About That Thing In Steubenville, Ohio...

via science of relationships

''It's really a sense of power that comes from specialness ... anyone who finds himself at the center of the world they're in has a sense of impunity.'' 

Ken Dryden, lawyer and Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. 

It's the last day of April, the month which has been claimed by several causes to promote awareness. One of those topics which deserves raised awareness is the frightening persistence of sexual assault in society. I published the article below on Secular Woman earlier this month:

In a down-on-its-luck eastern Ohio town, the local high school's star football players were powerful people. As the town's pride and joy - its hope for the future - the young men in Steubenville enjoyed all the privileges of small town princelings, just like millions of young men in millions of small towns all over the world. One of the privileges of that power was that the football players had their "pick" of the town's unattached girls. For star athletes, the privilege of first pick of the most desirable girls is like selecting ripe melons at Kroger. The athlete gets to choose or discard, never the girl.

Adults treat them like heroes, students treat them like rock stars, and amidst classes, club meetings and exams, there exists a gutter economy where women become a form of currency. Dave Zirin, The Verdict: Steubenville Shows the Bond Between Jock Culture and Rape Culture, The Nation, March 18, 2013.

The moment that a person - usually a female-bodied person - becomes the object of a more powerful person's desire (whether for sex or some desire to exert control), her humanity ceases to matter. She becomes, literally, a thing - "currency" that the more powerful person feels entitled to spend. Human culture is patriarchal: heterosexual men are the only persons whose full humanity is never questioned, while women - and men who are suspected by other men of not being the right kind of heterosexual man - are treated by every society on earth as less than fully human. Their existence and worth is measured almost exclusively within the context of their relationships with and effect upon heterosexual men. Heterosexual men are persons whose living, thinking and taking action defines who they are, while women are men's accessories: their mothers, their girlfriends, the mothers of their children. It is the thing that they are to men which defines what women are.

Pick a girl melon, any melon girl,
young football princelings!

The young woman who was carted from party to party in Steubenville that August night was little more than a ripe melon - or a piece of meat - to those football players. They treated her like a plaything as if there was no human being inside that unconscious body because, on a deeply primitive level, for some young men there is no human being inside a female body. And when she somehow gathered the courage to press charges against the young men who raped her, she became the thing which her town raged could unfairly (!) ruin their princelings' lives. Having also grown up swimming in the rape culture that still permeates nearly every human society, the rape victim feared she would be blamed and vilified for reporting the crime or pressing charges and she was right.  She had to be persuaded to go forward with the case, but she finally did - courageously, and in the face of vicious condemnation from her former friends and neighbors.

(trigger warning for sexual assault)
The girl was completely naked on the floor, laying motionless on her side, not far from where she'd just puked out of the side of her mouth.
By her side was one of his teammates, Trent Mays, who Westlake testified was fully exposed and smacking his penis on the girl's hip. Laying behind her was another player, Ma'lik Richmond, whom Westlake testified he saw penetrating the girl with two fingers, "halfway to the knuckle."
"It wasn't what I expected to see," Westlake testified Friday at the Jefferson County Justice Center here in this old Eastern Ohio mill town, where Mays and Richmond stand trial for rape. "I wasn't really sure what to think."
Why didn't you stop it, special prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter asked?
"Well," Westlake said, "it wasn't violent. I didn't know exactly what rape was. I always pictured it as forcing yourself on someone."
Let's ignore the obvious point that you don't need to "force" yourself on a girl who is incapacitated by alcohol. Instead, let's simply ask what did Evan Westlake do?
"I said my goodbyes," he testified.
Goodbyes? And what exactly was the response from Mays and Richmond after having someone walk in on them in the middle of that moment – even if, as the defense is arguing, it actually was consensual?
"They said, 'I'll see you Monday at football,' " Westlake said. 
Prosecutors may get conviction in Steubenville rape trial, but it will come at a cost. Dan Wetzel, Yahoo Sports, March 16, 2013.

How is it possible that a modern, educated teenager does not know what rape is? If inserting objects and body parts into the body of an unconscious person is not "forcing yourself on someone", then what is it?  How could it be that in a society which claims to abhor rape, a young man stood a few feet away while a rape was being committed, felt surprised but apparently undisturbed by what he was witnessing, then casually "said his good-nights" and walked away. He walked away without the slightest sense that a crime was being committed. The sight of an unconscious girl being casually violated by two young men aroused not a scintilla of basic human compassion in him. None at all. Three football teammates casually said, "see you Monday at football" while two of them were still raping an unconscious, vomit-spattered, urine-soaked girl and Evan Westlake was not sure what to think! How could he not know what to think about that?

One has to wonder: would Evan Westlake have known what to think had the unconscious victim been one of his male teammates? If his buddies casually said "good-night" to him as they shoved foreign objects and body parts into the anus and mouth of an unconscious 16-year-old boy lying naked on the floor right in front of him, would that have seemed a little more surprising to him? Disturbing, even? Would the nature of the criminal behavior have suddenly been a little easier to discern?

