I have explained, ad nauseum, that the entire POINT of my post was to claim that the particular male posters who seemed upset about the possibility of false rape accusations but not about rape don’t have the problems that the particular female posters who have been the victims of rape do, and that the behavior of the former in the two threads in question was much worse than the behavior of the latter although the latter group has far more reason to get upset about these threads.
I can believe that the meaning of my original post was perhaps not as clear as it might have been, but I have been quite explicit since then. I did not at any point say that no men are ever raped. I know my views about rape and I know the sorts of things I say about rape, and that is not one of them. I would never, not in a million years, say such a thing. If you continue to insist that I have then this will not be a simple misunderstanding as to what I really meant, as I have not left any room for further misunderstanding. It will be you deliberately lying.
There are a lot of reasons men have fear about rape.
First, the fear of being falsely accused. As has been mentioned, this fear does not necessarily come from false accusations being common, and personally I believe they are very uncommon. But the fear comes from the mere fact that they are possible. It is scary that someone could do you such an incredible amount of harm, destroying your life and making you hated by many people.
Directly related to this fear is the fear of jail. It has already been mentioned that rape is one of the main reasons men fear going to jail. Going to jail on a false rape conviction is especially scary, because it is generally believed that rapists would be at higher risk for torture and rape in jail than someone with a lesser crime. For this reason, a fear of false conviction leads to a fear of being raped yourself, so it seems wrong to say that only women fear being raped. Saying that no males said they were afraid in these threads makes no sense, because men are far less likely to admit having been raped or being afraid of being raped.
Another fear is the fear the men really are inherently evil. With such high statistics for rape, even good men may feel as though there is something wrong with their entire gender. This is hardly a pleasant thought.
Another fear is the fear that someone you love has or will be raped. This does not compare to the experience of the person who was raped, and yet it is still a powerful fear. Men do not want to believe that their sisters, mothers, girlfriends, or wives have ever been or could ever be raped. It is too awful for them to think about. A statistic such as “1/4 of women are raped” makes them think about it. Thus it is a common reaction to immediately disbelieve such a statistic in order to avoid this fear.
With all this fear on both sides, it is no wonder this is such a hard issue to talk about. I don’t think anyone should be offended by people who don’t believe the statistic. The methods and definitions used are still unclear to me, so I don’t know if it is true myself. At the same time, I consciously recall all the fears, and make sure I am not being dismissive out of fear, which many people seem to have done.
I didn’t mean to imply anything, Rex, I merely asked for clarification. Actually, looking back at your post now, I see nothing objectionable in it. I have no idea what I was thinking the first time I read it or why I thought you were disapproving of rape shield laws. All I can say is I was reading a lot of posts rather quickly and something about that paragraph struck me as possibly hostile. I may have conflated it with another post in my mind or something. I really am mystified now as to what the hell I was thinking because your post makes a lot of sense and you were only presenting the shield laws as an incentive (or at least not a hindrance) for victims to bring civil suits. I think I may have read the post (wrongly, obviously) as a complaint about what what women can do in civil court, when you were, in fact, encouraging civil torts as an option for victims. In any cause I drew a completely erroneous inferrence and pointedly asked for clarification of a statement that was already quite clear in context.
My apologies, Rex. It was sloppy reading on my part.
S’okay, I shouldn’t have snapped at you. There’s been a little problem with people putting words in people’s mouths in a few GD threads lately, I was a little on edge when I thought that’s what you were doing. All cool.
This isn’t exactly a fear issue for me, so much as outrage at the deliberate slander being perpetrated against my sex, and at the political motivations of those doing so.
It’s not the only one, but it’s the most emotive, inflammatory, and hard to criticize; and the bogus statistics reach such influential ears as, oh, say, the President of the USA.
I don’t believe that there is something wrong with my entire gender, but I do feel that there is a very real danger of this POV being accepted as fact.
And I think my reaction is no more extreme than, perhaps, a woman’s might be if figures were circulated purporting to show that one-quarter of male children will be viciously beaten by their mothers.
Thank you for the clarification, Eenfair. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression you live in a big city. The big newspapers do some things quite differently from the small rags I used to work for.
I’m not going to say that it’s untrue; however, I’m sure that if rape crisis centres do make a difference between those attacked by male vs. female rapists, it’s due, in part, to the amout of physical damage either can inflict.
A man can do a lot more ripping and tearing with a penis than a woman can with a vagina. In addition, he could probably leave a lot more DNA evidence than a woman (although her epithelial cells could be useful), requiring more speed in processing.
Obviously, if the woman used some sort of implement, she would be able to inflict as much physical damage as the man.
IMHO, there is very little difference to the amount of phychological damage inflicted by either and I assume that rape counselors would respond accordingly to those circumstances.
