I tried to post a comment at Feministing but, as usual, was bitterly rebuffed by Typekey, which thinks I’m a Soviet spy. So here’s the question I want to ask about this post:
What is the empirical foundation for the claim that “creating a culture which values genuine female sexual pleasure can help stop rape”?
Every study on rape that I’m aware of links it to male dominance and low female status. It’s an expression of misogyny and control, not a case of crossed signals about sexual enjoyment.
Anthropological analysis shows that levels of rape and other male violence on women are strongly correlated to the level of male dominance in a society (Sanday 1976, for example). Repression of women’s sexuality is also a symptom of male dominance, of course, but any correlation between that and rape is secondary. Counter-examples prove the point. The Minangkabau, for example, are quite restrictive of women’s sexuality, but rape is virtually unknown because women in their society have extremely high status (they traditionally refer to their culture as a matriarchy). On the other hand, there have been male-dominated societies where female sexual pleasure was assumed to be normal and good (no puritanical body anxiety at all), but rape was still common because women’s status was very low.
Valuing female sexual pleasure is a good thing. But how is it going to stop rape? The corollary to your thesis would seem to be that men commit rape because female sexual pleasure isn’t valued. And I would really like to know what the evidence is for that.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Feminist Theory, Rape on January 8, 2008, 4:51 pm EST
From the story about Huckabee’s parole of rapist Wayne DuMond:
It has all the markings of salacious, tabloidian detail that can haunt a candidate, a lawmaker, an elected official, who walks and stalks the halls of criminal justice, who has, as he has said, weighed decisions on whether to impose capital punishment, and has ordered death.
Salacious?
Main Entry: sa·la·cious
Function: adjective
1 : arousing or appealing to sexual desire or imagination : lascivious
2 : lecherous, lustful
DuMond was convicted of raping a 17-year old girl. After he was paroled he went on to rape and murder two more women.
I’m not feeling turned on, are you?
UPDATE: The magic of the tubes. The Times has removed the word “salacious” from the article. Poof!
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Rape on December 6, 2007, 12:04 am EST
I saw this in the news a few days ago, but didn’t post on it because it upset me too much. It upset me so much, in fact, that I had to spend two hours googling dolphin pictures in order to calm down.
But Shakespeare’s Sister is a better woman than I, and so she’s posted on the story of the prostitute who was gang-raped at gunpoint, and of the evil judge who reduced the charges to “theft of services”:
So there’s this judge. Her name—her name—is Teresa Carr Deni, and she’s a municipal judge in the Philadelphia Municipal Court. And recently, a defendant in her courtroom was accused of raping a prostitute at gunpoint—and inviting three of his friends to rape her, too. It might even have been more, except that when a fifth man arrived and was offered a turn, he asked why the girl was crying and declined to rape her while she wept and his friend pointed a gun at her, instead deciding to help her get dressed and leave.
The thing is, Judge Deni dropped all sex and assault charges at alleged gun-wielding gang-rapist Dominique Gindraw’s preliminary hearing. She decided he should be held on armed robbery for “theft of services.” Not only can prostitutes not be raped, according to Judge Deni, but calling what happened to the 20-year-old victim rape “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”
Folks, you know my theory. Pretty soon they’ll start purging the dictionaries. Take the word “rape” right out.
One thing Shakes didn’t mention, but I will: Jill Porter, the Philly columnist who reported this business, isn’t exactly a paragon of enlightenment herself. In her original column she wrote:
Certainly the victims don’t inspire much sympathy.
Why waste taxpayers’ money for what some people consider an occupational hazard?
There are enough sympathetic victims without wasting time on prostitutes who ask for trouble, right?
But crimes are prosecuted not out of sympathy for victims, but to maintain the rule of law in a civilized society, to punish a criminal and prevent further crime.
Has feminism not made it to Pennyslvania yet? What the hell is going on up there? It’s bad enough that Judge Asswipe thinks prostitutes are sexual vending machines; now we’ve got the Voice of Conscience saying, why yes, prostitutes are unsympathic sluts who are just asking for trouble, but still, we need to hold the line on rape prosecutions in order to maintain the rule of law for the greater good.
Are people in Philadelphia walking around in bustle gowns and tailcoats and shit? Is it like 1889 up there? Horse-drawn carriages? Little boys in short pants? Is Dave Lennox standing on the corner in pair of overalls?
Dolphin pictures. Dolphin pictures.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Rape on October 16, 2007, 12:17 am EST
I’ve written before about how the rape of women is an indissoluble part of war, but Professor Shortell makes the same point in about one-twentieth of the space. He quotes from this article in the New York Times about the war in Congo:
Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.
As Prof. Shortell says: “Rape and torture aren’t accidents that happen on the fringes of war; they are the essence of war.”
It is a conservative myth that men pay the price for war; that our brave boys are the ones who bear the burden of defending our whatever-the-fuck. I’m going to quote myself here, from a piece I wrote in February 2006 about Iraq:
Of course, the bigger point to be made here is that war exerts a profound and particular violence on women. Civilian females raped by maruading troops, female soldiers raped by their own comrades, military wives at home killed by their returning husbands — war and militarism hit women hard. This runs contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds that war is the special burden of men, the great sacrifice that males give for their country. Anti-feminists make a sort of fetish of this, claiming that war casualties are overwhelmingly male. That is, to put it politely, bullshit.
Despite the glorification of “our brave boys in uniform,” soldiers are not the main casualties of war. Civilian populations are. In the 20th century, 90 percent of all war deaths were unarmed women, children, and men.
I put that statement in bold because I think it needs to become a permanent fixture of everyone’s mental furniture. When we think about war, we need to think about its real effects. Forget John Wayne and Rambo; remember, instead, the citizens of Dresden, the women of Bosnia, the ash heaps/former humans of Hiroshima. Let’s say it one more time: soldiers are not the main casualties of war. Innocent civilians are.
Let us add now to that roster of raped and maimed civilians; let us add the Congo women lying in hospital beds with colostomy bags — colostomy bags, I tell you, because they have been so brutally raped their plumbing doesn’t work anymore.
That’s what war is.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under War, Rape on October 10, 2007, 4:53 pm EST
And it’s not just the “comfort” women; it’s all the enslaved and prostituted and raped women in that global apocalypse, that furnace of souls.
Heart includes the open letter to Ken Burns from Dr. Suki Falconberg, and I’m reproducing it here because I’d like you to read it in its entirety. I’d like you to read it and think about these women, think about what happens to women in war, think about what war means. What it really means.
LaVena Johnson, Private First Class, died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005. She was 19 years old.
According to the Army, her death was a suicide, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Uh huh.
Here’s the evidence in the case:
Two loose front teeth and a “busted lip” that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home, though these were not mentioned in the Army autopsy.
A dislocated shoulder, though this apparently wasn’t mentioned in the Army autopsy either.
Severe bruising on her body, ditto.
The absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death.
Indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her.
A blood trail outside the tent where Lavena’s body was found.
Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire.
The Johnson family and their supporters have been petitioning the Army to re-open its investigation, but so far the Army is distinctly uninterested in doing so. “Suicide,” says the Army. Open-and-shut case.
Uh huh.
Dr. John Johnson believes that his daughter’s murder (and surely that’s what it was) occurred in connection with a sexual assault. Either LaVena was raped and murdered in one attack, or she was raped and then later murdered in retribution for reporting it.
What Dr. Johnson doesn’t say in that clip is why he thinks sexual assault was involved, so I’ll tell you why: because our female soldiers in Iraq are getting abused and raped in astounding numbers.
