We still live in a world where the attitude towards males with regards to sex is that it is specifically their responsibility to make sex happen; and that if they don’t make sex happen, they look fucking ridiculous complaining that they don’t have a sexually active relationship, or aren’t getting laid.
Unequal and nonreciprocal.
Furthermore, to up the ante, the notion is that the way you make sex happen if you’re a guy is that you take charge, you dominate, you are bold, you break down barriers, you’re aggressive and wild and primal and you unleash your animal side and so on and so forth.
If you accept all that and yet deny the existence of a rape culture, you’ve got some serious blinders on.
You’re horribly naive if you think that attitude only exists in the US. The attitude is “merely” the intersection of various forms of misogyny and anti-sex attitudes that still exist in western culture.
In Norway for instance a series of interviews of jury members, undertaken as part of a discussion on jury system reforms, revealed that many, particularly women, had strong prejudices against rape victims and disliking their behaviour before the assault.
Yes I do. And the shortcomings of that country’s police force(s) are something I have excellent knowledge off.
I know Americans like to presume that theirs is the only nation on Earth, but I did not see any restriction on country in the OP.
In addition to Pakistan, there are also other countries in the world that exist. The UK for instance, where the burglary exchange took place; they did perk up when we realised that a passport had also been taken.
Yes. Every culture has the effect of producing more rapes than would occur if that culture didn’t exist. Let’s argue about whether that’s true or not. This is a great use of your and my time.
Among other things, all of that is based on a particular idea of what rape is, and who rapists are, which is inaccurate and which excludes a large subset of the category of “sexual assault” from consideration of things which make a person the scum of the earth. There’s no requirement that a majority or even a plurality of people intend to create an environment conducive to sexual assault, only that this be the effect.
And it’s quite easy to manage. Patrick Kane, famous athlete, is revered in the community. Rapists are the scum of the earth. Patrick Kane, upon information and belief, is not the scum of the earth. Therefore, Patrick Kane is not a rapist; therefore, a sexual assault did not occur. Alternatively – a man and a woman have a special relationship that involves sex. These people are married. Therefore, he could not have sexually assaulted her. These are just examples; I don’t know what happened in the Patrick Kane case and there has been some progress on marital rape. But it’s quite easy to see there are lots of ways how we can tell ourselves we’re being tough on something without actually being tough on it overall. It’s like putting yourself on a diet with enough arbitrary rules and loopholes that you eat more than you burn – you’re on a diet, but you ain’t doing shit.
My own issues with the term are (in no particular order)
Its imprecise.
It relies heavily on presumptions, conjectures and surmises. And interpretation. Lots of actions which are ambigious, or boorish and tasteless seem to be held up as examples of rape culture… the college banners put up in one link posted above are boorish, tasteless and frankly offensive, but I think it is a stretch to call the as examples of “rape culture”, most reasonable people can recignize hyperbole when they see it, when we a boxer knocked an opponents head off, we don’t actually mean that there was a decapitation in the ring.
Its inaccurate. Sexual intercourse without consent has been recognised as a crime as far back as in the oldest surviving law code, the Code of Ur-Nammu (ok admittedly you had to pay 5 shekels), but murder, theft and rape have been considered verboten throughout history.
If you’re having this much trouble with the words that make up the definition, I don’t think you’re in a position to have an opinion about its usefulness.
Only when it was the “right” kind of rape. For most of history, marital rape wasn’t legally rape. Many other forms of rape were not prosecuted or pursued, like rape of unconscious and barely-conscious women.
I don’t know much about the Code of Ur-Nammu beyond what I just read on Wikipedia, but I don’t see that it says anything about forbidding all sexual intercourse without consent. The law I believe you’re referring to is this one: “If a man proceeded by force, and deflowered the virgin female slave of another man, that man must pay five shekels of silver.” It doesn’t look like there was a law specifically banning the rape of another man’s wife, but I’m guessing this was considered to be covered by this law: “If a man violates the right of another and deflowers the virgin wife of a young man, they shall kill that male.”
There doesn’t appear to have been any law in the Code of Ur-Nammu against a man “proceeding by force” with his own slave, his own wife, the non-virgin female slaves of other men, the male slaves of other men, free men, or unmarried free women. I also don’t see anything about nonconsensual sex that didn’t involve the use of force, such as with an unconscious victim, or nonconsensual sex acts committed by a woman. Even in the specific situations where rape was illegal under the Code of Ur-Nammu, it sounds like the wronged party was considered to be not so much the unconsenting victim as the man who owned or had “the right” to her.