Although most people strongly protest that they would never condone rape, the reality is that most people actually do condone rape. Like Evan Westlake, they condone rape because they believe that most kinds of forced sex are not really rape as long as the recipient of the forced sex is female-bodied. Most people think that opportunistic or coerced sex, which is the modus operandi in the majority of sexual assaults, is normal, understandable or justifiable thanks to a culture which normalizes and excuses men who rape women. There may be a general rueful admission that "taking advantage" of a drunk woman or pressuring a date into sex may not exactly be polite, or the smoothest, coolest way to operate, but it is still after all just a guy doing what comes naturally when he wants something and that thing is apparently right there for the taking. If the object of his interest is incapacitated after drinking too much, her failure to say "no" can be taken for a "yes"- at his discretion. If the thing he wants is not 100% clear about her refusal (at least in his own mind - remember boys: no means maybe and maybe means yes!), then a guy feels justified in assuming that he has her consent and society backs him up on that. In essence, society hands over a woman's 'right to consent' to men, who are permitted - even encouraged - to apply it according to their own interpretation of reality, however influenced that may be by anger, alcohol or unreciprocated sexual arousal.

Consider the following rape apologia:
 "What did she expect to happen when she went out dressed like that?"
 "What did she expect would happen?" reasonable people ask, "If she didn't want to have sex, she ought not to have sent the wrong signal by getting drunk. If she has regrets in the morning, it was her own stupid fault."
 "If she didn't say "No', then she probably meant "Yes". She wasn't clear! How is a guy supposed to know, anyway?"
 "Why should some poor man go to jail because of some lying slut who only got what she was asking for?"
 "If something happened that she didn't really want, then she ought to have thought of that before going on that date/accepting that drink/asking him in for coffee/smiling and flirting/trying to enjoy full rights to free citizenship while being female..." - pick any scenario because they all lead to forced sex somewhere every day.
And of course, the ever-popular  "If men don't pursue women aggressively, the human race will go extinct!" which both excuses male aggression and denies normal, healthy female sexuality in one astonishing stroke.

These are common excuses given after a sexual assault. Some rapists may admit that it was not quite consensual sex, but they vehemently deny that it was rape. It does not matter if the woman did not want sex. Too many men feel that if the man wants sex - if he has interpreted anything about the woman from her style of dress to her behavior as some sort of sexual invitation - then he is entitled to force sex on her. In his mind, it is not forcing sex, though; he has been encouraged by rape culture to tell himself that she "asked" for it (even if she actually said "no"; even if the "invitation" was all in his own imagination).

With very rare exceptions, not quite consensual sex is seen as the inevitable result of mistakes made by women (leading men on, dressing like sluts, asking for it, needing to be put in their place, expecting to enjoy the freedom to go places and do things that men enjoy, etc) and not as rape committed by a man. When made by a very young girl or teenager (who is still assumed to be a virgin), these "mistakes" are considered foolish but innocently regrettable (though the sexual assault is still the girl's own fault). In the case of non-virgin women, the use of the word "mistakes" is a transparently insincere way of describing what is clearly believed by the culture to be calculated, provocative behavior on the part of a lying female who later regrets her own bad behavior but who inexplicably still wants to draw attention to it by accusing an innocent man of rape.

She must have led him on - how was he to know she only wanted to enjoy a flirtatious evening and then go home alone? Obviously, she didn't - she just changed her mind after the fact! 

Having internalized these attitudes thanks to the pervasive rape culture, most people are uncomfortable labeling such incidents "rapes".  It strikes people as somehow unfair to call a man who merely uses a woman's body without her explicit consent a rapist. Most of the time, people agree, women only get what they deserve!

Then, there is the myth which goes something like this: the only real rapists are monsters. When they are not leaping out of bushes to attack a woman with a weapon, rapist monters are hanging out at bars creepily stalking stupid women.  Even so, it isn't a crime to be a creepy guy - innocent nice guys are sometimes called creepy and just think of that slippery slope!  If women weren't so stupid, they would not provoke real creeps to stalk and/or attack them! But, the handsome, normal guy who won't take "no" for an answer after a date is nothing like those monstrous rapists. Maybe he paid for a nice dinner date and she's been smiling at him all night - so he can't be blamed for having expectations! and anyway his making a move is a natural red-blooded male reaction to female provocation. People ought to give him the benefit of the doubt because he is such a nice guy but they should have a healthy skepticism about the honesty of the girl or woman. A man should be thought innocent until proven guilty; a woman should be thought a liar until she proves she is telling the truth. Reasonable people should always be extremely cautious about casting doubt on a person's character - it could haunt him for life! - so trashing a woman's reputation instead is the only reasonable response to a rape accusation. The accused man is a person - a fully human being whose life could be ruined by the accusation that he is a rapist monster! - the accuser is merely a woman - just a female, and everyone knows how they lie...the question of whether her life might be ruined by whatever transpired is hardly worth asking. Females are, after all, made to be used by men, so why are feminists making such a big deal over this?

Another popular justification for rape apologia is the pretended even-handedness of criticizing young men for walking alone in unsafe places or getting drunk in situations where they might be assaulted and criticizing young women for walking alone in unsafe places (just about anywhere away from male protectors - and even then not so much, but that is for another post) or getting drunk in situations where they might be assaulted.

