Yes, I think if it is broadened beyond ‘These are our attitudes to rape and rape only’ (which is silly, because who’s got one viewpoint on rape and rape laws and absolutely nothing to say about virginity, sexism, abortion, etc.), men most certainly are included. As with sexism, when anything is done to keep women in one space, men have got to occupy the other. If women aren’t allowed to be horny and want sex, then men have got to be the sole aggressors. If girls can be sluts then guys have got to be conquerors… even if they’re not that interested in sex (or sex with girls). Or want to wait until marriage*. It’s restricting and it’s wrong, and nobody wins.
*To be fair, while my high school definitely had some ‘sluts’ who had done little else but look hot and, sometimes, come from a less well-off family, there were also some hot, straight guys who took things slow and never had sex 'til after graduation. As far as I know, they weren’t mocked, they just frustrated the hell out of the girls. But then, my school was very much the exception, at least compared to those surrounding us.
And we are now definately in the “rape culture” — but what if? Is it provable? What is rape?
That isn’t what “rape culture” is referring to - the prosecutability of the crime (or lack of crime). And this is where we always go with rape conversations.
Stop looking at this as protecting your own butts from having casual sex with a girl you don’t even know well enough to know whether she’d accuse you of rape, and start looking at this as a sociological issue. WHY would a guy have sex with a woman he doesn’t know well enough to know if she is trustworthy on this issue when she is that drunk in the first place? Our society treats casual sex as expected. And alcohol as the grease to getting it. Those are factors in the “rape culture.” And those factors are bad for both genders because they put both genders in a position where they cannot justify their actions.
The statement “we live in a rape culture” is unfalsifiable. The statement “we live in an X culture” is true (or false) where X = pretty much any social evil.
Rape, sexual harassment, and assault are all against the law. They still occur, which is deplorable. Name a law that doesn’t get broken.
It is not a positive statement, but a normative one: namely, that this particular social evil does not, in the opinion of the person using the term, get the attention it deserves relative to all others.
Yes, but that entitlement to sex or pleasure at the expense of someone else’s feelings or rights is what contributes to the sexual abuse in our culture. Really, someone’s pleasure is so important that’s he’d screw a girl so drunk she wouldn’t remember consenting?
ETA: And in some cases, encourage her to drink enough that she’ll give consent she wouldn’t give while sober…that’s…screwed up - you might not call it a “rape culture” - but regardless - that’s screwed up.
It is interesting that many noted conservatives almost all women dismiss the notion that there is a rape problem. Some believe that the “rape culture” is just a plot by evil feminists, completely made up for political reasons. The conservative fake feminist Christina Hoff-Sommers has written an article on this very subject.
Then rape is a result of a subculture that disregards others. Otherwise the argument becomes one where seeking pleasure or sex is by result, if not intent, at the expense of others. Since it seems obvious to me that the majority of sexual/pleasurable acts occur between couples/groups without coercion the rape culture can’t be the dominant one. It can certainly exist within the larger scope of course. The problem then isn’t rape but the disregard for the other person and that isn’t an exclusively sexual problem.
Grey, I agree. As I said earlier - I don’t really like the words “rape culture” - but we have elements of our culture that are disturbing and contribute to rape.
First, there are some of her points I strongly agree with. I don’t like it when people screw with science, and if Hoff-Sommers’ analysis is correct, Koss fucked with some science big-time when she rolled out that 1-in-4 statistic. The author’s discussion on the political pressure for activist groups to inflate their statistics to me rings incredibly true. People with strong ideological feelings tend to accept these statistics, often, on blind faith, without looking at where they came from.
Second, the author makes a really, phenomenal, excellent, spectacular point about the allocation of resources for combating rape. We KNOW that certain populations are more vulnerable and at-risk for sexualized violence than others, and yet we consistently assign resources to the more privileged in our society. If we really allocated resources based on at-risk populations, we’d have anti-rape programs implemented all over prisons, homeless shelters, brothels, and LGBT centers. But we don’t, right? We have them on college campuses, to protect the white middle class women least at risk for exploitation and best-equipped to deal with trauma.
And that does piss me off. I am politically left-of-the-left, okay, but this conservative lady has a point. In fact, it’s not even a problem specific to feminism, it’s a problem that has plagued social movements for a long time. She might be surprised how much her view matches that of certain leftist radicals.
That said, a lot of her analysis is problematic.
Hoff-Sommers is subject to a heaping dose of irrationality herself if she thinks date rape isn’t as psychologically damaging as stranger rape, and if she thinks having someone force a finger into your vagina is ‘‘stretching the definition’’ of rape, I have trouble granting her any credibility at all. Her criticism of Kilpatrick’s ‘‘1-in-8’’ statistic is unwarranted. It’s not rational, given her own admission that rape is one of the most undereported crimes, to accept the outcome of studies that look at rape reporting itself. Neither is it rational – and indeed, quite ignorant on her part – to say that if a woman doesn’t identify what happened to her as rape, it can’t be rape. Shame, denial and fear are a major part of being a victim of sexualized violence, which means it is often a very internalized experience, the sort where you tend to, oh, I don’t know, minimize what happened and blame yourself. All Hoff-Sommers does here is expose her ignorance about the psychology of sexual trauma.
All in all, though, excellent read. I’d never had the opportunity to hear an intellectual rebuttal to the standard feminist ‘‘rape culture’’ argument, and I appreciate your sharing it, Icerigger.
It has been announced this afternoon that those accused of rape in the UK are now going to be made anonymous. I think this is great news for everyone who it should be - victims, the falsely accused, the justice system - and awful news for everyone who it shouldn’t be - rapists and false accusers.
Well, yeah, and in my case there was no prosecution or anything like that either–I don’t think that’s because of rape culture or because people see sexual assault as just “no biggie” but rather because of the circumstances–when things happen fast and you don’t know who’s committed the crime, how can you convict someone? I just don’t see this as a situation of no one caring and people just letting it happen.
There was a thread about this a while back. The number varies by study, but is somewhere between 10 and 50 percent of reported rapes, with the reality (I think) being closer to the 50 than the 10.
The above link only looks at recanted accusations, so the bar is higher than in other studies.
Mind that I’m aware the majority of rapes go unreported which will skew the numbers. But there’s definitely a reason for men to be fearful of false rape accusations, especially in the military. However, this debate is a tangent and I recall the previous debate being a good one, so you may want to search for that.
Yep. The truth is, a false rape accusation (in the sense of one that has been made to anyone) is actually far more likely to be reported than a real rape. And a part of that is because the existence of the former makes the latter worry that they won’t be believed.
I wouldn’t know about LGBT centers, but I am not sure what needs to be done in (for example) prisons or brothels to prevent rape. Or even what could be done - what kind of advice would one give to a prostitute that would allow her to avoid having sex with strangers? And a prison would seem to be about as secured an environment as can be reasonably attained, given the character of most of the people in it.
Homeless shelters suffer from many of the same objections. The major causes of chronic homelessness are mental illness and chemical dependency. If one cannot manage her drinking or delusions enough to maintain a life indoors, it is quite a lot to expect that you can manage to stay un-raped. IYSWIM.
I just cannot wrap my brain around the idea that when two people meet at a bar decide to get drunk and end up having sex one is more to blame than the other just because the other party regrets it the next day. I find the entire concept that you are not responsible for your bad decisions while drunk ridiculous. You did not get raped, you were not assaulted, you were not abused, you got drunk and did something stupid. We don’t defend anyone else that gets drunk and does something stupid, why do women think they should get a pass?