And there are places where women who don’t want to be raped shouldn’t go. This is not saying that women who go to those places deserve to get raped - they don’t - but there are some places where women are not safe from this, and people they aren’t safe from.
I realize no place is rape-free, but unlike some women who post on another mostly-female site I frequent, I don’t spend every waking moment thinking about being raped, nor do I see every man out there as a potential rapist. :dubious:
High school football teams too, at least far too many of the ones I know about. My high school’s team was well known for inviting girls from the special-ed class to their parties and passing them around after they got drunk and/or high, and while there was no Facebook or Snapchat back then, there were Polaroids. I found out about this from a GIRL :eek: I worked with who hung with that crowd. Thing was, it could have happened in front of the whole city’s police department, and I don’t think anything would have been done about it. People also didn’t realize at the time just how wrong this was.
A few years later, I hung out with a girl (she wasn’t my friend; let’s not go there) who briefly attended a small-town liberal arts college, and she told me about a certain male dorm where, if a girl passed out at one of their parties, the boys would (ALLEGEDLY) gang-rape her and shave her pubic hair. :dubious: I’ve been told more than once that this story smacks of urban legend, in part because she said the shaving was almost a mark of pride - girls coming out of the shower without a towel in front of their dorm mates, that kind of thing. This was at a time where shaving down there wasn’t as common as it is now.
I certainly hope it’s an urban legend, and you do have to wonder what kind of woman would knowingly go to a party like that.
BTW, when the woman I mentioned in the previous post was in her last two years of high school, she was the type who would do things like get in a van with a bunch of guys, and they would drive out in the country and take turns with her. This ended when the inevitable happened: as they were driving back into town, the guys who weren’t driving opened the back of the van and threw her out onto the highway.
I never found out how she explained that to her parents.
I wonder how the young boys explained to their parents that they threw a person out of their van? Yeah, it goes both ways. What a terrible girl to want to ride in cars with boys :dubious:
As a young woman I liked to have fun but I never got drunk because I feared the worst. What a shitty way to live, not having the freedom to have fun. The guys would take advantage for sure. I never had any doubt about that. Rape culture took away my freedom.
As a young woman I was constantly harassed by men, sexually assaulted by my employer I didn’t ask for the body or face I had, and I loathed getting unwanted attention. I wanted to hide in a corner, but I couldn’t. I always dressed very conservatively and still I was harassed. When I did go out I loved to dance and was quite good, but “friends” told me I should get a breast reduction because I looked out of proportion. I didn’t think my breasts were up for discussion but apparently some thought so. Comments about my body made me feel awkward and unworthy. I just couldn’t understand why it was so important to them to make me feel lousy.
So now I’m older and unattractive by cultural norms, I feel so much freedom and so grateful to be invisible. I would never ever want to be young again.
The question is, why is this particular type of “hyperbole” ok? If they had signs saying “Drop off your new MacBooks here, har har har” it’d be considered at the least strange (even though everyone loves expensive electronics). If they made a public “joke” about crimes against children or committing a hate crime, it’d be outrageous.
But making a joke about assaulting women is considered by some to be all in good fun. We don’t do that with other violent crimes.
Sexual assault has always been recognized as a crime- when committed against “innocent” women, which at times has not included sexually active women, married women, sex workers, women who dress or go to places deemed “asking for it”, lower class women, women of specific races, slaves, servants, etc.
Even then, through much of history and even today in some areas, it is illegal as a property crime, often against the woman’s male relatives. The crime is not the pain and suffering caused by the assault, but the lowering of her “value”’ in the marriage market (which at times was a literal market), or the blemish on her family’s honor. That’s why punishments like making the rapist marry the victim make sense to some people- it “rectifies” the loss of her marriage value and the potential of her becoming a permanent burden on her family. Same with the fine you cited. It’s meant to make up for the loss of literal value caused by deflowering someone who can now no longer be marketed as a virgin.
I am not impressed by rape as a property crime. I am not impressed by rape laws that only apply to select victims and select types of assault.
The only laws that take rape seriously are ones that are based on the idea that it is never okay to have sex with someone who is not consenting, regardless of who they are or what they have done, because it is harmful to them personally (not to their relatives or to their marriage prospects.)
If you are asking me to defend the boys, well no I do not defend them and would support any action taken against them under applicable rules (even if its as little as sending them to humour classes).
People make jokes about killing and stealing all the time. Hell most of humour consists of bad things happening to some people. Be it Monty Python or Chris Rock, (look up “Salad tossed” if you have the time. Or Tiger went Tiger).
