches, and they are not given harsher sentences for committing the same crimes as other people. While people labeled “nerds” or “geeks” sometimes face ridicule or bullying, so do people who have red hair or whose last names sound funny.

Read the rest.

Hate Crimes, Google Glasses, and Victim Blaming

Stop Telling Harassment and Assault Survivors To Go To the Police

Miri, , , , , , , , , , , 50 Comments

Note: Yes, this is prompted by something that happened to me this weekend. But I’ve been thinking about it for a while and it applies to many events and situations, so I’d rather the comments section didn’t dissolve into a discussion of me and my specific (frankly rather mild) situation. I’m doing fine. However, the snark is on high for this post, so please do take what I just went through into account before complaining about my “tone.” 

So, let’s talk about when someone gets harassed or assaulted and they make it public (whether to friends and family or, like, public-public) and everybody always comes out with the same line: “Oh my god! You need to go to the police right now!”

Stop, rewind. Please stop saying this. I know it’s well-intentioned. I know you want us to be safe. Please stop saying it anyway. It does more harm than good. Let’s talk about why.

First of all, it’s unsolicited advice. Unsolicited advice is frequently annoying, especially when it’s coming from internet randos I don’t even know and who shouldn’t presume to know me. As is often the case with unsolicited advice, it completely ignores my situation as a young woman who’s just started grad school and is terribly busy and has few social supports in the huge new city into which she’s only recently moved. Do I look like someone who has the time and resources to pursue a court case right now? If we’re being honest, I haven’t even had time to call my doctor and ask her to rewrite a prescription I need, let alone spend hours having a lovely tête-à-tête with a cop who tells me I was probably asking for it by being a woman and existing.

So I don’t need your advice. Sometimes people respond to this with “Yeah well if you didn’t want advice why’d you post it online?” Oh, you know, many reasons. In my specific case, it was to highlight a ridiculous flaw in Facebook’s moderation system, to bring attention to the abuse faced by virtually any woman who writes online about feminism (or does anything online, let’s be honest), and to get some emotional support.

Emotional support, by the way, is not (necessarily) advice. Emotional support is, “I’m really sorry you’re going through this.” “You don’t deserve to be treated that way.” “How are you doing?” “Do you need some distractions?” “Whoever did this is a really shitty person.” “This wasn’t your fault.”

As I said, I’m personally totally fine and I didn’t need to vent to anyone or anything. But I appreciated it when people said things like this to me. Many victims do. You do not need to pile advice on us to show us you care! There are better ways.

Second, any person over the age of 5 is aware of the fact that the police are a thing that exists. We don’t need to be told to go to the police any more than a hungry person needs to be told that maybe they should consider eating some food. I mean, really, do these people think we’re not aware that we have the option of calling the police? (I’ll grant that maybe sometimes people may not know that certain acts, such as blackmail or death threats, are a crime. But sexual assault? And still.)

So if you tell me to go to the police, you’re sort of (unintentionally) treating me like an idiot. Yes, I know that the police exist. And guess what? A dozen other people already had the same idea you did, so if I didn’t know about the police before, I sure do now.

Third, going to the police is not effective. It’s just not. So you’re giving me advice that is not helpful. The stories of what happens to women who report harassment or assault to the police are plentiful and really sad. Yes, sometimes it works out well. But generally, either nothing happens, or the women get revictimized by the police. (Sometimes, the police also do this.)

I have been sexually assaulted and sexually harassed and threatened with rape and death. At no point have I seriously considered reporting any of these things to the police. I am not an irresponsible or uninformed person, so please trust me when I say that I have good reasons for not even considering the police as an option.

Fourth, telling a victim over and over to go to the police sends a message. And, unfortunately, that message is generally not “I care about you.” That message is, “It is your duty as a victim to go to the police, or else you’re being irresponsible and immature and making me worry about you and failing to prevent your attacker from hurting others. You are not responding to your harassment/assault in the right way.”

Did you mean to say that? Probably not. But I’m telling you right now that this is how many victims are going to perceive it. When someone becomes the victim of a gendered crime (or any crime, but we’re talking about specific crimes here), that is a time to consider this person’s needs first and foremost. You may indeed be very worried for them. You may wonder what this means for you or others you care about. It is tempting to treat the survivor as though they and they alone hold the power to stop these crimes once and for all in their hands, and all they have to do is pick up the phone and call the cops.