"Holding a girl responsible for her own stupidity is not victim-blaming! I'd criticize a guy, too, if he stupidly put himself in danger by getting drunk with the wrong crowd or hanging out on the dodgy side of town!"

But here is where this false equivalency breaks down: even if we accept the claim that society really does accuse young men of bringing crime on themselves because of their appearance or their behavior (something so rare that even a determined google search can find little evidence of it - with the notable exception of too many cases which are suspiciously limited to young men of color or other marginalized groups, but again, that's another post in itself), the difference is that no one ever suggests that because of a male victim's stupidity, his attackers should not be held accountable for their crimes.

In no other assault scenarios are victims routinely blamed for inciting envy, fear, rage, a desire to hurt or control or any other emotion in their attackers. Only when girls or women are attacked - and in particular when they are sexually assaulted - is the onus for the crime placed upon the victim. It is not even sexual assault itself that is the exception but specifically sexual assault against women and girls which is reserved for this special 'victim-caused' category. Rapes of boys and men are not generally dismissed as "he was asking for it". One only has to point to the recent public hue and cry over the sexual crimes committed by priests in the Catholic Church to see that this is true.

The rape of a child or teenager - or indeed any person who is in a subordinate position to an authority figure - is unconscionable and deserves to be prosecuted vigorously. However, the deliberately vague term "child rape" that is always used to describe these clerical crimes obscures the fact that most of those victims were not just "children" but specifically underage boys.  The stark truth is that it is because the majority of these crimes were committed against boys and young men that society is as horrified as it is by them, and it is because this fact is obfuscated by the coy usage of "child" instead of "boy" that society can continue to pretend that it treats all rapes - of both male and female victims - as equally terrible. The truth, however, is that similar abuses have been visited upon girls and women in far greater numbers for all of human history - at least 1 in 4 girls and women are raped in their lifetime by clerics, teachers, family members, neighbors, boyfriends, employers, husbands and sometimes even strangers - but this ugly feminine reality has never elicited universal societal condemnation like the outrage over the recently uncovered sexual abuse of boys by priests. On the contrary, rape, forced pregnancy, assault and battery of girls and women has been protected all over the world for most of human history by patriarchal social mores and laws, often justified by 'respect" for religious freedom. Rape and male oppression is accepted as the way things are for women. Boys and men, on the other hand, are never supposed to be the targets of this kind of abuse. When it happens, it is considered an intolerable blight in society.

In first world countries, most women gained citizenship, the right to vote and legal recognition of their human rights over the last century. Nevertheless, most societies still do not accept that the majority of rape claims by women are really rapes. The hyper-vigilance over "false accusations" is not because assaults have not occurred, but because society denies that those alleged sexual assaults are equivalent to 'forcible rape'. There is always a justification, always an excuse for why it was understandable for that man to force that woman into a sexual act.

The Rape Culture that pervades all human societies ensures that women are still considered less than fully human - even in the first world - so that abuse of their autonomy and consent is tolerated and condoned even by the justice system. By and large, the reality in most societies is that while there may be laws on the books criminalizing rape, society actually refuses to recognize most forms of sexual assault on women as legitimate rape, and in practice most societies regard nearly all women as unrapable. When the fault lies with the alleged victim, there can have been no crime committed. Rape culture reinforces the idea that women, by their very existence, are always sexually tempting men, always at fault, always to blame. Women make men force sex on them, so it is never rape.

In many parts of the world, rape is accepted as an everyday occurrence, and even a male prerogative. In 1991, at a coed boarding school in Kenya, seventy-one girls were raped by their male classmates, and nineteen died in the ensuing panic. The deputy principal reassured the public: "The boys never meant any harm against the girls. They just wanted to rape." Michael Parenti, "The Global Rape Culture", The Culture Struggle, 2005.

Rape culture serves up a double whammy to women - it not only dismisses the assault of women and girls as justifiable based upon the feelings of their attackers, but it also holds the victims responsible for those feelings. Young men raised in rape culture are accustomed to judging the morality of their behavior toward women according to their own emotions and desires - how they feel around a woman justifies their behavior toward her - and at the same time they are encouraged by rape culture to hold women responsible for how they, men, feel. Rape culture tells men that they are entitled to satisfy their own urges at a woman's expense. Many, if not most, men who assault women believe that what they feel has been deliberately caused by the women they target and therefore the women are responsible for whatever "happens". Surprisingly frequently, especially if charges are laid against him, a rapist will actually claim (and actually believe) that he is the victim in the situation. Plenty of evidence supports the contention that society - steeped in rape culture misogyny - usually agrees with him.

via parenting teens

Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture.  Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety.
  Rape Culture affects every woman.  The rape of one woman is a degradation, terror, and limitation to all women. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That’s how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don’t rape, and many women are never victims of rape.  This cycle of fear is the legacy of Rape Culture. (Rape Culture, Marshall University Women's Center.)

