This business of rape being something that’s done to the man who owns the woman who is raped…I watched some of the 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder the other day, and was struck by something the defense lawyer-protagonist (Jimmy Stewart) said. One character said of another, “He was a nice guy.” Jimmy Stewart responded, “Yeah, a nice guy, except for his habit of raping other men’s wives.”
« Proxy
Ownership
« Proxy
That’s nice.
A nice guy can rape women and still be a nice guy.
A nice guy can rape his OWN wife and still be a nice guy.
But once he starts boning some other man’s property, boy HOWDY! He’s not NICE!! No more Mr. Nice Guy for HIM!!
A throwaway line in a random bit of pulp. That makes it so much worse than a calculated position. The people who wrote that line, the actor who said it and the vast majority of the people who listened to it presumably didn’t even think there was anything amiss. Because it didn’t occur to any of them that women might be actual people. Horrifying.
I was listening to local classical radio a few months ago and the announcer introduced a minor composer by saying he was a horrible person, although his music was rather nice. So, was he an anti-Semite – Wagner? Did he write music for the Nazis – debatably, Orff or Richard Strauss? No, it turned out this guy, whose name I don’t recall, did the unthinkable: He slept with “other men’s wives” and he embezzled money from the church! Well, the latter kind of makes him a hero to me, and the former is none of my business. Rather bizarre, too. Rarely is Wagner’s music, for example, introduced with any such disclaimer.
Jimmy Stewart dropped bombs in Germany that killed certainly dozens if not hundreds of civilians. Funny, his movies are never introduced with any disclaimer about that, either. I guess only certain forms of abusing the property of other men are unacceptable.
Exactly, latsot – It’s the throwaway background stuff that passes practically unnoticed that shows how deeply ingrained this shit is.