It’s telling that many of the people who told me to go to the police this weekend and who received a curt response from me (curt, not nasty or abusive) immediately took it personally and lashed out, whining about how rude I was and how I didn’t appreciate that they were worried about me. (Keep in mind that these were total strangers on the Internet, not friends or family or anyone else entitled to my emotional energy.) Of course. Because it was about them, and not me, all along. It was about their understandable need to contribute to the conversation and feel useful and tell a young woman what they, as older and wiser adults, thought she needed to do.

At no point was there any acknowledgement from these people that I was dealing with fucking death threats and maybe wasn’t in the best emotional state to be sweet and cheerful about rejecting their unasked-for, completely unhelpful advice.

That’s how I knew it was never about me.

Fifth, law enforcement is a deeply problematic institution that some people choose not to willingly engage with. I won’t say too much about this here because it’s just too immense a topic to cover in a paragraph or two. But yes, I have some ethical qualms about working with a police force that, in my city, fines women for carrying condoms (must be prostitutes amirite?) and profiles people of color with its stop and frisk policy. Sometimes contact with the police is unavoidable, and I would obviously call them if I were facing an immediate risk of injury or death as opposed to some dumb random Facebook death threat.

Stop telling harassment and assault survivors to go to the police. Stop treating us like we don’t know what’s good for us. Stop acting like the police are a panacea to all the world’s evils. Stop making it about you. Stop. It’s our turn to speak.

Stop Telling Harassment and Assault Survivors To Go To the Police

Strawmanning Rape Culture (Part One)

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[Content note: sexual assault]

Rape culture is a very difficult concept for many people to understand, perhaps because, like many sociological constructs, it works in such a way as to make itself invisible. Understanding rape culture, especially if you are someone who isn’t affected by it very much, requires a keen attention to detail and a willingness to examine your own complicity in things you’d rather not believe that you’re complicit in.

For a great introduction to rape culture, read the Wikipedia page and this Shakesville piece. If you’re not familiar with it, read these things before you read this post, because this is not a 101-level post. Here’s another definition, from the book Transforming a Rape Culture, that may be useful (although you’ll notice that I’ll expand on it a bit later):

A rape culture is a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm.

In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes. This violence, however, is neither biologically nor divinely ordained. Much of what we accept as inevitable is in fact the expression of values and attitudes that can change.

Many people hear about rape culture briefly, perhaps online or in a text assigned in a sociology or gender studies class, and don’t really read about or grasp the nuances of it. This makes it very easy to strawman the rape culture argument, to reduce it to clearly absurd and obviously inaccurate claims that are easy to strike down–and, crucially, that nobody who claims that rape culture exists ever made to begin with.

Here are some common strawman versions of rape culture, and why they are inaccurate.

“So you’re saying that people think rape is okay.”

When many people hear “rape culture,” they assume this is supposed to imply that we live in a society where people actually think rape is okay and/or good. That’s an easily falsifiable claim. After all, rape is illegal. We do, in some cases, punish people for committing it. If someone is known to be a rapist, that person’s reputation often takes a huge nosedive. We teach nowadays that “no means no.” People obviously resist being identified as rapists, and they wouldn’t resist it if it weren’t generally considered a bad thing to be.

So how could we really have a rape culture? More to the point, if people who say we live in a rape culture are not claiming that people literally think rape is okay, what exactly are we claiming?

One way rape gets shrugged off and thus accepted in our culture is by constantly shifting the goalposts of what rape is. If you flirted with someone, it’s not rape. If you had an orgasm, it’s not rape. If you dressed sluttily, it’s not rape. If you’re a sex worker, it’s not rape. If it was with your partner or spouse, it’s not rape. If you’re a prisoner, it’s not rape. If you’re fat or unattractive, it’s not rape (because you must’ve wanted it). If no penis was involved, it’s not rape. If you were unconscious, it’s not rape. The fact that we have politicians debating what is and is not “legitimate rape” is evidence that we do not consider all rape to be legitimate. And, unsurprisingly, studies show that people will admit to having committed sexual assault provided it’s not called “sexual assault” in the survey.