Many women unwittingly support rape culture by taking comfort in the mistaken belief that rape only happens to a certain kind of woman and they themselves can avoid it by living properly (whatever they think that means). What they fail to realize is that by promulgating rape myths, they actually strengthen the rape culture that makes them more likely to be victimized. Rape myths provide cover for those who actually commit the majority of rapes: seemingly ordinary men who also believe the myths of rape culture and who thus believe that in many situations the consent of a woman can be considered implicit based upon how he interprets her behavior. If he feels that what she is wearing or where she is or how much she has drunk or how much she has flirted is an invitation to him, then it is an invitation to him regardless of whether the woman ever had any thought of issuing an invitation. What she thinks or feels simply does not matter because the possibility that she actually has real thoughts and honest feelings like he - a fully human person - does, simply does not exist. Many rapists have so thoroughly absorbed the poison of rape culture that they truly believe that they are entitled to take what they tell themselves women are offering and therefore whatever they have done, it is not rape.

Thanks to the warped view that rape culture propagates of what is normal sex, many men feel genuinely threatened by the idea that any non-consensual sex might be called  'rape'. Most of these very concerned men consider themselves nice guys but some are uncomfortably aware that they may have skated over the consent line at times. Defensively, they insist that there are grey areas in the mating landscape.

Women are hard to read! Sometimes 'maybe' can mean 'yes', not "no" Why should any red-blooded man accept that ambivalence is a form of "no" and be forced to hope lamely that on another occasion she will give enthusiastic consent? Why should women get to have the upper hand in sexual matters?

They argue that parsing the meaning of a woman's "It's getting late", "I'd like to go home now" or "It's not a good time" is a complex problem and that consent is a very vexing and elusive concept.

Women jerk men around! Why would she say 'maybe' if she means 'no'? Maybe 'maybe' means 'yes'! Why shouldn't a guy interpret her ambivalence as 'yes'? Everyone knows women want to be swept away. But if she doesn't want that, then she should be clear about it. Who can blame a guy for pressing the issue? If he doesn't press, he might never have sex! 

They worry that to criminalize all nonconsensual sex is a slippery slope which could unfairly bring innocent men down with the (very, very few!) guilty ones.

Consent can be very ambiguous and difficult to determine! When she accepted the date/flirted/drank too much, who can blame a guy for thinking she was giving tacit consent to more? How dare she cry rape in the morning just because she regrets her slutty behavior of the night before!

Ignoring for now the constant underlying thread of misogyny that runs through all rape apologia (which can be boiled down to: women lie, they lie constantly and they enjoy lying just to hurt an innocent man for the evil pleasure of it), there is an interesting inconsistency highlighted by this claim that sexual consent is difficult to decipher.

At least one study has shown that human beings are perfectly capable of recognizing both verbal and non-verbal refusals, even when the word "No" is not used at all.  In every other sphere of human interaction, human signals for 'no' - for refusal - are widely understood by both men and women and yet men who rape persist in special pleading that it is difficult to be sure in just one specific situation: when a woman is saying 'No' to sex. Rapists prefer the emphasis to be on whether a woman said "No" clearly enough because they know that there will be wiggle room for them to pretend that most forms of verbal and nonverbal "no" secretly mean "yes" when it comes to female sexual responses and, unfortunately, society allows them to make - and win - that argument.

It really is very simple.

"Did she say 'yes'?
"No."
"Then your answer was 'No'."
"But she said, 'Maybe'!"
"But, did she say 'yes'?"
"No."
"Then your answer was 'No'."
"But she seemed like she was not sure, maybe she wanted to consent!"
"Did she say 'Yes'?"
"No."
"Then your answer was - undeniably, unambiguously - 'No'."

In spite of the best efforts of women's groups working to reduce sexual assault, no large-scale social movement to accept a working definition of consent such as "Only an unequivocal 'Yes' means 'Yes'" has been forthcoming. Many men - who definitely do not see themselves as rapists - prefer the pliable, male-interpreted "No" because it would be much harder for those Nice Guys to kid themselves about their own opportunistic behavior - and harder for society to excuse them, too - if the only acceptable green light for sex was an unequivocal "yes". "'No' means 'No'" (except when Nice Guys™ think it means 'Yes' to them) has been massaged by the rape culture to suggest the possibility of ambiguity and that leaves the door open for not-so-nice-guys to cash in on the sexual aggressiveness of a few men.

Thanks to the fact that women live in fear of sexual assault, less sexually aggressive men can still benefit from the rape culture which provides cover for more blatant rapists. By pretending to be confused by "mixed signals", a so-called Nice Guy can pressure a woman into sex she doesn't want by telling her that she made him think she had promised him something. More aggressive males pave the way for the Nice Guys because a woman's fear of male anger if she refuses to honor this bogus "promise" seals the deal. By shaming women for being reluctant to trust that their intentions are honorable (even when they are not), Nice Guys often succeed in coercing women to engage in unwanted sex. By accusing women of teasing because they have interpreted a sexual invitation from a little light-hearted flirting, Nice Guys can and do frighten women into agreeing to unwanted sex because women have learned to fear the consequences of being labeled a "tease" (a "tease" can either put out what she has been "promising", or have it taken from her forcibly, which society will judge she deserves). Nice Guys never do anything overtly aggressive, but they trade on the fear of male aggressiveness to manipulate and coerce women into unwanted sex. In other words, Nice Guys do rape, too.

