A Really Long Thing About Rape and Men and Sexual Things

I owe at least one update about my Thanksgiving weekend, if only for one facet of it. But right now I would kind of like to talk about how I'm feeling.

How am I feeling?
Marginalized.

... Let me explain.


As much as I hate to go into specifics because it makes everything into a much more personal argument, today karenhealey posted this - a copied version of a post erbie made. Actually I see now, following that link, that a major bone of contention in the discussion on karenhealey's LJ has been edited. And she has made a similar edit on her own post. Since I began writing she has posted again to clarify, and she does an excellent job and gives a much clearer picture of the situation in New Zealand, the numbers and scope of which are deplorable. But I will continue to focus on her original post.

What do I think about this?
Well, to tell the truth, I feel kind of sad. And kind of angry, both for several reasons.

To begin with I'm going to make some common disclaimers (pay attention, I will reference these later):

I am against rape. I am against violence, truly, though you'd never know it unless you pay real attention. I have a wonderful girlfriend, have had for seven years and continuing. I was raised Catholic in a small town in northwest Indiana, though I'm not Catholic any longer (by my attestation, not by the church's). I have several female friends, at least a few of whom are close (and one of whom is my girlfriend). I have multiple female coworkers at or above my seniority and importance level. I am not in favor of male supremacy, female subjugation, the "glass ceiling", the "cutting of the rose" (don't eat first), harems, forced burkha and veil usage, binding of the feet, trading of females like cattle, or similarly denigrating practices. I am generally in favor of civil liberty over personal security. I am in favor of a broadly democratic and capitalist, yet flexible and thriving society.

Did I miss anything? I hope not. That said, I take ownership of my words (thank you millenia for making me think about this more and more often) and I stand behind them, until I see fit to abandon them.

Now I am hopefully considered to be a real person and no longer one of the amorphous masses. Sadly, my post has a reduced connection to karenhealey's post, as I can only speak about the country I grew up in (the USA), as I just don't know enough about the problem and culture there (New Zealand) to extrapolate with fairness and intelligence. I will also speak on a generic global scale.

My issue with erbie's post is not primarily in the second half - not the edited second half, anyhow. Do I believe there is a problem with date rape and alcohol related rapes in the USA? Yes. Do I believe there is a problem with rape in the USA? Yes. I also believe there is a "problem" with murder, and a problem with bombing in the Middle East, and a problem with AIDS in Africa... the list goes on. Do I think that reduces the importance of rape as a violent crime? Of course not, don't be silly. Rape is a horrible thing for any person and their loved ones to go through. I don't speak from direct experience, but from reading documented cases and stories.

Let me get the parts of the post I agree with out of the way before I am irrevocably tossed onto a tangent and never return to it. The portion of the post that begins with the list of "don'ts" is trite, but acceptable. Those are the recommended methods for dealing with rape victims. The portions which exhort one to not be silent about date rape fall a little under a topic I will discuss later, but are for the most part okay.

The problem I have is with the greater part of the post - the long list of times and places to Not Rape Women. To elucidate the problems I have with it, I am going to give a brief (haha, what larks) rundown of my experiences in what we might as well call "rape education".

In the American school system, you begin learning about rape before you even truly have a clue what sex is - and probably even before you know the definition, thanks to most of the mainstream media. That's another rant, though. Suffice to say that "sex" and "rape" are two mystical terms paired and defined before you even have a soft mental framework of the subject matter to hang the definitions on - you learn about rape when sex is all giggles and blushes and ews and segregated classrooms so the boys learn the boy bits and the girls learn the girl bits.

It is an ironclad guarantee that every sex-ed class will cover rape and domestic violence, almost in the same breath. Often there's an entire chapter on it. And it is never a pretty chapter - the subject matter pretty much guarantees that. But the overtones to the book, the attitudes of the teachers, the awful, awful sex-ed films... The entire affair is saddled with an unassailable air of "BAD". Do the boys play light about it? They try. They act bored, distracted. It sinks in regardless - moreso if you're paying attention. It happens in middle school, it happens in high school. Sometimes more than once per school. My high school had the occasional mandatory convocation with the requisite horribly acted date rape movie. Some colleges have a required course which covers the material.

I received a formal education about rape three times - once in a Catholic side educational program (CCD), once in middle school, and once in high school, plus the aforementioned convocations. Informally, I learned about rape many, many times. Movies, books, news, all kinds of media. In fact, you would correctly ascribe my experience with rape education to be a socialization experience - that's what it was. The societal norms projected into my skull. Would I say my education was sufficient? I would say more than enough. I and many of the males I know quail before the very concept of rape or of being thought of as a rapist. The merest murmur of "no" would send me flying out the appropriate door before I could take another breath. That's societal pressure for you. Does it work? In a lot of cases (more on this later). Is it healthy? Fuck no. I should not have to consider a contract of consent before engaging in relations. That is something which should be sanely worked out by two individuals. And I firmly believe that it can be.

Here is where I and this post come into conflict. My whole life - quite nearly true in a literal sense, and certainly true for as long as I can feasibly remember - I have been taught to respect women. To believe rape as a bad thing. It has been repeated, again, and again, and again. Combined with the incredible forces of "sexual predators" and "sexual harassment", there is an incessant cultural tsunami that would drive me into sexual repression and social phobia if I were to let it (I will approach this after I conclude this section. Yes, there's a whole nother bit coming). For someone to post something that is little more than a list of the places and times one could rape somebody as if it is the cure to all the ills of rape is where, I am afraid, I begin to get angry. I will sum up my feelings.

If you are an intelligent and decent human being, the chances you already know what rape is and have a stance against it are incalculable. I do not believe there can be a person under such a huge rock that when they finally emerge, blinking, they are confronted with rape as something entirely new and do not have an opinion about it.

If you are a human being with a screw loose, someone telling you that rape is wrong is unlikely to help. Rape (the type that is not date rape, I'll get to the promised bit on that next) is a control issue. It is something you do to subvert someone, to place them beneath you. Saying "Don't do it!" like Hooty the Owl is not going to solve the problem that is wrong in their brain.

And date rape. I pondered long and hard on what I would say about this. Do I perceive date rape as wrong? Of course. Do I perceive getting a girl drunk with the explicit intent of sullying her virtue, as it were, is wrong? Yes. Do I think that, simultaneously, college date/alcohol rape is under-reported and over-reported? Yes.

Allow me a second to explain before I am torn apart; from the studies I have read coupled with my knowledge of the subject I have arrived at the belief that date rape victims often feel at fault, and do not report the incident. From my personal experience as a college male, my personal experience being absolutely drunk, coupled with news stories of false reports, I have arrived at the belief that it is possible to accuse a male of doing something which he had no intentions of doing prior to becoming wasted.

Is it difficult to separate the two? Of course. This is the nitty gritty, where there's nothing but he-said/she-said, and things like how she was dressed enter into the question. I don't condone it. I think that more directed education is needed in this area. I think that peer pressure needs to be applied like it is on drinking and smoking these days (if I remember my numbers both are down). But I think that it would be incredibly easy to blame a young adult for something he didn't truly want to do, either.

I think that this, and the the aforementioned tsunami, are both part of an overall demonization of males.

Now you see why I added so many disclaimers above. I am required to hedge my monologue with such stuff as that paragraph because the moment I suggest that the male gender might be taking more of a beating than it deserves, I am considered clearly insane.
I am going to move on from just rape into the general area of my argument, wherein we will broaden the scope into sexual predators, the other thing I really wanted to cover in this post. But first, more hedging.