My impression is that those people, especially men, who say they’ve been raped by a woman tend to get generally laughed at and told to stop being silly. (Men often get an additional layer of, “Oh, quit bitching about getting laid, would you? Some people.” When the male friend of mine who was raped confronted his rapist, she told him, “Oh, get over it. I did you a favor.”)
I have no idea how much that general attitude would carry over into a scenario of people specifically trained to deal with rape victims. I have seen a lot of powerful wordshapings devoted to the idea that “rapist” is a word that only can apply to men, and some fringey stuff like that which Nightime and Malacandra mentioned that suggests that “man” and “rapist” are interchangeable. I’ve also seen stories in the past (though I have no cite) in which men in need have been at least berated for taking up resources that were allocated to something more frequently needed (or at least used) by women in need.
I’d be surprised – pleasantly surprised, but definitely surprised – if the run-of-the-mill rape hotline person were able to deal with a male victim as smoothly as a female one, if that person were able to deal with the concept of the female rapist as smoothly as a male one. There’s so much cultural baggage on the side of “Rape is something men do to women” that the idea of “Rape is something people do to people” is one that I’ve seen get a lot of resistance, even (perhaps especially, I can’t judge this fairly) among those people who are trying to do something about the state of raped and abused women.
Me, I’m a woman who was assaulted and who didn’t talk to anyone about it for several years afterwards. In part, I didn’t talk about it because I didn’t want to become The Victim, some sort of representative of an archetype. But at least, if I were to become an archetype, it’s an archetype because people believe it actually happens.
Well, I’m training to be a crisis counselor, and rape is obviously a crisis.
Frankly, I would be quite shocked and apalled if any of my colleagues expressed the notion that a man can’t be raped in general, or that a man can’t be raped by a woman, specifically.
There is, of course, man on man rape which would be as assultive and injurious as man on woman rape, with the exclusion of the fear of pregnancy, but the inclusion of such things about shame about perceved sexuality or whatever.
Secondly, the notion that women never force themselves on men is silly. There are female predators out there, just as there are male ones.
Finally, it’s certainly possible for a woman to rape another woman.
While I’m sure that there are ignorant, untrained people answering rape hotlines in the world, I’m confident that they are not the majority, and that if someone called in crisis, regardless of their sex, the counselor would be prepared to deal with that situation.
I can certainly understand feelings of being violated, and that wouldn’t change regardless of the sex of the person expressing those feelings.
The one that I used to work for did train us to work with both male and female survivors (of both female and male rapists) and I don’t think that agency was outside the ordinary.
Most of the assumptions about and depictions of rape crisis agencies that I’ve seen or heard aren’t reflective of the reality what happened inside of the agency I worked for or the ones I knew about.
It’s sickening to me to see how quickly it turned from a debate on statistics to a misogyny fest. The anger and defensiveness immediately shown, particularly by male posters, is literally frightening to me. Yes, some women do lie about being victimized; that does not mean that MOST women do. As a matter of fact, in my experience more women DENY being raped because they know what they will go through in a courtroom situation.
If ONE woman in 2 million is raped in her lifetime, it’s too many.
The “anger and defensiveness” you mention was by no means confined only to one side of the debate. IMO.
Rape is a dreadful thing. So is being hit by lightning. The one is more dreadful in part because it is more common than the other.
There is a difference between dreadful things that happen once in ten times vs. once in a million times. It does not diminish the awfulness of the dreadful thing to anyone to whom it happened, either once in a million times or twice a week for a year. But in a world of limited resources, it makes sense to concentrate on reducing the dreadful things that happen most commonly more than the ones that happen once in a blue moon.
The point of at least some of the debaters in the other thread is that we do not know that rape is as common as is claimed by some. It is neither mysogynistic nor cruel to try to determine how common the crime is.
If it turns out to be rare, this does not diminish the suffering of those who are raped, nor excuse those who committed the crime. Nor is pointing out that “people with an agenda are massaging the figures” the same as accusing all women who have been attacked as liars.
I suspect part of the defensiveness mentioned comes from the ease with which the assertion “rape is very common” can be followed with the accusation “all men are rapists, at least by intention”. It has been known to happen. I refer you to works by Susan Brownmiller and others, and her famous quote that “Rape is a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. (Against Our Will, by Susan Brownmiller, 1975.)
Objections to so sweeping a generalization are hardly a “misogyny fest”. Feminists or others who attack those who object to false accusations and/or false statistics lose credibility for their position, almost as much as those who made the misrepresentations in the first place. IMO.
Shodan,
The misogyny I refer to is reflected in the wording and content of some of the male posters in that thread. I do not think nor did I say that merely questioning the statistics is misogynistic.
And just for the record, I would not consider myself to be a feminist in any way shape or form. Humanist, yes.
If some of the male posters responded like jerks and said things that were mean, stupid and otherwise nasty, does that indicate misogyny or just that the person who said the nasty thing is a jerk?
Honest curiosity, where is the line between ordinary asshole who says mean things and misogynist who hates all women?