The patriarchal culture which teaches men to view women as simultaneously both lying temptresses and sexually submissive subordinates ensures that self-aware rapists know they need not fear any negative social consequences as they continue to victimize women and girls. It will always be the woman's fault. Meanwhile the self-deluding "nice guys" observe society's acceptance and normalization of male aggression toward females, admire what they see not as rape but as other mens' sexual conquests and regard their own sexual opportunism as perfectly normal and reasonable within that context. This is the reason why many men sincerely believe that false rape accusations are a real thing. If they - normal, nice guys! - have felt and done these things (or think it's OK to do these things), then it cannot be rape! Only monsters commit rape and these nice guys are not monsters!

The Steubenville case, the Rehtaeh Parsons case, the UCLA water polo player case and countless other sexual assault cases, both reported and unreported,  starkly illustrate how rape culture ensures that many young men and women really do not believe that forcing sex on a woman without her consent is always rape, especially if she was initially flirting or drinking at a party or has had sex before. A rape victim's recovery from sexual violation is horrendous enough, but rape culture ensures that the society which is supposed to protect her will victimize her again through victim-blaming, slut-shaming, sympathy for the perpetrator and even erasing the victim from discussion of the impact of the crime which is viewed - like almost everything else in patriarchal culture - not from the female victim's perspective but from the male's. Isn't it time that we took concrete, effective steps to dismantle Rape Culture once and for all? We've tried the ridiculously ineffective tactic of urging women not to get themselves raped. Perhaps, at long last, we can begin to urge men not to rape.

The first step is to raise young men who understand and respect that women are human beings whose feelings and wishes are as important as mens'. A man's feeling of entitlement to use a woman's body because he felt that she was offering it does not trump her feelings or her right to refuse consent or even to withdraw consent at any time if she becomes uncomfortable with the man. We need to change the sad reality that, because of our rape culture, men's sense of superior entitlement is protected at the expense of women's humanity. His feelings are of paramount importance, while it is often barely acknowledged that she has any legitimate feelings at all. She is a thing that causes uncomfortable feelings in a man. When rape happens it is deemed justifiable by society because of however the man felt (he felt he was led on, he misunderstood her "mixed signals", he felt she had provoked him, etc) while the woman is held responsible both for whatever he was feeling and for the consequences when he decided not to exercise any self-control over those feelings.

Only men can stop rape.

Obviously, rape culture creates a win-win situation for would-be rapists. Unfortunately, it also creates an environment where the dehumanization of women is so normalized that even some nice, decent men ultimately perceive virtually every woman as "unrapable" in most contexts. In other words, because of the constant stream of misogynist rape apologia in our culture, too many boys and men unconsciously form the belief that almost nothing that they can do to a woman can ever be called rape - even though they still honestly believe that they consider 'real rape' a heinous crime.

The second step is to make men understand that the behavior that many of them do not consider "rapey" is, in fact, rape. That the women whom some men tell themselves were "asking for it" or whose consent some men believe they can assume because of how they, men, are feeling are not there simply for them to take.  That when a man decides that because a woman has put herself in one situation willingly (a party, date or whatever) therefore it is perfectly reasonable for him to presume she has given her consent for anything else he expects the evening to lead to - even if he has to push it a little - that is rape.

Below is an ad aired in the UK which addresses Rape Culture in a gut-wrenching, all-too-common scenario: a party, drinking, the initial trust of the young woman, the expectations of the young man, and the eventual rape. This ad underlines the truth that rape occurs whenever one person coerces another person into sexual activity against the second person's wishes. The only thing that will prevent rape is if rapists stop raping.

Teaching men how not to rape: Hey, it's so crazy, it just might work!

Indeed, it is the only thing that will work.

TRIGGER WARNING!  Please be aware that this ad portrays a common scenario where a rape occurs, and though very well-done, it may be painfully triggering to some viewers.



Further Reading:

How a victim-blaming system excuses rape, Jen Roesch, socialistworker.org, January 7, 2013.

Sexual Assault and Rape Resource Guide, R. Graham, Carolina Women's Center, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2003.

Acquaintance Rape of College Students, Rana Sampson, USDOJ, COPS Problem-Oriented Guides For Police, no.17.

Yes, It Is Rape.

Today's post is a Nifty PSA that I hope my readers will pass on far and wide. Let's make it go viral on Facebook. There is no banner photo on this post because the subject is too serious and I do not want the TRIGGER WARNING* that this post discusses rape culture to be missed.

We live in a culture - the culture of virtually all of humankind, not any particular national culture - which refuses to hold men accountable for acts of sexual aggression against women. The sociological term for this is Rape Culture.

Glamorizing rape.

  Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture.  Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety.
  Rape Culture affects every woman.  The rape of one woman is a degradation, terror, and limitation to all women. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That’s how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don’t rape, and many women are never victims of rape.  This cycle of fear is the legacy of Rape Culture. (Rape Culture, Marshall University Women's Center.)

