Wesley Clark makes some interesting remarks on the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape that IMO merit serious discussion.
This all started with a clusterfuck of an IMHO thread here, Women and Sexual Assault, in which several Doper women share experiences of sexual assault, child molestation and rape and how this has led to them being more cautious around men.
It’s a long-ass thread, so I’ll summarize: A lot of women who participated have been sexually abused, raped, or sexually assaulted and many expressed fear of being approached by strange men for that reason. Some men in the thread have expressed offense at this, for various reasons, and there has been some heated debate about, among other things, the prevalence of sexualized violence against women, whether or not it is indicative of systemic misogyny, and what kinds of behaviors can rightly be considered warning signs of a sexual predator. Also brought up was the subject of ‘‘rape culture’’ and whether we do or do not live in a society that encourages and trivializes the sexual oppression of women.
Wesley’s comments below are located in the spin-off thread Men and Sexual Assaulthere.
For the sake of Great Debates I’d like to put any of these topics on the table. I would say that those Dopers who experienced sexualized violence by either men or women should feel free to use their experiences in the interest of the debate, but to keep in mind it is meant to be a debate. That is, while it may be inappropriate to debate the subject in threads specifically made for women and men to share experiences of assault, this is a thread specifically made for debating such things.
My thoughts for Wesley are to follow (eventually.) In the meantime, have at it.
Sorry, Malthus and others, I’m inexperienced at this. So many issues were raised in that IMHO thread I wasn’t sure where to begin.
I guess:
Resolved: We (of the United States) are living in a ‘‘rape culture.’’
Do we or don’t we? Can the experiences of women justify their caution around strange men? Can they be used as evidence in favor of living in a rape culture?
And I believe Wesley’s points tie into this, which is why I included them. Some would, for instance, say rape jokes trivialize the horror of rape and are evidence that we live in a rape culture. I am preparing my own response on that subject as we speak.
Let’s list out the other supposed cultures we’re in.
Car Culture - every has one and/or needs one
Consumer culture - everyone consumes and wants to satisfy needs through consumption
Western Culture - everyone is steeped in the basics of liberty, property rights and representative democracy
Rape Culture would be what exactly? Everyone basically wants to rape or will be raped at some point? What exactly would the commonly accepted behaviour be in a “Rape Culture”?
I don’t like the words “rape culture” and don’t necessarily agree with the entire feminist “rape culture” party line.
But there are certainly components of our culture that are disturbing when it comes to how rape is portrayed or discussed.
For instance, around here every rape debate ends up in a legalistic definition of rape. Which is a definition of rape. But discounts a lot of experiences where women have been violated, just not in a way that would be prosecutable. Darn hard to get a date rape conviction if a woman didn’t get injured trying to fight him off. That’s disturbing that we are so quick to discount that as “not rape.”
This I’m not so sure about. Do abusers or rapists care about the psyche of their victims? And they are at risk of losing their family, job, etc. if they live in a society where 1) Their crime is seen as such (rather than a minor offense, fault of the victim, the norm e.g. marrying a nine-year-old girl) and 2) They are caught and the victim is believed.
The ones that don’t end in a debate over the number of false accusations, you mean. In a country where it was still legal to rape your spouse in some states up until the early '90s, the shoe certainly switched feet quite quickly.
There are a lot of behaviors that are perceived to be accepted as a part of life. Consider the following scenarios happening to a women:
A man runs up and grabs a woman’s breast
A man runs up and exposes himself masturbating to a woman
A man, frustrated after years of friendship that he wants to turn into something more, leans in and aggressively kisses a female friend or acquaintance until she pushes him off
-A woman is at a bar and gets grabbed in the crotch on the way to get a drink
A woman gets drunk and goes home with a friend, then wakes up realizing she had sex that she doesn’t remember
Those are all situations involving sexual aggression by men towards women that the victims would have absolutely no recourse against. Well, maybe in the last scenario she could find a sympathetic cop, but it’s unlikely that there would ever be any sort of prosecution, let alone a conviction.
The idea behind the “rape culture” is that these sorts of examples have become normalized, excused, and otherwise accepted by society. Boys will be boys, she shouldn’t have gotten drunk, how do I know she’s not lying, etc.
I want to borrow ** Dangerosa**'s disclaimer that I don’t approve of overuse of the word “rape” to describe every instance of sexual aggression, and I think using the term “rape culture” is counter productive. But I’m sold on the idea that our society dismisses a lot of harmful behavior.
If we are talking about criminal convictions then there is absolutely nothing disturbing about it, that is exactly how it should be. I think this is the main reason for this kind of discussion, non violent rape is a very “he said, she said” situation that’s incredibly hard to prove or even prosecute. I’m firmly on the side of “better that 100 guilty go free than 1 innocent get punished” side because frankly it would be a scary world if people could get convicted on nothing but someones word.
I think, like Bryan Ekers said, a woman can be as cautious as she likes around strange men. I know that when I walk at night, which I love to do, I tense and brace myself if a man passes me on a dark street. Especially if he says anything to me. I am scared, and I wish he wouldn’t say anything at all. But I believe that is my own issue. Not his problem, and he shouldn’t have to be ‘extra careful’ around me, constantly trying to know where the line is that will scare me. He should be able to relate to me just the same as he would to another man, not taking into account that I am female, or vulnerable, or a woman that has been abused/molested/assaulted in my past. Not his problem. I know that sounds curt, but I’m just making the point that he shouldn’t have to consider those kinds of things when just dealing with me in a normal social manner.
If he is the type of asshole that chats with a man who is obviously busy, he is no bigger a heel for doing that to a woman.
I’m not convinced that we do or don’t live in a rape culture. I’m not sure I actually understand that term, so I will read this thread carefully as it develops.
Okay - on that topic, the issue is really unresolvable; whether or not we live in a “rape culture” depends on how how much tolerance of sexual violence is considered acceptable. Given that sexual violence is a reasonably elastic term, there is unlikely to be a consensus on this.
What I get out of that question is ‘does our society take sexual violence more lightly than it ought, thus encouraging more of it than would otherwise occur?’
The problem here is that there is never going to be anyone who claims, publicly at least, to prefer increased sexual violence, or that it be taken less seriously in individual cases. It is sort of analogous to other safety issues: no-one is willing to publicly state that a certain amount of danger is inherent in using a product such as a car, but a “perfectly safe” car is simply impossible: at some point, adding safeguards on safeguards becomes too cumbersome for actual use. Ultimately, safety has to be balanced against other values, like utility.
Similarly, while no-one is going to come out and say that sexual violence isn’t a problem, and a serious one, at some point an excessive focus on the issue impedes other values - like freedom of expression, or (in more personal terms) simply enjoying one’s life.
There will never be much of a consensus as to whether that balance is reached, in a personal or on a societal level. Those who use the ‘rape culture’ polemic are clearly attempting to push the balance one way; but the matter is inherently subjective.
In short, we live in a “rape culture” as much as we live in a “murder culture”, a “racist culture”, a “class-ridden culture”, a “culture of gluttony”, a “culture of waste”, etc. Sexual violence is one of the evils to which our culture is prone, no question; whether it is more significant than other evils is a matter of debate, and can by its nature have no definitive answer.
I like very much that those of us who missed the actual definition and aren’t sure what it means would still like to go on record as saying it doesn’t exist.
This is more or less my problem with the phrase in practice; it’s too easily dismissable, even though the definition seems to me to be pretty accurate to describe my everyday environment. I think Wesley fell repeatedly into the same trap that other posters in this thread are doing, which is to assume that, like Dangerosa said, we must be talking about forcible stranger rape and must be arguing that society is rewarding or fomenting violent rapes.
For instance, systemic sexual harassment contributes heavily to the kind of culture the definition speaks to, but it’s very easy, as anybody can see from the other thread, to get all bent out of shape because sexual harassment isn’t rape, and to dismiss the argument that something like a rape culture exists because it looks like a bait-and-switch to call it a rape culture and then complain about garden variety misogyny. Which, to be clear, I don’t think it is, but since some respondents to this thread are, I expect, going to be resistant to the idea that any such thing exists in the first place, talking about it in terms of rape is probably going to get nothing but derision in response. It seems like it’s a controversial opinion to hold that steeping a society in sexual harassment and objectification will contribute to a greater incidence of sexual assault, and so maybe that distinction is going to continue to be a sticking point. Along those lines I wonder to what extent the discussion would change if we simply agreed to talk about a culture of sexual harassment rather than a rape culture, although I can see good reason not to make that concession in a world where rape is a grave possibility.
Anyway, yes, I think that we do. Like Wesley, I’m afraid that without prophylactic measures it’s the status quo that we’ll keep defaulting to; unlike Wesley I don’t think that’s a good reason not to invest in those measures.
Damn. You’re one of my favorite posters here and I pissed you off too.
People playing videos games say ‘I really killed that guy. awesome’. Despite it, homicide is virtually non-existant (compared to sexual abuse) among that demographic (middle class white men 18-35). I don’t think you can draw a connection between a comment and a society that actively encourages a certain behavior.
I made a joke about slavery, england and rape all in one sentence. Not sure what separates those 3 factors though, or why a joke only involving slavery and england would somehow be more acceptable.
My claim, again, is that it (culture) doesn’t seem to matter. If culture was responsible for our widespread sexual abuse, then widespread abuse wouldn’t exist in virtually all societies (as far as I know) or affect both genders when underage.