Do I think that women are currently equal in society? No. There is work to be done on a variety of equality fronts: ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and others. Do I think that this trend of accusing the male gender as a group is a worse problem than rape as a whole, or date rape in specific? No. I am not inciting a call to action, I am noting a trend which is occurring. Let me cite my other current examples before I continue.

schneeble posted a link today which he obtained from InstaPundit. I don't know that I need to say much to accompany this - it's an example in my argument and nothing more. Is it more sexist or less sexist than "Women must wear skirts in the office" or "Women can't do anything but type"? I'm not going to quantify where it stands in the hierarchy of sexism; it's pointless and long and subject to opinion anyhow.

Statistics, from what I have read, do seem to support the fact that "sexual offenders" are overwhelmingly male. Just as the percentage of rapists is. But this... there is an element of hysteria to this. In Iowa, they passed a law, which recently held up to court review, as that article shows. 2000 feet from playgrounds, schools, day care centers, etc. Frankly, in a state made mostly of small communities, housing which fits those restrictions is hard to find (it's an old article but the statistics were valid then and the issue of lack of housing is valid still). I will refrain from arguing about the law. I use it only as an example of the frenzy which is being worked up around this area of the Midwest. Nebraska is considering such laws, as well. Trick-or-treating around the city of Omaha this year was pitiful, as everyone took their children to a safe event at the zoo in daylight.

Looked at objectively, this law will not help. When viewed at in light of this new airline policy, however, it paints a disturbing trend, which I mentioned earlier. This law, this policy, the original post... they don't help. They are feel-good devices. The law will not stop (as the Typepad.com article even mentions) a sex offender who wants to do so from re-offending. The policy will not stop a person bent on offending from doing what they like with the child. The post will not stop someone dedicated to raping from doing so. If someone does not pick up on these socializations, which are far from obscure, then something as trivial as a law is not going to stop them. The best evidence of this is murder.

The law is a bit of an odd man out as it targets merely prior offenders, but the trend that is developing already views a lone male with a lone child as a suspicious pairing. What next? I merely illuminate the possible slippery slope. I do not enjoy being labeled as a potential anything - frankly, being judged by my past actions is enough. But I am, as a male, a potential rapist. A potential child molester. That's not cool. I cannot see how doing this helps in any manner - rather, it provides a shield for true rapists and child molesters. When you broaden the scope thusly, you lose all possibility of perspective, of rationality, of seeing true danger.

South Park did an excellent episode about molestation once (well, a couple, but one in particular) where the parents dutifully responded to each increasingly doom-slinging news report about child abductions, eventually sending their kids out into the wilds of Colorado to live because they weren't safe with their parents. That is precisely what's threatening to happen. The kind of absolute security that is being demanded for children cannot exist. If you have protected them from strangers, then you open them to the threat of potential rapists you know. If you cut your child off entirely, what the hell have you done to the poor human?

Demonizing a gender is unnecessary. It is a backlash to societal events which will prove, in the end, worse than the cure. You might feel the male gender is owed a few hundred or thousand years of oppression - if so you've crossed the rather broad line from equality to superiority. No equality movement should try to force the scale back the other way. It defeats the goddamn purpose. You cannot protect people - women, children, other men - with these actions. You do nothing except make it harder for people who are already complying with social mores to get along with their lives.

I have rambled enough and come to no end conclusion other than that these are events which disturb and anger and sadden me. I will close with a personal anecdote of a sort, because this is a personal topic. I am, after all, male.

(Edit: Fixed a grammatical error in here. Changed nothing else.)
I was a Boy Scout in my youth. I truly did enjoy helping people - helping people is in fact one of the few things I truly enjoy. When I am forced to ignore a crying apparently lost child in a mall or in Walmart, when I cannot actually even consider helping them because I am male, and I will receive at the very least a dirty look from the mother, if not from every passerby, and at the most I'll actually have to spend time actively convincing her I didn't intend to molest or otherwise harm her child - that is saddening to me. It is horrible that a woman must take concrete preventative actions to avoid being raped, but it is saddening that I have to worry about proactively justifying my gender. I don't equate the two - how could you - but I maintain that continuing to require the latter will not help the former.



End of Line.