 From very early ages, men and women are conditioned to accept different roles. Women
are raised to be passive and men are raised to be aggressive. We are conditioned to accept certain
attitudes, values and behaviors. Our conditioning is continuously and relentlessly encouraged and
reinforced by the popular media, cultural attitudes and the educational system. The media is a
major contributor  to  gender-based  attitudes  and  values.  The  media  provides  women  with  acomplete list of behaviors that precipitate rape. Social training about what is proper and ladylike,
as well as what is powerful and macho, teaches women to be victims and men to be aggressors.
 The high incidence of rape in this country is a result of the power imbalance between men
and women. Women are expected to assume a subordinate relationship to men. Consequently,
rape can be seen as a logical extension of the typical interactions between women and men. One
way to analyze the power relationship between men and women is by examining some of the
common social rules women are taught. (Defining a Rape Culture, UC Davis web publication.)

Glamorizing violence

Whittling down the definition of rape to such a thin sliver of possible scenarios that it might eventually simply disappear as a "crime" entirely, has become the vogue these days. The impetus behind that social and legislative push is that many men (and many women, too, since we all are immersed in Rape Culture) believe that, in most cases, forced sex is justifiable. Most people agree that it may not exactly be polite, or the smoothest, nicest way to behave, but coerced sex is usually not really rape: it's just a guy doing what comes naturally when he finds a woman attractive. If men don't pursue, the human race will go extinct! She probably asked for it. If she didn't say "No', then she probably meant "Yes", and if she wasn't clear, how is a guy supposed to know anyway? If something happened that she didn't really want, then she ought to have thought of that before going on that date/accepting that drink/asking him in for coffee/smiling and flirting/pick any scenario because they all lead to forced sex somewhere every day.

With very rare exceptions,  not quite consensual sex is seen as the inevitable result of mistakes made by women (leading men on, dressing like sluts, asking for it, etc) and therefore most people are uncomfortable labeling such incidents "rapes". After all, it somehow strikes people as unfair to call a man who uses a woman's body against her will a rapist, when he is otherwise a nice guy and anyway it was a natural reaction by any red-blooded male to female provocation. For many people there is really only one definition of rape: the violent 'bushy-haired stranger' (this imaginary monster is always a 'bushy-haired stranger', ever notice?) who sexually assaults a virgin, leaving visible injuries. 

Violent stranger rape is comparatively rare. If Republican hopes to narrow the definition of rape to so-called "forcible rape" are realized in every state, rare violent stranger rape could become the only kind that will be recognized as criminal, while women actually live in fear of the myriad forms of "not-really" rape that can happen to them at any time, while society looks the other way. Since in Republican dreams the coercive power of the threat of force is not equivalent to the use of physical force, cannot be measured and is probably all in the woman's hysterical, over-reacting imagination anyway, nearly all of the most prevalent rape scenarios would no longer be considered crimes. Women will be victimized by the sexual aggression of men without even the inadequate protection of seldom-prosecuted laws to give them the courage to step out into the world knowing that they have the legal right to not be sexually harrassed - even though that right is assaulted every single day in a thousand little ways. This systemic intimidation which limits women's ability to pursue their lives and happiness as freely as men is sanctioned and encouraged by Rape Culture. 

22 Ways to Stop Violence Against Women

Below is an ad airing in the UK which addresses Rape Culture in a gut-wrenching, all-too-common scenario: a party, probably with drinking, the initial trust of the young woman, the expectations of the young man, and the eventual rape. Rape culture ensures that many young men really do not believe that forcing sex on a person who is saying 'No' is rape, especially if she was initially flirting or drinking at a party or has had sex with him before. This ad underlines the truth that rape occurs whenever one person coerces another into sexual activity against the second person's wishes. 

*TRIGGER WARNING!  Please be aware that this ad portrays a commonly-experienced scenario where a rape occurs, and though very well-done, it may be painfully triggering to many viewers.

via Love, Joy, Feminism

Why Can't A Woman...Be More Like A Man?

Good question, Professor!

Individual freedom and the right to bodily autonomy - the principles behind our understanding of consent - were the principles upon which many of us assume the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision was based, although the case itself was focused on a citizen's right to privacy around making decisions concerning her bodily autonomy and medical care.  Laws which deny a woman the right to bodily autonomy - including laws that deny a woman the right to control what happens to her own body in favor of giving any potential fetus the "right" to use her body against her will or without her consent - are an unconstitutional denial of individual freedom because they relegate a woman to a legal status that is less than human. The legal precedent that a woman actually has the right to consent to the risks and responsibilities of pregnancy, and an equal right to decline consent to those risks and responsibilities was thought to be finally established by Roe v Wade. But since it was argued as a case for privacy, Roe v Wade has never been a guarantee of women's reproductive rights. It has always been vulnerable to attack, either through court challenges or through legislation which has chipped away at it.

One way or another, the
Republican Party will find
a way to control those sluts!

From the moment Roe v Wade was decided, the religious right began working to overturn it. Outraged that women had at last been granted the right to choose if and when to be pregnant -  a right which conflicted with the patriarchal order which demands that men have complete authority over women - the "moral majority" began a campaign of slut-shaming, raising the specter- never far beneath the surface in any misogynist culture - that uncontrolled women would engage in wildly promiscuous and "irresponsible" sex and darkly warning that the new law would bring about the downfall of American civil society  However, when this tactic initially only gained traction within the most conservative and misogynistic segments of society, conservatives realized that the problem was that a majority of Americans in the late 1970's actually respected a woman's right to choose - and that most Americans believed that the consensual sexual activity of women was no more society's business than the consensual sexual activity of men. Conservatives began to cast around for a way to undermine that public perception that women should be entitled to civil rights equal to men.