Another way rape gets excused is through victim blaming, which I’ll discuss a bit later. Even when we admit that what happened to someone is rape, we still often blame them for it, thus implying that, in some cases, rape isn’t really so wrong because the victim was “asking for it.”

One more related way in which rape gets excused is through claims that rapists (male rapists, generally) “can’t help themselves.” By framing rape as the inevitable result of masculinity, hormones, sexual tension, and so on, we’re implying that rape is a normal part of our society that we’re not going to do anything about. The hypocrisy of a society that pays lip service to the idea that rape is bad while also suggesting that in some cases it’s not “really” rape and in some cases it’s just what you’d expect and ultimately it’s inevitable anyway is emblematic of rape culture.

Remember, though, that some people do actually think rape is good and/or okay. Some men do openly admit to wanting to rape women, and even if they’re attempting to make a so-called “joke,” their choice of joke says a lot about their beliefs about rape.

“So you’re saying that without rape culture, there would be no more rape.”

People also misinterpret the rape culture argument as a claim that all rape is caused directly by rape culture. While some people probably do believe that there would be no rape in a society free from rape culture, I don’t. I think that rape culture drastically increases the prevalence of rape by encouraging attitudes that lead to it, reducing penalties for rapists, and making it more difficult for victims to speak out and seek justice.

Strawmanning the rape culture argument in this way makes it seem patently ridiculous. After all, we don’t claim that there’s a “car theft culture,” but people steal plenty of cars. We don’t wring our hands over “identity theft culture,” but lots and lots of people fall victim to identity theft. Same, unfortunately, with murder. So if you think we’re saying that rape culture is the entire reason rape exists as a phenomenon at all, it’s easy to refute that claim by pointing to other crimes, and also by pointing out that people often commit crimes because it gives them some sort of advantage.

If rape culture did not exist, rape would still exist, but things would look very different. Rape would be much rarer. When there is enough evidence to show that someone committed rape, that person will go to jail. Although there may still a bit of stigma surrounding being a rape victim, that stigma will not be any greater than it is for being the victim of any other crime (right now, it’s much greater). Rape would not constantly be threatened and used as “punishment” for being queer, for being a woman who speaks out, and so on. There will still be researchers trying to understand what causes people to become rapists and activists trying to stop them from doing so, but the key difference will be that when someone gets raped, we’ll ask more questions about the person who raped them than about the person who was raped. We’ll ask what led the rapist to do such a thing, not what led the victim to be so careless.

“So you’re saying that the fact that a given crime exists means that ‘[crime] culture’ exists. Why isn’t there a murder culture, then, huh?!”

Closely related to the previous one. The existence of a given type of crime is not sufficient to show that a “culture” exists that encourages and excuses that crime. The reason there is a rape culture but not a murder culture is because, overall, our culture does not claim that murder is acceptable, okay, inevitable, or even commendable in certain cases. Are there individual people who believe this about murder? Certainly. But for the most part, these people lack institutional backing. Police officers and judges and jury members are not constantly going on record saying that, well, it wasn’t really murder in this case, or the victim’s past behavior suggests they have a tendency to lie about these things…

It’s still absolutely reasonable to say that we have a problem with murder or theft or [other crime] in our society without having to make the claim that a [crime] culture exists. These crimes do have sociological causes, not just individual ones. Economic inequality, for instance, tends to contribute a lot to these types of crimes; they are not simply personal failings as we often dismiss them to be.

Culturally, however, rape gets a lot more support and excuses than theft or murder do. Victims of rape are blamed to a greater extent than victims of any other crime; and not only that, but that blame is used by people in positions of authority to avoid finding, trying, and sentencing the rapist.

The second half of this post will be up tomorrow. If you have more strawmans to add in the comments, try to hold on to them until that post comes out and you see the rest of them.

Strawmanning Rape Culture (Part One)

[blogathon] Does Anyone Deserve to be Stigmatized?

Miri, , , , , , , , 9 Comments

This is the third post in my SSA blogathon! Don’t forget to donate!