Sexual assault in the military isn’t new: studies of female veterans from Vietnam to the first Gulf War found that 30% had been raped and 90% sexually harassed. And every indication is that it’s even worse in Iraq. Women make up a bigger percentage of our forces over there than they have in any previous war; something like 1 out of 7 American soldiers in Iraq is female. These women are right there in combat alongside the guys, riding in the tanks, doing the searches, facing the same dangers. But the shared risks don’t mean that the male soldiers are inspired to treat their female comrades as comrades. “Meat” is more like it:
Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. “The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis,” she told me. “It was for the guys on my own side.”
“There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke,” said Montoya, the soldier who carried a knife for protection. “This guy out there, he told me he thinks the military sends women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them sane. He said in Vietnam they had prostitutes to keep them from going crazy, but they don’t have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead.”
In the current Iraq war, which Pickett spent refueling and driving trucks over the bomb-ridden roads, she was one of 19 women in a 160-troop unit. She said the men imported cases of porn, and talked such filth at the women all the time that she became worn down by it. “We shouldn’t have to think every day, ‘How am I going to go out there and deal with being harassed?’” she said. “We should just have to think about going out and doing our job.”
Women soldiers in Iraq are in so much danger from rape by their own male colleagues that they are routinely instructed never to go the latrines or showers without a female buddy (or several). And it’s not just the so-called bad apples who commit these crimes. Commanding officers, team leaders, sergeants, lowly GIs — they all get in on the rape action. The obstacles to even reporting these assaults are so high that the vast majority of perpetrators get off scot free. Meanwhile the victims — those who have the courage to report what happened to them — are routinely ostracized and penalized for being “traitors.”
Given all that, it’s no surprise that the Army isn’t even remotely interested in justice for LaVena Johnson.
One more thing here, which I’m putting below the fold, as it were, so as not to get my rant poo all over the LaVena Johnson story and thus distract readers from their God-given duty to go sign the fucking petition. And that’s this: every time somebody suggests that all the raping of our female soldiers in Iraq is the result of the stress of combat and the way war turns people into predators, I wanna get up out of this blog and whack that somebody upside the head. ‘Cause dig it: our male soldiers aren’t assaulting each other, aren’t expressing their angst by attacking each other, are they? And our female soldiers aren’t assaulting male soldiers, aren’t ganging up to attack male soldiers. The stress of combat applies to everybody over there, but the rape violence is unidirectional and specific in its target: male soldiers assaulting female soldiers. And that’s because hatred of women, violence towards women, is interwoven into the fucking DNA of Western machismo and Western military culture. Women are the “other,” they are the despicable thing, the non-masculine thing, the thing to be used and abused, conquered and destroyed. I’m not a veteran but I grew up on military bases, and there is no more misogynistic culture on earth.
And that’s why, to be honest, whenever I hear the usual pablum about “supporting our brave men and women in uniform,” etc., I do a little virtual puke. I respect the women over there and some of the men, but I know damn well that a large percentage of the male soldiers in our military are pure grade-A asshats.
Thanks to the latest and thoroughly excellent Carnival Against Sexual Violence, I’ve discovered
PC Bloggs, a policewoman in the U.K. who blogs about police crap. (Police crap: It’s a technical term, folks. Work with me.) PC has two posts in the carnival, and the first one is a doozy.
In Look how EQUAL we are, PC neatly illustrates the difference between how female and male rape victims are treated. She cites “two examples of the kind of regular updates entered into Blandshire’s Incident Control System by the on-duty control room supervisor following different reports”:
Incident #1:
Caller reporting her 17-year-old daughter was raped last night by two named offenders after going out drinking at her local pub. Daughter is very distressed and sore.
Update from supervisor: Officers to attend and establish the following:
1. Is the daughter making an allegation?
2. Names and descriptions of alleged offenders.
3. How much alcohol was consumed?
4. If allegation is being made, locate scene.
5. Will the victim attend court?
6. If allegation could be true, will she consent to a medical?
Incident #2:
Caller reporting her 18-year-old son was raped last night by a male known to him, following a party at his house. Son is in pain and upset.
Update from supervisor: Officers to attend and establish the following:
1. Locate the crime scene.
2. Arrange medical examination and take victim to rape suite.
3. Name/description of offender.
4. Preserve forensic evidence, seize clothing.
It would be mind-boggling if our minds hadn’t already been boggled from birth by the same kind of crap here in ‘Murka every goddamn day of our lives.
PC’s second post in the Carnival, An Idiot’s Guide for Rape Victims, is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the absurd obstacles to getting a rape conviction, at least when the victim is a woman. But check the comments: it’s like an MRA propaganda bratwurst exploded in the pan and spewed greasy lies everywhere.
“95% of all rape allegations are proven, in court, after the evidence being tested by qualified barristers and subjected to examination by jurors, to be false.
“In other words the women lied.
“I makes you wonder just how many innocent men have had their lives destroyed by lying women.”
…writes one serial rapist from his jail cell as he takes a break from penning his latest demand for parole. And a divorced father who sexually abused his daughter and is still fuming over losing custody chimes in:
“But when we get the Feminazis and their pussy-whipped supporters who want the inconvenient facts ignored and accused men to be convicted merely on the say so of a hysterical, neurotic or drunken woman then, quite frankly, it is difficult to consider that they are not delusionally insane?”
I’m thinking I need to make an exception to my self-imposed ban on travel. Like the Accidental Tourist, my goal when travelling is to find an environment as similar to home as possible so as to avoid even a twinge of culture shock. I believe Britain can provide me with that kind of experience. I can go there and encounter exactly the same kind of rape-denying MRA fucktwits I enjoy so much here at home.
And there’s more: British feminists get pornified by book publishers, too!
Notice anything? Like, maybe, how the title makes it sound like a prostitute’s tell-all? And how the cover features a good-looking woman with bright red lipstick (and no eyes, ’cause that could confuse men into thinking she’s a human being)?
You know, if Andrea Dworkin wrote Intercourse today it would be published with a lurid pink cover and a picture of a naked porn actress on all fours with a pair of bunny ears on. Intercourse! The too-hot-to-handle exposé from deep inside the Battle of the Sexes!
I’m betting PC Bloggs has written a smart and incisive book. But dig the publisher’s product blurb:
WPC BLOGGS is a 21st Century policewoman… a cross between Bridget Jones and PC David Copperfield. She frets about her make-up, flirts with male officers and, occasionally, arrests some very naughty people.
She frets about her fucking makeup? FRETS ABOUT HER FUCKING MAKEUP?
Oh man, I’m totally booking my flight. I can travel again! It’ll be just like home!
One question, though: do y’all still have those wax paper squares in the bathroom? Cause that could be a problem.
This woman-shaped piece of meat has made the crucial mistake of reporting her rape. She will be punished.
Here’s an interesting change. After all these stories of women being prosecuted or threatened with legal action for pressing rape charges, today we have a story of a woman being prosecuted for not pressing rape charges.
You all remember that back in 2005, a 17-year-old girl was actually prosecuted for reporting her rape. Not only prosecuted but convicted of a crime — and all because the state decided it couldn’t prove the case against her attackers.
And with the Duke case, as you all know, every sexist twit this side of the Andromeda galaxy took to the intertubes to demand that the victim in that case also be prosecuted, again for the “crime” of reporting a crime that the state decided it couldn’t prove.
And in the De Anza case, a teenage girl who was gang-raped by a sports team was publicly castigated for, again, reporting a crime that the state decided it couldn’t prove.
Anybody see a pattern?
The increasingly loud message is clear: if you’re raped, you’d sure as hell better not press charges. If the state can’t prove the case, or even if the prosecutors decide they don’t believe you, you could go to jail! And shit, even if there’s airtight evidence, like a goddamn videotape of the assault, the defense attorneys will still crucify you and make your life a living hell and very possibly succeed in getting your attackers acquitted. Definitely better not to press charges.
Now, in a fascinating development, an Air Force woman who has obviously taken this message to heart is being court-martialed for not pressing charges.
The woman in question explained her decision this way: “Under enormous stress and after consultation with the legal office, I made the decision not to testify — the pressure of the judicial process was too much for me, and I felt like no one was looking out for my interests.”
In other words, the crucifixion party had started up and she decided to opt out. The usual crap was already being slung: she was promiscuous, she wore skin-tight clothes, she asked for it, yadeyadeyade. Damn if I blame her for bailing. She’d already been raped once and didn’t feel like repeating the experience. (Note, by the way, that this mess is going on in North Carolina, home of the Duke travesty. Not a good state for rape victims. )
But clearly she erred by not fully apprehending the rape zeitgeist, which is that if you’re raped, you’d better not report it at all. If you do, you will be punished. One way or another.
It’s a lose-lose scenario. If you press on with the case, you’ll be destroyed. If you don’t press on, you’ll be destroyed. The only people who don’t seem to be getting destroyed in all this is the men who are committing the goddamn rapes.
I’m reminded of the Catch-22 we saw with the street attack case, where the women who defended themselves and their friend were sent to jail. Sent to jail! And yet if a woman doesn’t fight back, that’s automatically proof that she asked for it, whatever “it” is.
I think the key here is to be found in that recent ruling that the word “rape” cannot be uttered in a rape trial. It doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as rape anymore. There’s just “sex,” and a world full of lying sluts.
They’re trying to turn the clock back, kids. This is the patriarchy, fangs bared and poison dripping, ready to take back what it’s lost. For thirty-five years women have been talking about sovereignty over their own bodies, and the big P is pushing back. Time to get the meat under control. The MRAs are the vanguard, and every moment that they’re not whacking off to porn movies where women are abused and degraded and made to wear toilet seats around their necks, they’re trolling blogs and sending letters to the editor and spreading the word that women are sluts and liars, that rape never happens, that feminism has gone too far, gotta get the uppity bitches back in line. Fuck that noise.
Posted by Violet under Recommended, Rape on August 8, 2007, 6:05 am EST
Fuck it. Just fuck it. Every time I crawl reluctantly back from one of my cave retreats and decide to check the news, hoping to see maybe something good in the world, maybe a picture of a fucking flower or something, I get gobsmacked. Top story today: Duke terrorists are now actually being rewarded with an undisclosed sum — millions of dollars? Who the fuck knows? The message is clear: You can terrorize some woman all you want, call her a nigger and threaten to shove a broomstick up her and knock her around and probably rape her, and here’s what you win:
Adoring national media attention
The fervid devotion of millions of moist-palmed dudes who totally sympathize with how unfair it is to get nailed just for terrorizing some stupid bitch
The profound satisfaction of seeing the woman you terrorized dragged through the mud, publicly hounded, and even threatened with legal action for committing the GINORMOUS crime of actually reporting her assault
Millions of dollars in prize money from your university to make you feel better about the terrible ordeal you’ve been through
Any questions about why every single athletic team in this country now has carte blanche to rape and torture any woman they get their nasty goddamn hands on?
Throw up, throw up, throw up. Just fuck it.
Posted by Violet under Rape on June 18, 2007, 5:22 pm EST
On good days, when I’m not feeling too depressed, I dash off the occasional post that attempts to deliver the Fuck-You-Patriarchy message (or Fuck-You-World message) in a quirky, even humorous kind of way. Then I read things like this and the possibility of humor or quirkiness or really anything besides a loaded shotgun seems unthinkable. Forever.
Whaddya say, gals? Shotguns? Shall we just load up and start blasting the motherfuckers? I mean really: let’s just kill them and then we can have the planet.
Posted by Violet under Rape on May 26, 2007, 7:26 pm EST
UPDATE: I wrote this post before seeing the “Update” to Jill’s, in which she reported the comments the AutoAdmit trolls made about her on their own board: “I want to brutally rape that Jill slut,” “I’m 98% sure that she should be raped (even if only in Internet Land),” “So seriously, I think we should start another war with this cunt. She clearly deserves anything XOXO might inflict on her.” Of course that just proves the point of my post, but I wouldn’t call these guys “funny.” No, funny’s not the word. Insane, maybe? Or maybe just normal privileged men chatting about doing what normal privileged men have always done to keep the underclass in line.
What’s it called when the thing that you’re doing disproves exactly what you’re saying?
Over at Feministe I’ve been following the Duke case thread, which has been infested by trolls from AutoAdmit (the home for misogynist racist law students on the web). By the way, I strongly recommend that post as an excellent statement on the case.
Anyway, one of the twit-trolls said a funny thing:
Friendly Intruder Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
“they’re not rich, but you have to realize that being a white man from a middle class suburb IS privileged in American society. maybe you don’t realize that.”
Jesus. Are we still on about “white males”? Still?
Our generation has moved past sexism to a large degree. Fighting a fight that was pretty much won by the late 90s seems like a waste of effort.
Yeah, I know. I don’t get it. I dated a rather extreme feminist for quite awhile and I tried like hell to understand her position. But she went to Yale, so it was difficult for me to feel her discriminated pain.
Notice the nascent MRAism there? He’s jealous of the girlfriend’s success. Guarantee you in 15 years he’ll be a divorced member of Fathers for Justice or something and railing about how the fembots have turned this country into a matriarchy.
But what’s funny is the “our generation has moved past sexism” bit. Do you hear that? Sexism is over! It’s just so last-decade. Friendly Intruder’s generation is beyond it. Which Friendly Intruder has amply demonstrated by his comments throughout the thread:
Remember a few days ago when I mentioned that Amanda was going to work for the John Edwards campaign? Well, in the interim the wingnut noise machine has launched an all-out attack on Ms. Pandagon, which would be funny if people weren’t taking it so seriously. Amanda has been accused of hate speech by such Gandhi-like figures as Michelle “Concentration Camp” Malkin and Bill “Hollywood Jews killed Jesus” Donahue, and Edwards has been warned that if he doesn’t fire her, then Republicans like Malkin and Donahue won’t, er, vote for him. Right. It’s really quite the shitstorm, and just about everybody in the feminist blogosphere (other than me) has been covering it. Liza at culturekitchen has the round-up.
There’s a rumor this evening that the Edwards campaign has caved in to the pressure and fired Amanda (as well as Shakespeare’s Sister, who was hired to do netroots stuff), but nobody seems to know for sure. While we all keep our collective fingers crossed that the rumor isn’t true, you can do your part to help the Edwards campaign stay on the side of the angels by going to their website contact page and writing a little note of support for Amanda and Shakes. You might mention that if Edwards can’t be counted on to defend a woman’s right to speak her own mind on her own blog, then he probably can’t be counted on to defend a woman’s right to anything. Just a thought.
As for the Duke case, one of the things Amanda has been castigated for by the wingnuts is her insistence on believing that if a woman says she’s been sexually assaulted, then there’s a really good chance that she has, in fact, been sexually assaulted. In reading through the posts in defense of Amanda’s right to express her opinion, I was surprised to see a couple of liberal bloggers state that the Duke defendants are “almost certainly innocent” and that the “serious charges” have been dropped. Have I missed something? Actually only the rape charge was dropped, because in North Carolina “rape” has to involve penile penetration and apparently the victim in the Duke case can’t be sure what they stuck in her since they were holding her face down on the bathroom floor. If you rape somebody with something other than a penis in North Carolina, it’s called “first-degree sexual assault.”* The Duke defendants are still charged with that and with kidnapping.
It’s also possible that dropping the rape charge and just going with first-degree sexual assault was a tactical move to avoid dealing with the issue of DNA from men with whom the victim may have had consensual sexual relations in the preceding days or weeks. If you didn’t click on that link in the previous sentence, please do so — look, here it is again! Wendy Murphy does an excellent job of countering the defense attorney spin.
The only thing certain about the Duke case is that the defense is funded by millionaires who have spared no expense in the past year to vilify the victim and win the case in the court of public opinion. Their main line of attack has been, predictably, to argue that the rape didn’t occur at all. Since something like 96% of rape accusations are true and the rate of false accusations is the same for rape as for other major crimes, I’m not particularly inclined to believe that the victim in this case is lying. Certainly there’s always that 4% chance, and this case may prove to be one of the rare ones in which the charges are false, but I haven’t heard anything yet that makes me think an assault of some kind didn’t occur. The victim was confused about the details of the story? She may have IDed the wrong person? That’s normal. When I was attacked by a guy who broke into my house, I was so freaked out and traumatized that afterwards I simply could not reconstruct in my mind the precise sequence of events. I also couldn’t identify the guy’s face, even though we’d been grappling with our noses just inches apart.
As for the Duke players, we do know that they were verbally abusive, yelled racial slurs, threatened to rape the woman with a broomstick, and hustled her into a bathroom. These guys are the scum of the earth. Is it really so hard to believe they thought it’d be fun to fuck with the stripper?
*Addendum: According to Wendy Murphy, “rape” in North Carolina refers only to penile/vaginal penetration. All other penetration acts are covered under the sexual assault charge. So, penis-in-anus, penis-in-mouth, and object-in-vagina are all considered sexual assault in North Carolina, not rape.
“The Rape of Mr. Smith” was posted in the comments at Feministe by Tyra and elevated to a blog post by Jill. It’s been floating around so long that people attribute it to Anonymous, but in fact it’s from Connie Borkenhagen, who published it in the American Bar Association Journal in 1975.
The Rape of Mr. Smith1
In the following situation, a holdup victim is asked questions by a lawyer.
“Mr. Smith, you were held up at gunpoint on the corner of First and Main?” “Yes.”
“Did you struggle with the robber?” “No.” “Why not?” “He was armed.”
“Then you made a conscious decision to comply with his demands rather than resist?” “Yes.”
“Did you scream? Cry out?” “No, I was afraid.”
“I see. Have you ever been held up before?” “No.”
“Have you ever GIVEN money away?” “Yes, of course.”
“And you did so willingly?” “What are you getting at?”
“Well, let’s put it like this, Mr. Smith. You’ve given money away in the past. In fact, you have quite a reputation for philanthropy. How can we be sure that you weren’t CONTRIVING to have your money taken from you by force?” “Listen, if I wanted –”
“Never mind. What time did this holdup take place, Mr. Smith?” “About 11:00 P.M..”
“You were out on the street at 11:00 P.M.? Doing what?” “Just walking.”
“Just walking? You know that it’s dangerous being out on the street that late at night. Weren’t you aware that
you could have been held up?” “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?” “Let’s see … a suit. Yes, a suit.”
“An EXPENSIVE suit?” “Well – yes. I’m a successful lawyer, you know.”
“In other words, Mr. Smith, you were walking around the streets late at night in a suit that practically advertised the fact that you might be good target for some easy money, isn’t that so? I mean, if we didn’t know better, Mr. Smith, we might even think that you were ASKING for this to happen, mightn’t we?”
*
I believe this is where the original ends; the final question and response in the version posted at Feministe ( “Look, can’t we talk about the past history of the guy who did this to me?”…) were probably added later by another hand.
So how much has changed in 30 years? Well, I’d say that this kind of victim-blaming is slightly less likely to happen now if your rapist is a complete stranger. But if you’ve ever been introduced to a guy, you’ve basically given him carte blanche to rape you, jam pool cues and broken bottles into your body, burn you with cigarettes, and whatever else he can convince the jury you gave him permission to do when you smiled at him. That is, unless you yourself are male. Curiously enough, it is still true that when men meet each other or become friends or just happen to find themselves at the same party, automatic consent to be raped and tortured is not assumed to be given. The legal system is funny that way.
1From “The Legal Bias Against Rape Victims (The Rape of Mr. Smith).” Connie K. Borkenhagen, American Bar Association Journal. April, 1975
Posted by Violet under Recommended, Rape on January 5, 2007, 9:28 am EST