Religious conservatives soon zeroed in on "consent" as a potentially malleable concept that they might be able to use to drive a wedge between women and their human rights, thereby setting the stage to put women back in their traditional place.  In order to overcome the legal issue of consent, religious and political conservatives began working tirelessly - using tactics including slut-shaming, inserting abstinence-only purity campaigns into public schools, and falsely equating microscopic blastocysts with full term babies - to entrench the notion that recreational sex involving the conscious avoidance of pregnancy is shameful and that only marital sex which welcomes the prospect of conception should be recognized and supported by society. Their aim was to increase public acceptance of explicitly Christian sexual mores in order to garner voter support for their social agenda. The ultimate goal was to get this explicitly Christian theology enshrined into law: that whenever a woman has consented to sex, she has automatically consented to pregnancy, too.

That's right, ladies, when you consent to sex, you consent to
pregnancy. And when you don't consent to sex, you
consent to pregnancy, too! You and your uteri are in a perpetual
state of consent to pregnancy! Ain't patriarchy grand?

Eventually, extreme conservatives began to worry that exceptions for rape and incest could possibly become a loophole through which some lying women could escape unwanted pregnancy, leading to the push for the elimination of exceptions for rape and incest as legal justifications for abortion. Building on the false premise that a conceptus is equal to a full-term baby, conservatives argued that a fertilized egg, no matter how it came into existence, is an innocent life deserving of protection. Completely ignoring the question of whether a woman who has been raped is deserving of society's protection and adroitly sidestepping Roe v Wade, forced-birth groups wrote bills denying abortion rights to women even in the case of rape or incest which their political arm, the Republican party, sponsored in state legislatures. In one giant leap of cruel imagination, conservatives managed to establish as a serious idea that even when a woman does not consent to sex, her consent to pregnancy should be automatic in the eyes of the law.

Lest there be any doubt about the intentions of the religious conservatives and their hired guns in the state and federal legislatures to render the legal notion of female consent completely irrelevant and completely powerless, forced-birth organizations created "personhood bills" which they instructed their Republican lackeys to sponsor and pass in various states. "Personhood" bills, if signed into law, would confer the full rights of a "person" - a deliberately vague term, but generally considered to be equal to a live-born child - to all fertilized ova. Such laws would criminalize most forms of female-controlled contraception, emergency contraception, assisted reproduction and, of course, all abortions. They would also open the door to state-sponsored invasion of women's privacy and health care rights since legally protected "persons" could potentially be "murdered" before a conception is discovered to have taken place. Furthermore, such laws would criminalize anyone who attempted to help a woman abort the conceptus "person" either by performing a surgical procedure, providing medical abortifacents, or driving a woman across state lines to obtain an abortion in a non-"Personhood" state.

Got that, gals?

"Personhood" laws are the holy grail of the forced-birth movement and the ultimate goal of religious conservatives. If passed, such laws would strip women of all bodily autonomy in matters of reproduction. Women would be denied effective female-controlled birth control, they would be denied emergency birth control if their partner's birth control fails or he refuses to use it and they would be denied abortions - even if they are impregnated by rape and even if their health or lives are endangered by a pregnancy. In short, thanks to the twisted culture of "life" pushed so ruthlessly onto them by religious conservatives, a woman would be compelled to sacrifice her happiness, risk her health and even lose her life because a single-celled conceptus has been granted a right to occupy her body which supersedes all of her rights including her humanity, her dignity and her right to life.

In essence, the goal of "personhood" laws is to elevate a cluster of cells to the full status of a man - and actually even to exceed that status because in no other situation can one person's needs compel another person to give up bodily autonomy, physical resources, health and safety (no American citizen is compelled to give so little as a pint of blood for another person, even if a life depends on it) - while reducing a pregnant woman to the status of a gestational vessel whose human rights have been totally subjugated for the purpose of reproduction, whether she has chosen to reproduce or not. These laws do not recognize "equally competing rights" of human beings who have equal status before the law. The woman's rights are erased while the blastocyst's "rights" become supreme.

Keep that contraception out
of those sluts' hands!

The Republican Party, which has degenerated to little more than the political arm of the conservative religious right, has been striving relentlessly to ensure that women will be legally forced to bear all of the negative physical, social and most of the financial repercussions for any unplanned pregnancy, while the churches themselves underline and enforce the subordinate and inferior position of women in the culture. Through tireless efforts to withhold access to contraception from women, the religious right ensures that reproductive control remains primarily in the hands of men. Thanks to ideologically-driven appointments to the FDA and the business interests of both drug companies and the medical establishment, only male-controlled methods of reliable contraception are available without a prescription, forcing women to navigate (and pay for) "care" from layers of medical and pharmacy gatekeepers before they are permitted to obtain reliable female-controlled contraception.