Last quarter I took a psychology class called Social Stigma. Social stigma, to quote the great Wikipedia, is:

the extreme disapproval of (or discontent with) a person on socially characteristic grounds that are perceived, and serve to distinguish them, from other members of a society. Stigma may then be affixed to such a person, by the greater society, who differs from their cultural norms.

Social stigma can result from the perception (rightly or wrongly) of mental illness, physical disabilities, diseases such as leprosy (see leprosy stigma),[1] illegitimacy,sexual orientation, gender identity[2] skin tone, nationality, ethnicity, religion (or lack of religion[3][4]) or criminality.

In the first class, the professor ignited a debate by asking the question, “Does anyone deserve to be stigmatized?” As examples, she used neo-Nazis and pedophiles.

We were really divided. The understandable knee-jerk response is that, yes, some people do things that are so terrible that they deserve to be stigmatized. However, I came down on the “no” side for several reasons.

First of all, there’s a difference between condemning someone’s actions and stigmatizing them. Although we may talk about certain actions as being “stigmatized,” the way the phenomenon of stigma operates is that it puts a mark of shame on an entire person, not just on something they did. When someone does a thing that is stigmatized, we don’t just think, “Oh, they’re a good/cool person but I don’t like that they did that.” We think, “This person is bad.” They’re immoral or vulgar or even mentally ill (transvestic fetishism, anyone?).

When a group is stigmatized, they are considered less than human in some ways. Whichever aspect of them is stigmatized becomes the whole of their identity in our eyes, and often this means that even if they change the actions that caused them to fall into that category in the first place, the stigma remains. This is the case for ex-convicts, for instance, who are often denied housing, employment, and other opportunities simply because they used to be criminals, served their time, and are now trying to contribute productively to society.

So, stigma and social disapproval are not the same thing; there are some key distinctions between them that I think may have been lost on some people during that class discussion.

Second, there’s a bit of an idealist in me that wants to teach people why doing bad things is bad rather than just keep them from doing those things for fear of stigmatization. And I get that practically it doesn’t matter, and if the only way to prevent people from doing bad things was to make them afraid of stigma, I’d accept that.

But the thing is, if the only reason you don’t do a bad thing is because you’re afraid that people will judge you, what happens if/when you become reasonably sure that you can do it without getting found out?

Take sexual assault. Being a convicted rapist is actually a very stigmatized identity–it’s just that rapists rarely become convicted rapists. Rape is known to be a Very Bad Thing, but rapists know that they can get away with it if they commit it in certain ways. Despite the stigma, rape is pervasive and rape culture exists.

Third, what we stigmatize does not always correlate well with what is actually harmful to society. Rather, we stigmatize things for knee-jerk emotional reasons, and then we invent post-hoc explanations for why those things are harmful. That’s how you get the panic about gay teachers converting students to homosexuality (has there ever been any evidence for that?), abortion causing mental illness, same-sex couples being unfit to raise children, atheists being immoral, and so on.

We didn’t decide to stigmatize same-sex love, abortion, and atheism because they were harmful to society. We decided they were harmful to society because we were stigmatizing them. And now, even as modern science and research knocks these assumptions of harm down over and over again, bigots still cling to the fantasy that these things are harmful. That should tell you something.

Fourth, wielding psychological manipulation as punishment really, really rubs me the wrong way. The attitude that if someone does something bad they deserve to be cast out and hated and seen as inhuman scares me. I think it’s very normal and understandable to want to punish someone for doing a horrible thing, but, as I wrote after the Steubenville verdict, I’m not sure that that’s the most useful and skeptical response. I feel that our primary concern should be preventing people from doing bad things (both first-time and repeat offenses) and not satisfying our own need for revenge by punishing them.

Stigma is a blunt weapon. By its very definition it transcends the boundaries we try to set for it (i.e. condemn an action) and strongly biases our views of people (i.e. condemn a whole person). That’s why “hate the sin, love the sinner” just doesn’t work. If we are to promote rationality in our society, we should find ways to prevent crime and other anti-social acts without using stigma and cognitive bias as punishment.

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[blogathon] Does Anyone Deserve to be Stigmatized?