That was one hell of an essay. The last couple of paragraphs lost me a little, but overall it’s amazing.
It’s interesting how it shows Trump is not entirely wrong about fake news, even as he is a big part of the problem.
Yeah, but then the right-wing tradition has not been inventing sins, so much as inverting them and projecting their own on their opponents. The cries of leftist media bias and now Trump denouncing the dishonest attacks of the Lügenpresse against him are just one more example. (Another that might be mentioned here is the bit about free speech vs. safe spaces.)
I’m hoping this might be a good place to discuss this…or at least, to get confirmation that my anger is totally justified.
A so-called ‘conservative’ woman wrote a piece about how we really shouldn’t second-guess the women who say “me too” because sometimes it’s actually a REAL rape, like what happened to her.
She literally repeats all of the false assumptions while ‘proving’ to her audience that this time, it was real. Things like: I only had one drink, the blood test confirmed I didn’t have alcohol in my system, as soon as I came to I was screaming and fighting…
Yeah. So, if you’d been roofied, you wouldn’t have come to an hour later screaming and fighting. And even the idea that she sat there nursing one drink while waiting for a friend…so how did the drug get into that one drink that never left your hand while you weren’t being distracted because you weren’t actually talking to anyone? None of it adds up. It’s all a way to claim that when a conservative woman gets raped, it really is out of her control, unlike those women in Hollywood who were trying to get ahead in their careers, etc.
It’s just a lot of little dog whistles that if you draw attention to them, she could claim “see, you’re trying to shame good Conservative women like me who get raped”. It just really pisses me off.
If anyone really wants to read it, it was published in The Daily Signal (part of the Heritage Foundation:
Swearer seems to still be processing. She acknowledges that before she was raped she would have thought it was impossible for her to be raped. She clearly has a ways to go to understand that “modesty” is no more of a defense than a handgun.
I understand your anger at this. It’s pretty half-assed, like most libertarian attempts at dealing with Real Life Events.
I’m saying it’s either entirely made up, or the details have been made up – based on faulty assumptions – to make it seem like she had a “legitimate” rape as understood by Republicans.
You’re definitely not crazy; I just didn’t feel I could respond to the piece without considering the possibilty that it was true-ish-for-her. It’s muddled at best.
Too true:
This seems like so many conservative reactions to things: abortion is bad (except our abortions), LGBT people are bad (except our LGBT people), government assistance is bad (except our government assistance). So now it’s rape survival stories are bad (except our rape survival stories). Ugh. When you set up a system that marks everyone and everything as “evil,” you then get to selectively forgive whoever you like!
Good analysis. I would add: presidents who sexually harass women are bad (except our presidents).
There’s a famous reddit thread where users who have committed sexual assault talk about it.
Some are repeat offenders, some are remorseful, its a hard read. Jezebel has good coverage of it, and a link to it if you want to wade in.
I don’t know how to fix this problem. Evolutionary dentata maybe?
I have been wondering since #metoo started trending how many men had raped or molested a woman. The sheer volumes of victims mean there must be a lot of perps. I read many stories of women who were raped or approached as children, and that worried me. I can, for example, understand the guy who goes to college and joins a frat and gets indoctrinated into a certain mindset about women through his buddies, and maybe even goes on to treat women that way - or even is around guys like that in high school. I see how there is a whole cycle perpetuating that mentality. But how do men think, “That 10 year old wants me”? It seems by its nature more of a solitary crime, more on the face of it wrong.
I think those are two issues. Child molestation is very different from sexual assault/harassment of women. (and also again different from being gay, looking at you fucking Kevin Spacey!)
I don’t think anyone thinks children are sexually attracted to them, thats backwards, they are sexually attracted to children. And they use guilt, force, manipulation to scratch that itch. Predators of this kind don’t even seem to have a gender preference, they abuse both genders almost equally. And I’m of the opinion that its a form of mental illness, and that we need more resources to help those who recognize the issue before they act on it. Right now if you go to your doctor and say you need help because you’re sexually attracted to children you’ll likely get arrested, even if you haven’t done anything.
And I think you are downplaying the role of society and media and how influencing it is in how women are viewed. You don’t need to be in a frat to be a rapist, you don’t need to be friends with rapists to be a rapist, you don’t need to influenced by a buddy to be a rapist, you just need to not care about women. And society does a good enough job of teaching that mindset all on its own.
Jon Krakauer had some numbers in his book Missoula. I don’t have it at hand, but it goes something like: only 6% of men rape, but on average they rape 14 different women. (These numbers don’t go into women who rape, or men who rape men – that’s another data set.)
Recall the adage that all rapists are serial rapists.
It makes sense in a horrible way – someone uses someone else’s body with little to no thought to their autonomy or wishes. Unsurprisingly, the victim makes a point of never being alone with them again if they can help it. So the attacker moves on to other victims.
It all fits very neatly into being a PUA or stag or whatever the hell metaphor, and also into “women are crazy” – “we had sex and then she didn’t want to talk to me anymore” or alternatively “we had sex and she got all upset and wanted to talk about it”.
Thank you for pointing that out. One thing that’s bothered me is that #metoo started largely to point out a major systemic issue but media has treated it as a hunt for a few bad eggs. Removing a few major offenders from their power to abuse is important but in itself could distract from the systemic nature of the problem.