Religious patriarchy allows society to label unplanned pregnancy a "women's issue" in spite of the fact that it takes both a man and a woman - both failing to use effective contraception - to create an unplanned pregnancy. The fact that society allows unplanned pregnancy to be framed as a women's issue reveals the depth of the unconscious misogyny which lays the responsibility for - and the consequences of - an unplanned pregnancy squarely in the woman's lap, while little thought - and almost no censure - is directed toward the "guilt", the "promiscuity" or the "irresponsibility" of the man involved.

You know the old joke about keeping 
women barefoot and pregnant?
Not so funny anymore.

More insidiously, when pregnancy and the laws restricting women's rights over when and if they will become pregnant is framed as a women's issue, conservatives ensure that half the population at least may ignore the very real danger to women's health and safety. Few men pay attention when women's rights are being stripped away because the phrase "women's issue" is unconsciously received as a signal that the subject is unimportant and less than men's other concerns. Even men who love the women in their lives are lulled into a false sense of "nothing to worry about" as their wives, their sisters and their daughters are slowly but surely reduced to the legal status of walking wombs compelled under threat of criminal prosecution to gestate the offspring of any man who succeeds in impregnating them - whether by mutual and loving consent, by accidental failure of birth control or by force.

In this way, the religious patriarchy ensures both that women cannot control their own reproduction completely (since women - even abstinent women - can be, and often are, the victims of forced impregnation) and that no man - not even a rapist - must accept the decision of a mere woman on the question of whether or not he can use her body to reproduce. That is because the "right to life" of a conceptus is, in fact, really just an extension of men's rights. A conceptus is always some man's potential offspring, and at its core, religious teaching is all about enshrining the right of every man to reproduce. If women are allowed the freedom to choose, some men would almost certainly have difficulty finding a willing mate with whom to procreate. Religions which enforce the authority of men over women and which restrict the freedom and choices of women therefore speak to the root of cultural misogyny - men's fear of the potential power of women to control their (men's) ability to reproduce. "Right to life" is actually the trojan horse by which male rights over women are being inserted directly into women's uteri. That's right, ladies. It's a great big Biblically-condoned 'fuck you'!

Make no mistake. God's Own Party is
determined to restore Christian patriarchy
at the cost of women's human rights.

While religions pay lip service to condemning male brutality, merely offering verbal assurances on how a "godly man" ought to behave (while doing nothing to ensure that he does so, and even less to punish him if he does not, thus making aggressive or coercive male behavior toward women virtually riskfree for men), they strenuously resist efforts to enact laws which could increase rape prosecutions or extend protections for women against sexual assault, citing concerns about - you can guess - men's rights. This is apparent in the narrowing definition of rape - and the continuing insistence by men that women lie, women falsely accuse of rape and most of all that many, if not most, rapes are not really rape at all.

The ultimate social priority for religion is to assert and enforce the patriarchal ideal of total authority of men over women, and to that end, religious conservatives - and their men in government - are willing to grant even rapists and abusers privileges over women, to safeguard the authority of "godly" men. In short, in order to protect the privilege of all men, themselves included of course, even "godly" men who profess to abhor rape willingly award rapists and abusers the right to reproduce using women's bodies against their will. As always, there is no thought spared for the humanity of the women who would be sacrificed to this Christian ideology. If they are mentioned at all, involuntarily pregnant women's physical and emotional violation is dismissed as a "blessing": a "gift from God".

Restrictive "purity" codes for girls 
- demanding that they bear the 
responsibility for men's sexual urges 
- is already a real thing in the
 conservative Christian world - 
This is shockingly similar to
  Islamic sharia dress codes.

In the Republican vision of the future - as in the past it idealizes - "freedom" and "rights" will only fully belong to men and to the potential offspring of men, while women will be, at best, reduced once again to second-class citizenship, and, at worst, returned to sexual and reproductive slavery. Political, financial and social oppression of women, reproductive slavery and viciously misogynistic church-mandated rules of correct behavior and dress (for women only) are the unceasing reality for millions of women in theocracies around the world.  All of these forms of oppression of women are rooted in the desire of these conservative societies to control the sexuality and reproductive freedom of their women. Almost without exception, societies based upon religious laws which both deny women fully human status and hold them accountable for the sexual activity of both genders strictly limit female freedom and impose exaggerated requirements for modest dress on their women and girls.  If a Christian theocracy is successfully installed by conservatives in the United States, ever-deepening oppression will become the inevitable future for women and girls here.

Religious conservatives want Roe v Wade overturned because they oppose the principles of individual freedom and the right to bodily autonomy for women upon which the decision was based.  That denial of those rights would relegate women to less than human status is exactly the point. Second-class status for women would be a feature, not a bug, for Christian conservatives since the Bible commands that women are not equal but subordinate to men. Bible-based religion asserts that man is the original human and woman, taken from man, is less than human. This is the reality of Bible-based governance. It seems like a nightmare from the dark ages, or some dystopian futuristic novel, but this is really happening right now in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Al Stefanelli's post on this subject is a must-read.  And please watch this brief, powerful video and share it with everyone you know. This is not just a possible vision of future life for women in the USA - it will be the inevitable outcome of a Bible-based US government. Women's civil rights, our freedom, our dignity and our humanity are literally on the line.

via newleftmedia