Jokes are funny in context. The little humour that those signs had came from the fact that young people are a lot more sexually free and adventurous in college, to the discomfort of their parents and that is what those signs (tried) to mock. I frankly didn’nt see any “rape culture” in those signs at all. Juvenile and failed attempts at levity? Certainly. Unless you actually believe that they hand out firsties (or whatever you call them in the US) for sexual use as a matter of course.
The “hand over your MacBooks” would sound strange because it would not make a lick of sense.
Firstly, re the father/husband issue, you do know what differentiates a crime from a civil wrong? A crime is never against an individual, its against the sovereign and its attempts to keep peace. Thats as true of rape as it is of murder or theft. These crimes can and are successfully prosecuted in-spite of the victims’s wishes.
You also seem confused when you define “rape as often a property crime”. Thats not strictly speaking true. Many places had a crime (either known as or translated to rape) which did include taking of a woman without her fathers consent and that was often used by the father, and consent or lack thereof of the woman was irrelevant. But, please don’t make the presumption that because such laws existed, meant forcible sexual assault was ok… the Romans for example distinguished between rape andforcible sexual intercourse (called Stuprum). In the Old Testament, what is called rape, is basically eloping without permission.
Always check exactly what the law of a place is, before declaring that “rape is just a property crime in xyz”
(Removal from lawful guardianship is still a crime in most places, although obviously “guardianship” is much more limited today)
I do agree with you that society seems more concerned with the protection of the right sort of women. But, I don’t think thats rape culture. Its simply the human condition. The weak, the poor, the disadvantaged always get shafted. Poor men get conscripted, richer men find exemptions (to use an American example). Poor peoples property get stolen, their lands seized and they often have no practical recourse. Does that mean people live in a “murder culture”? Or a “theft culture”?
I find it quite illuminating that I cannot honestly think of a single civilised (using civilised in its proper meaning of settled, complex cultures") where it has ever been ok to say “you are a pretty woman, bend over”. There always is some excuse as to why the normal rules don’t apply there, either as an excuse put forth by a criminal, or because of the perceived low status or actions of the targeted person.
In short the very fact that people have to find excuse to justify their actions, seems to suggest that “rape culture” does not in fact exist.
Which is funny, because you’ve just described a large part of what we’re all calling rape culture, right before saying it was proof that it doesn’t exist.
You think the fact that people feel the need to justify their actions, as to evidence that “rape culture” exists? Because frankly if there was "rape culture, they would not feel any more need to justify their actions then you do before you squish an insect.
“Justifications” which are usually inane and unbelievable to any reasonable and rational person (Like these arseholes in India)
You’re excluding the middle in order to make this an issue that’s easy to dismiss.
You can’t think of a single civilized culture where any man could have sex with any woman without her consent at any time. OK, sure. Is your understanding of what literally anyone has ever said about rape culture at any time that rape culture means any man can have sex with any woman without her consent at any time? Presumably not.
So the entire issue is about what kind of justification is considered acceptable. If you think the justifications are usually inane and unbelievable, I’m with you there too. So then, naturally, since there’s no rape culture, and since the justifications for rapes are usually unbelievable… most rapes historically have been successfully prosecuted, right? If not, how do you characterize an environment where an inane and unbelievable (to you) justification is sufficient?
But the reverse of that is also true. There is no culture in which rape didn’t happen, and in which a lot of people didn’t excuse or overlook it when it was happening to people they didn’t like, ergo all culture is rape culture, and calling a culture a rape culture is as meaningless and semantically aggressive as making sure that everyone agrees that, e.g., feminism is a culture of rape before anyone can have any conversation about feminism or its goals.
Plus, it’s even more true about a whole slew of other crimes, like robbery, assault, and murder, with people even more eager to declare “He had it coming.” for those crimes.
But that’s the entire point; we live in a society where people do go “So what, lots of people have it coming.” for a whole slew of non-rape crimes, and “Oh my god, that’s terrible!” for rape. The fact that this particular criminal descriptor was used, and no other, contradicts the very idea that the descriptor meant to get across.
There should be better vocabulary here. There are cultures with zero institutional respect for sexual autonomy (like the Indian village example), cultures which actually do flatly encourage rape (ISIS or a few other war-torn areas), and lots of areas which sanctify the purity of one class of people, devoting a great deal of public discourse and effort to protecting them, while conspicuously ignoring the routine sexual assault of other nonsanctified groups. And then there are cultures who don’t really do any of these things, but have rape in varying degress regardless. Wrapping them up in one word is inaccurate, and making “rape culture” be that word isn’t even wrong enough to be worth engaging.
:dubious: