On the thoughts of rapists
Aug. 18th, 2009 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gaudior[Note: In response to comments both online and in person, I have revised the latter portion of this entry to better reflect the point I was trying to make. My apologies-- I thought I'd revised this enough to be "publishable," but I clearly should have gotten a beta. I will be glad to provide the unrevised version if anyone should want it for any reason.]
This is in response to just one aspect of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rax's extremely thought-provoking post "So How Do We Talk About Rape?"; it's also something I've been thinking about for some time.
In her post,rax raises the question of sharing personal experience of rape, including the question of whether or not to tell other people in the social circle that Person A, their friend, has raped you. Because, rax said, a friend said she wanted to "ostracize" that person.
I feel that this concern-- "I can't tell anyone what this person did because they'll ostracize him/her" ties into two expected fallacies on the parts of the people being told:
1) My friend is incapable of evil, because s/he is my friend.
2) All rapists are purely evil.
Fallacy #1 is, of course, a form of the Geek Social Fallacies"-- specifically, #2, "My friends accept me as I am," which precludes any criticism, no matter how deserved. I think this applies to many people other than geeks-- many, many people feel loyalty to their friends, and are reluctant to think badly of them. Especially in the context of fallacy #2.
I've been thinking about this for several years, because I've been on both sides of it. I saw a friend of mine get raped-- and all the rapist's friends circle the wagons around, declaring that he would "never do that," and accusing her of lying or worse. On the other side, I was told that a friend of mine (long ago, and not anyone I think anyone I currently know knows) had raped someone-- and our social circle exploded with people trying to make sense of it, and assuming that there must be something wrong with the report, because we couldn't imagine he would do something "like that." It made me wonder what exactly we meant by "like that," and I came to the following conclusion:
We have a mental image of a rapist. He is an unkempt, deranged man in a dark alley, slavering, holding a knife. He has no background. We know nothing about his past, his origins, his feelings about the stock market (although if we think hard, he probably holds political views opposite to ours). He has only one motivation: to slake his lust and violence on our bodies, or the bodies of people we love.
Of course, this person does not exist except in our imaginations. Intellectually, we're aware that people who do evil things have feelings, memories, jobs, pets, etc. But the image of the Rapist persists. And when we're called to believe that a friend might have raped someone, we look at our friend, and at the Rapist, and cannot reconcile the two. And so we either forcibly fit our friend into that mold-- or, if we can't manage to do that, we deny the charge. And then our friend-- our smart, funny, creative, slightly odd but "surely not evil" friend-- goes on being both dangerous and misunderstood.
No-one rapes in a vacuum. Sometimes people genuinely misunderstand a panicked freezing-up as consent.* Sometimes people are drunk or high, and their impulse control goes to hell. Sometimes people have bought into the macho-male culture that says women are made for men's pleasure, and so if you bought her an expensive dinner, you deserve sex. Sometimes people are enjoying someone else's pain. Sometimes people have been raped themselves, and believe that sex always involves a certain amount of fear and pain for someone-- and they'd rather it not be them, this time. Sometimes people have been raped themselves so often and so badly that they've cut off their memory of it-- and the only way they can possibly handle the unconsciously held shame/pain/fear/anger they feel is to make someone else feel it, more and worse-- to put their own feelings outside themselves into someone else, so that the feelings become bearable.
So reasons for raping go from "being stupid and entitled" to "being sadistic" and all the way to "being so badly traumatized you're borderline psychotic." But the point is-- all of these are understandable, human motivations, held by understandable humans.**
That doesn't mean rape is excusable. Rape is wrong, and I believe that people have the ability and the responsibility to choose their actions. Even someone borderline psychotic can come to understand what s/he is doing and stop-- it may require a lot of therapy to change, but it can be done. And I believe that person has a moral responsibility to do the work necessary to make that change.
But what it does mean is that we need to stop assuming we know what a rapist looks like. And we need to stop assuming it's an all-or-nothing, "you did this, so you're automatically purely evil!" thing. I see a parallel set of behaviors in discussions of race-- people assume that the phrase "your behavior shows that you have some underlying racist beliefs you might want to think about," is equivalent to, "you're a card-carrying member of the KKK who wants to bring back slavery and castrate everyone non-white!"
Your friend who raped someone is the same person s/he was before you knew about the rape. S/he still has the traits you liked. And s/he may feel guilty about the rape, or be carrying some old pain of his/her own-- or s/he might not have thought about it very much at all. And in any of these cases, s/he is both a) the cause of tremendous pain in someone else, and b) still the same person.
As his/her friend, you don't have to ostracize him/her or excuse him/her. Treat it like you would something else s/he did which deeply upset you-- yell at him/her, urge him/her to rethink the beliefs that led to the rape (with a therapist if that would be helpful). Break off the relationship if that feels to you like the right thing to do.
But if you value that person's friendship too much to let go of, fine, keep it-- with the awareness you now have of what your friend is capable of. Stay aware of all the complexity of the situation. Don't assume that you have to ignore everything you know and love about him/her because you now also know that s/he is dangerous. Don't ignore the fact that s/he is dangerous just because you love him/her. Take precautions when you're with him/her, and let others know when they might be in danger from him/her.***
It would be nice to believe that all evil is done by people we don't know. It's not. Reality is much more painful and complex than that, and we get in trouble when we demand it be simple.
--R
*VERY IMPORTANT PSA: Trauma theory says: our response to terror is not just fight-or-flight; it's fight-or-flight-or-freeze. When we're both terrified and trapped and out-matched, we tend to shut down, go limp, and "play possum," in the unconscious hope that this will get us hurt less.
In some cases, we're completely right.
In other cases, freezing means that a person is not able to say "no, stop" even when s/he wants nothing more than for what's going on to stop happening.
And to make it worse, a person who has already been raped or otherwise traumatized is likely to have triggers: stimuli of all kinds which forcibly remind him/her of the past trauma, and throw him/her back into the same panic s/he felt during the original assault. Triggers can be things both obviously connected to a trauma (being grabbed from behind) and less-obvious (the shade of yellow the attacker was wearing; the smell of lilacs that were in the air during the battle, etc).
Therefore, the fact that someone has gone perfectly still and is not resisting DOES NOT MEAN that s/he is okay with what's happening. If you are doing something even vaguely possibly boundary-crossing, and the other person isn't saying anything or moving, STOP. And don't continue until the person has given you an emphatic assent, using complete sentences and facial expressions and preferably humor or another indication of being really entirely present.
**I believe that this conflation of rapists with evil outsider also explains a lot about why people's attempts to prevent child molestation are so damn ineffective. People spend tremendous effort in keeping convicted sex offenders away from children, when a very high percentage of children are assaulted by someone they know (friend, family member, etc.) I think we'd be much more effective by teaching children that they have the right to control their bodies no matter who asks them to do something uncomfortable, and listening to them and taking them seriously when they tell us how they feel, than by any amount of "Stranger Danger!" lessons.
***If more people were willing to accept that "this person can be dangerous" is not exactly equivalent to "this person is ultimate evil and should be hung from a bridge," I would strongly advise publicly announcing the names of people who have raped. As it is... it remains one of those problematic questions with no clear right answer.
This is in response to just one aspect of
rax's extremely thought-provoking post "So How Do We Talk About Rape?"; it's also something I've been thinking about for some time. In her post,
rax raises the question of sharing personal experience of rape, including the question of whether or not to tell other people in the social circle that Person A, their friend, has raped you. Because, rax said, a friend said she wanted to "ostracize" that person. I feel that this concern-- "I can't tell anyone what this person did because they'll ostracize him/her" ties into two expected fallacies on the parts of the people being told:
1) My friend is incapable of evil, because s/he is my friend.
2) All rapists are purely evil.
Fallacy #1 is, of course, a form of the Geek Social Fallacies"-- specifically, #2, "My friends accept me as I am," which precludes any criticism, no matter how deserved. I think this applies to many people other than geeks-- many, many people feel loyalty to their friends, and are reluctant to think badly of them. Especially in the context of fallacy #2.
I've been thinking about this for several years, because I've been on both sides of it. I saw a friend of mine get raped-- and all the rapist's friends circle the wagons around, declaring that he would "never do that," and accusing her of lying or worse. On the other side, I was told that a friend of mine (long ago, and not anyone I think anyone I currently know knows) had raped someone-- and our social circle exploded with people trying to make sense of it, and assuming that there must be something wrong with the report, because we couldn't imagine he would do something "like that." It made me wonder what exactly we meant by "like that," and I came to the following conclusion:
We have a mental image of a rapist. He is an unkempt, deranged man in a dark alley, slavering, holding a knife. He has no background. We know nothing about his past, his origins, his feelings about the stock market (although if we think hard, he probably holds political views opposite to ours). He has only one motivation: to slake his lust and violence on our bodies, or the bodies of people we love.
Of course, this person does not exist except in our imaginations. Intellectually, we're aware that people who do evil things have feelings, memories, jobs, pets, etc. But the image of the Rapist persists. And when we're called to believe that a friend might have raped someone, we look at our friend, and at the Rapist, and cannot reconcile the two. And so we either forcibly fit our friend into that mold-- or, if we can't manage to do that, we deny the charge. And then our friend-- our smart, funny, creative, slightly odd but "surely not evil" friend-- goes on being both dangerous and misunderstood.
No-one rapes in a vacuum. Sometimes people genuinely misunderstand a panicked freezing-up as consent.* Sometimes people are drunk or high, and their impulse control goes to hell. Sometimes people have bought into the macho-male culture that says women are made for men's pleasure, and so if you bought her an expensive dinner, you deserve sex. Sometimes people are enjoying someone else's pain. Sometimes people have been raped themselves, and believe that sex always involves a certain amount of fear and pain for someone-- and they'd rather it not be them, this time. Sometimes people have been raped themselves so often and so badly that they've cut off their memory of it-- and the only way they can possibly handle the unconsciously held shame/pain/fear/anger they feel is to make someone else feel it, more and worse-- to put their own feelings outside themselves into someone else, so that the feelings become bearable.
So reasons for raping go from "being stupid and entitled" to "being sadistic" and all the way to "being so badly traumatized you're borderline psychotic." But the point is-- all of these are understandable, human motivations, held by understandable humans.**
That doesn't mean rape is excusable. Rape is wrong, and I believe that people have the ability and the responsibility to choose their actions. Even someone borderline psychotic can come to understand what s/he is doing and stop-- it may require a lot of therapy to change, but it can be done. And I believe that person has a moral responsibility to do the work necessary to make that change.
But what it does mean is that we need to stop assuming we know what a rapist looks like. And we need to stop assuming it's an all-or-nothing, "you did this, so you're automatically purely evil!" thing. I see a parallel set of behaviors in discussions of race-- people assume that the phrase "your behavior shows that you have some underlying racist beliefs you might want to think about," is equivalent to, "you're a card-carrying member of the KKK who wants to bring back slavery and castrate everyone non-white!"
Your friend who raped someone is the same person s/he was before you knew about the rape. S/he still has the traits you liked. And s/he may feel guilty about the rape, or be carrying some old pain of his/her own-- or s/he might not have thought about it very much at all. And in any of these cases, s/he is both a) the cause of tremendous pain in someone else, and b) still the same person.
As his/her friend, you don't have to ostracize him/her or excuse him/her. Treat it like you would something else s/he did which deeply upset you-- yell at him/her, urge him/her to rethink the beliefs that led to the rape (with a therapist if that would be helpful). Break off the relationship if that feels to you like the right thing to do.
But if you value that person's friendship too much to let go of, fine, keep it-- with the awareness you now have of what your friend is capable of. Stay aware of all the complexity of the situation. Don't assume that you have to ignore everything you know and love about him/her because you now also know that s/he is dangerous. Don't ignore the fact that s/he is dangerous just because you love him/her. Take precautions when you're with him/her, and let others know when they might be in danger from him/her.***
It would be nice to believe that all evil is done by people we don't know. It's not. Reality is much more painful and complex than that, and we get in trouble when we demand it be simple.
--R
*VERY IMPORTANT PSA: Trauma theory says: our response to terror is not just fight-or-flight; it's fight-or-flight-or-freeze. When we're both terrified and trapped and out-matched, we tend to shut down, go limp, and "play possum," in the unconscious hope that this will get us hurt less.
In some cases, we're completely right.
In other cases, freezing means that a person is not able to say "no, stop" even when s/he wants nothing more than for what's going on to stop happening.
And to make it worse, a person who has already been raped or otherwise traumatized is likely to have triggers: stimuli of all kinds which forcibly remind him/her of the past trauma, and throw him/her back into the same panic s/he felt during the original assault. Triggers can be things both obviously connected to a trauma (being grabbed from behind) and less-obvious (the shade of yellow the attacker was wearing; the smell of lilacs that were in the air during the battle, etc).
Therefore, the fact that someone has gone perfectly still and is not resisting DOES NOT MEAN that s/he is okay with what's happening. If you are doing something even vaguely possibly boundary-crossing, and the other person isn't saying anything or moving, STOP. And don't continue until the person has given you an emphatic assent, using complete sentences and facial expressions and preferably humor or another indication of being really entirely present.
**I believe that this conflation of rapists with evil outsider also explains a lot about why people's attempts to prevent child molestation are so damn ineffective. People spend tremendous effort in keeping convicted sex offenders away from children, when a very high percentage of children are assaulted by someone they know (friend, family member, etc.) I think we'd be much more effective by teaching children that they have the right to control their bodies no matter who asks them to do something uncomfortable, and listening to them and taking them seriously when they tell us how they feel, than by any amount of "Stranger Danger!" lessons.
***If more people were willing to accept that "this person can be dangerous" is not exactly equivalent to "this person is ultimate evil and should be hung from a bridge," I would strongly advise publicly announcing the names of people who have raped. As it is... it remains one of those problematic questions with no clear right answer.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 06:19 pm (UTC)Which is strange, that. But yes. This is one reason I dislike men and either freeze up around them or get very angry. They all have the possibility of getting angry and doing something to you. Everyone of them. Because they're bigger than you are and love to hold power.
In contrast I've met many back alley\homeless people and have only had one pair be slightly creepy. So they would be less likely to freak me out. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 10:48 pm (UTC)(And oh dear, I definitely didn't mean to imply in my example of The Rapist that actual homeless people were actually like that. He's a fictional archetype.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 01:08 am (UTC)They all have the possibility of getting angry and doing something to you. Everyone of them. Because they're bigger than you are and love to hold power.
While I agree with the fact that men have the capability of doing all these things, I disagree that these qualities are only attributable to men:
- All people have the possibility of getting angry and/or doing something to you.
- Many men are larger than me. I'm short. But many men are not larger than me, and physical size *alone* should generally not be a reason to be afraid of anyone.
- Speaking as a woman who loves to hold power, I think it's somewhat strange to say "men love to hold power" without also acknowledging that people in general love to hold power.
I think that it's easier for women to assume that all men are potential rapists, both because of statistics showing that men are actually more likely than women to rape, and because of the way that the conversation around rape in general American culture tends to sidetrack instances of rape that don't fit that mold of "cissexual heterosexual woman being raped by cissexual heterosexual man," but I am not entirely convinced that because it's *easier* for women to assume that all men are potential rapists that women *should* assume that all men are *likely* potential rapists just because they have that potential. That's a large step, and a lot of fear to carry around on a day-to-day basis.
Also, I am wondering what your statement of "I have to disagree" is actually disagreeing with in particular. Gaudior made a lot of points, and I am not sure which one(s) in particular you are referring to. Please clarify?
The Rapist that actual homeless people were actually like that
Yes...in fact, aren't actualy homeless people pretty likely to be raped?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 08:39 am (UTC)Everyone of them. Because they're bigger than you are and love to hold power.
I find your comments very prejudiced, very one dimensional, not accurate and really somewhat disturbing. Perhaps you feel that they are all bigger than you and love to hold power and want to hold that power over you, and I am sorry if that is so. I acknowledge that there is much violence, sexual or otherwise in this world, and that much or most of it is perpetrated by men, but you dislike all men because some men are rapists? You get mad at men because some men are rapists? That is some extreme bigotry you have there.
I don't expect anything I've said to change your opinions, but I'm uncomfortable not saying anything in the face of such things.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 02:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 04:42 pm (UTC)I wanted to comment on this, because this is something I resonate with, too.
I explained it to my lover like this: I have an underlying thread of fear of him in our relationship. This IS because he is bigger and stronger than me. Thus, I am aware that, should he ever lose his senses and morals, should he ever lose restraint (which, yes, is something he seems more likely to do when very angry), he can beat me. He can kill me.
(If anyone is being tempted right now to mention self-defense, just remember that all those techniques are available to him to learn, too, and to my knowledge there is no advantage (knowledge, weapon, or biological enhancement) I could gain that he couldn't also. And thus it comes back to the one advantage nature gave him that it didn't give me- a bigger, stronger frame and muscles.)
Now, obviously, I don't think he's likely to do those things, or I wouldn't be with him. But I am aware that it is his reason that prevents him, not a lack of ability. And further, that I am protected not through my own abilities or power, but through his (power of reason and restraint).
And while it is true that there are women who are stronger than me, and men who are weaker than me, I don't think it's a stretch to say that most men are stronger than most women, and that that is just an inequality that nature gave us to deal with.
Which is basically how I'm dealing with it. I don't think this difference is fair, or can be resolved. But it's life.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 11:15 pm (UTC)Which is basically how I'm dealing with it. I don't think this difference is fair, or can be resolved. But it's life.
I agree with this.
Though I gotta say, I think we'd be less worried about the fact that male partners are stronger if we didn't also have a culture that glorifies male violence and female helplessness. But it is a bit chicken-eggy.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 06:41 pm (UTC)If I learned someone I knew had robbed someone or deliberately abused a child or set off a bomb in a public place, I have no problem saying that's not okay -- that isn't someone I can talk to or respect or consider a friend. To me, committing rape falls in the category of "not okay."
I am usually strongly in favor of reason and moderation and civility in discourse and acknowledging the valid feelings of one's opponent. When I think about rape, I become filled with red-hot fury and the desire to KILL. Rape is more offensive than other physical attacks, because it implies a kind of ownership. And it's part of a system whereby society punishes those (usually but not always women) who get "uppity" or are perceived as transgressing their proper roles.
When I hear a story of rape or attempted rape, I want to kill the person who did it. Partly because I feel incompetent to help the survivor emotionally, so I'd really like to have something concrete to do. (If the survivor expressed a sudden need for a thousand pieces of wood to be stacked in neat piles of ten, that would be almost as satisfactory.) Partly because I have a strong emotional reaction of "you do not do that to my friends." Partly because I think there really are things that place the perpetrator outside the bounds of human society. Partly because every once in a while I realize in just how many ways the ingrained assumption that all men are potentially dangerous affects my life, and I get really sick of it.
Disclaimer: I have lived a sheltered life. No one has ever tried to rape me or physically hurt me.
Pardon me while I go look for my rationality. I may be back to the discussion later if I can find it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 11:24 pm (UTC)How is it now?
Hmm; lots to think about.
Date: 2009-08-19 01:35 am (UTC)Hm.
So, I too likely wouldn't respect that person, and wouldn't consider them a friend. I would also definitely say that rape is "not ok." But I don't know if committing an act that is definitely horrible and deserving of censure would cause me to stop caring about them or trying to love them anyway despite their horrible acts.
I also don't know if I would stop talking to them (I might, and have in cases in the past), because one of the ways that I try to show people that I love them despite the fact that they have done horrible things is by talking to them. I might talk to them in order to get them to come to the self-realization that they have done a horrible thing, or to help them repair their life so that they can be less prone to doing horrible things in the future. Even if the person isn't listening to me, sometimes I talk to them anyway, so that there is a bridge of words that they can cross when they realize that they did a horrible thing, and realize that they are obligated to apologize for it--I think part of my duty as a friend to someone who may have done horrible things is to express my disapproval of the thing, but sometimes to also be there to express my forgiveness of them when/if they start to understand that what they did is wrong.
I think this is getting deeper into the distinctions which we were talking a little bit about at brunch on Saturday, the distinctions between what I understand as "forgiveness" and people taking responsibility and just punishment for their own actions.
I am usually strongly in favor of reason and moderation and civility in discourse and acknowledging the valid feelings of one's opponent. When I think about rape, I become filled with red-hot fury and the desire to KILL.
I think that is understandable. It is good to be able to have feelings of anger especially when justified by horrible crimes. However, I think that it is a reaction that needs to be tempered with the understanding that rapists, while they have done a horrible thing, are still people, if damaged and broken ones...and the wish to kill does not really lend itself to productive discourse that gets at the root of the issue, any more than the wish to do any other horrible action might (which, I assume, is why you absented yourself from the discussion to calm down).
Recently, I have been reading a lot of books about subjects that I need to educate myself about and think about. That has taught me a useful thing: anger can be a really good motivator for change, and is sometimes the only thing that is forceful enough to make people sit up and notice a legitimite greviance.
I think that part of the anger issue here is that some of the conversation about rape, regarding power, has already taken place, on people's bodies, and without a sense of civility/moderation, without consent.
Partly because I feel incompetent to help the survivor emotionally, so I'd really like to have something concrete to do.
I think that if you have not read Rax's original post you might want to; she commented in the original about a friend who was having reactions similar to your own and her feelings about it, and I commented there on "how can people who have not been raped contribute to a discussion about rape in a way that is constructive, and not only about statistics, or about expressing sympathy for the victims of a horrible crime?"
Re: Hmm; lots to think about.
Date: 2009-08-19 04:10 pm (UTC)This, yes. I think it's really important to remember that everybody has the ability and, at some times, the desire, to commit evil. And it's true that some things are so bad that forgiveness requires a huge amount of work and making amends on the part of the person who did them-- and it might make a sense to set a limit and say "this amount of evil is more than I will accept in a friend." And it also makes sense to stop being friends with someone if you feel unsafe around them, and just knowing their potential for threat makes you feel ill-at-ease.
But I agree with
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 07:22 pm (UTC)The problem is that this conflicts with like, everything else we tell them.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 01:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 02:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 04:19 pm (UTC)I read an lj comment once in which the commenter said she always made a point, while playing with her son, of stopping when he said stop. Even in the sort of tickling games where part of the game is often the ticklee shouting "No!" and being ignored-- she didn't ignore him. She stopped. Because she wanted him to learn that no means no, and he had the right to control his body.
I'm not sure how this ties in with things like brushing hair, getting vaccinations, and other things that I really didn't want to have happen as a child, but it's a good thing I was forced into.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 06:21 am (UTC)Adults routinely pick up kids, drag them, spank them, ruffle them, groom them, and shove them. They herd them into small spaces and determine what they eat and wear and where they live and what possessions they can have. Everything is--wow, there's a cat hitting and snapping her teeth at her kitten on my windowsill right now--that is kind of hilarious. All the signs in a kid's life point to a general lack of the right to control one's own body and actions. It's like being some weird mixture of a pet and an indentured servant. Your owners may decide to let you run wild and break all the furniture, but it's their choice, not yours. They may decide to treat you like a rational human being and give you choices about how you live your life, but nobody is going to stop them if they want to forbid you to do what you love most or put you on a diet or lock you in your room if you argue with them. Other adults may decide your parents aren't treating you right and take you away, but then you're the property of a bunch of adults instead of one or two.
I'm not trying to say that children have no power, or that this is an entirely bad state of affairs, but it does sound pretty ridiculous when an adult tells a kid, "It's your body and you get to control what happens to it and no one should ever touch you in a way you don't like," right before dragging them off to the doctor to get stripped and prodded and lectured.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-21 08:40 pm (UTC)But I think it is possible-- in no small part because I think I did it. I know that when I was a child, there was at least one incident (I realized, looking back in hindsight) where I prevented a much older boy from either molesting me or at least putting me in a very uncomfortable situation-- because I felt ill-at-ease with what he was asking, and I knew I had the right to say no. That it wasn't okay for him to make me do something I wasn't okay with.
I wish I could remember how my mom approached things like baths (to which I was opposed on principle) and doctor's appointments. Certainly, reasoning with me and explaining why it was important and in my best interests to do the thing was a part of it. Also, there was a story in my family of a meddling great-aunt telling my (thin, short and with little appetite) mother, then about six, to eat more. My mother was polite at first, but when the great-aunt insisted, my mother responded with, "You're not my mommy and you're not my daddy and you can't tell me what to do!" And, most importantly, a) my grandmother backed her up, even as she told her to be polite about it, and b) my family then proceeded to tell the story for years, and for generations, thus teaching me that this was appropriate. That I had the perfect right to assert myself and my chain of command.
It wouldn't help kids for whom their parents are the abusers. And yes, it certainly did get me seen as a trouble-maker by various teachers and other adults. But then, being trouble-makers was part of the family culture... and I think in the long run, it was definitely worth it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-23 06:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-23 09:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 07:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 10:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 11:06 pm (UTC)But I am saying that there are degrees of rape. Some are worse than others. Some, while still bad, are such that we can understand how a reasonable, well-meaning person might have committed them, and even sympathize with the genuine surprise and remorse they might feel upon realizing the implications of what they've done. And others are so monstrous that we really can't feel any sympathy whatsoever for any person who could commit such a terrible deed. Can we agree on that much?
I agree that all rapes are bad; even the ones that don't involve violence or threat thereof, and the ones where the rapee wasn't clear about their desires, and the ones that for any other reason might cause some people to question whether the facts add up to rape.
My point is that treating all rapes as if they were equally bad can be counterproductive. I see a lot of writing that seems to do just that, and I think it both confuses the issue, and provokes defensiveness that can lead people to take all rape less seriously than we ought to.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 11:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 11:57 pm (UTC)There are lots of things about which I think, in principle, something should be done, but aren't important enough to me personally to go out of my way to do them or even to feel guilt about not doing them. There are other things that I think are important enough to justify my actually getting involved.
Now that I say it that way, it occurs to me that someone might therefore want to persuade me to treat their entire issue as all being in the latter category of importance, even if they need to present me with biased information in order to get me to do so. The problem is that if I notice someone doing that, it makes me treat the whole issue as less important, if only because I don't feel like I can get believable information. (I'm pretty much figuring this out as I write it, by the way.)
I often feel as if anti-rape advocates are intentionally presenting me with biased, or at least carefully framed, information, in order to manipulate me into caring enough to act. One example of this is the unqualified use of the word "rape." I realize it may not be intentional; I realize it may be the truth as they see it; I realize that it may be the truth as it really is - but I feel like there's an attempt to manipulate me. And that makes me want to discount the whole thing, even though I know that even if there is an attempt to manipulate me, that doesn't mean the cause isn't actually valid on it's own merits.
Also, I'm not quite sure what they're trying to manipulate me into caring enough to do. It occurs to me that that also makes me uncomfortable - the call to action, without any action to be called to. When I try to figure it what they're trying to call me to, the only thing I can come up with is that they're trying to manipulate me into not raping anybody. And seeing as not raping anybody, by any definition except those that deny the very possibility of consensual sex, has been among my goals all along, the implied accusation (a) that I might do it, and (b) that I might be so intent on doing it that I need to be manipulated into not doing it, I find quite frankly insulting. Insulted is better than raped, certainly, but it certainly doesn't incline me positively toward the anti-rape campaign.
And I think that finally brings me back to what I was feeling when I wrote my comment:
I'm against rape, in any form. I think I'm in agreement with most anti-rape advocates about most of their ultimate goals. And I find that most of the anti-rape rhetoric I encounter makes me feel less supportive of that cause, not more. Since I actually am in support of that cause, I want it to be more effective, and so rather than just writing them off, I'm making an attempt - admittedly a casual, poorly-directed, and perhaps insufficiently thought-out one - to suggest how it might be more effective.
(Apparently I'm also enjoying exploring the mental territory. This was originally going to be two-sentence comment, honest. But I wouldn't bother to engage with it if I didn't care about the topic.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 10:54 am (UTC)There's definitely an attempt to reframe the conversation from a framework that I at least consider harmful. I guess I can see how that comes across as manipulation. On the other hand, I think it's important that survivors get to set our own definitions in certain conversations. Were I trying to convince people of a certain policy change, I would be more willing to shift my approach to one I was less comfortable with. I think this comes back to the thread about what kind of conversation are we having?
And seeing as not raping anybody, by any definition except those that deny the very possibility of consensual sex, has been among my goals all along, the implied accusation (a) that I might do it, and (b) that I might be so intent on doing it that I need to be manipulated into not doing it, I find quite frankly insulting
This is a legitimate problem, but one that I don't know how to fix.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 12:00 pm (UTC)In certain conversations, yes, I agree. If we're talking about a particular individual's experience, and that person feels raped, then that's a fact that deserves recognition independent of the details of what actually happened, and it's certainly not the time to say, "well, actually that isn't really rape," even if you honestly believe that.
On the other hand, if we're talking about the social problem of rape, and how important it is, and what we can/should/must do to address it, then we need to define what it is we're talking about in an objective way. We need a definition that lets us all agree on what problem we're discussing, even if that means that there are some debatable cases that we're deciding not to deal with for the moment, for the sake of dealing more effectively with the majority of cases where there isn't any real ambiguity.
I think this comes back to the thread about what kind of conversation are we having?
Agreed. (I just read your post, but not the comments on it. I might do that later.)
This is a legitimate problem, but one that I don't know how to fix.
I don't know how to fix it either, but I appreciate the recognition of the problem.
I also recognize that the solution that gets me more sympathetic to the cause isn't necessarily the same solution that gets other people whose current attitude is more in need of adjustment, and so it might be that it's worth annoying me some in order to be effective with others.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-21 09:06 pm (UTC)One problem I have with this statement is that what a rape looks like on the outside may have very little to do with its actual effects. PTSD is a tricky bugger, which has to do with a zillion factors beyond the objective events that occurred during the initial trauma. There are people who are raped and beaten at gunpoint who end up being much less emotionally devastated than people who are violated in ways you might consider less severe. The damage done is very much about the meaning which both rapist and survivor bring to the situation. And since I think you'd agree that the results matter most, it's a bad idea to focus solely on an outsider's view of what is going on in the initial incident.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-21 10:47 pm (UTC)What I meant by "objective" isn't that it shouldn't take into account the feelings of the people involved in any particular case, because they are relevant to defining the act. But the feelings of any particular person discussing a case, or discussing rape in the abstract, should be set aside for that discussion. You and I can (or at least, should do our best to) objectively discuss the subjective feelings of the people involved a hypothetical or a specific sexual situation, without letting our emotional investment in other events that have happened to us or to people we know subvert our ability to think rationally about the very strong and important feelings of someone else.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-22 02:20 pm (UTC)This is way easier to say from your side of the aisle, I'm just saying. Where demanding objectivity silences the people with the most at stake --- those who have been emotionally traumatized --- maybe there's a problem with the way we're framing the conversation.
(That said, I don't think letting emotions rule is necessarily right either; this is another one of those things where I see two options and don't like either and am still trying to break out of the two-option mindset to find something better.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-22 03:26 pm (UTC)I also don't want to let those who have been emotionally traumatized generalize their own personal trauma to other incidents that may not be anything like their own.
I acknowledge that a person who has been raped has insight into what that's like that I lack, and that's valuable in considering how to handle the problem in the general case - but not all situations are exactly like that one, and it may take someone with a more objective viewpoint to see that clearly.
In other words, I think that in thinking about rape in the abstract it's important to incorporate subjective perspectives from people emotionally involved from their own personal experiences as survivors, AND objective perspectives from people not emotionally invested one way or another. Subjective perspectives from people accused of rape should probably also be considered, though I'm not sure what if any impact they should have. It's unlikely that any one individual has all the necessary perspectives, on any issue but particularly one as emotionally charged as rape, and that's why it's so important that decisions be made by a group of people representing a variety of perspectives, speaking calmly about extreme emotions, to make rational decisions about how to handle traumatically emotional situations in a way that respects both the trauma of the victim and justice toward the accused.
Believe me, I acknowledge that that's hard!
(I also acknowledge that I've lost track of the thread of this discussion, so my apologies if I've strayed from the point.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-23 09:37 pm (UTC)*power
*pain
*the unpredictability and chaotic nature of life
*sex
*evil
*relationships.
Those are things that matter to us really deeply, and we have feelings about them. I think a conversation in which we notice and acknowledge our feelings, as well as the feelings of others, as well as the objective facts, as well as the theory, is worthwhile. I think that any conversation that tries to exclude or ignore those will founder.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-21 09:01 pm (UTC)I feel that the question is very much what
However, that doesn't mean that action cannot be taken to prevent the latter kind of rape-- it just means that different actions will be more effective. These actions include things like telling people (your friends, your kids, your students, your clients if you do end up being a therapist) that you strongly disagree with the ideas that a woman "owes" a man sex, that having sex with lots of women (whether they want it or not) proves their masculinity, that men have a "right" to sex, that once you're aroused it's impossible to control yourself, etc., etc., etc. There are a ton of beliefs out there which boil down to: rape is one of the inevitable byproducts of the nature of men and women. You (as a straight white man, and therefore a person who is more often listened to) have a lot of power to challenge those beliefs when you hear them around you. And every challenge makes someone's rape slightly less likely.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 03:03 am (UTC)I do not think that the motivations of the perpetrator make much of a difference in the trauma and emotionality of the victim. I do think that the level of physical and/or psychological violence involved in the crime and the previous experiences of the victim do make a huge difference in their trauma response. I could go on and explain this in further detail if anyone is interested.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-22 01:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 05:08 pm (UTC)One more quick note- this sort of rape is why I have heard many feminists and anti-rape advocates say that the culture of consent needs to change. Instead of the reasoning being something like "it isn't rape unless someone says 'no'," it should be more like "it IS rape unless both parties enthusiastically say "yes!"
And sex should be good enough that we can say "yes! yes! yes!" to it. And as for the sex that isn't that good, well, I personally feel we'll all survive with a lot less of it.
PS- Google "Enthusiastic Consent" to learn more about this idea. I am linking one article I found really quickly about it below
http://womensrights.suite101.com/article.cfm/using_enthusiastic_consent_to_fight_rape_culture
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 05:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-22 01:15 pm (UTC)I think that trying to make the platform consistent across conversations when those conversations have very different purposes would be counter-productive.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 04:56 pm (UTC)Just a head's up, this sort of wording is often used by "Men's Rights Activists" who want us to feel bad for how hard their lives are, because a woman at any point can just decide she doesn't like him, or what happened with him, and accuse him or rape, and ruin her life.
Aww, teh poor mens. < /sarcasm>
Anyway, not having been raped myself, but having someone close in my life who was, and having read much discourse on the subject, it is my understanding that even saying to ones' self "I was raped" is very emotionally difficult, and that, as you say, "rape" is such an emotionally charged word, that I personally am having a hard time believing that anyone would decide the morning after that it was a bad idea to consent to sex the previous night, and that therefore it was rape. (Deciding the morning after that you were really in no position to give consent, or wondering if you really indeed did give consent are a different and less clear area for me, but I wouldn't put those in the category of deciding that it was a bad idea.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 05:27 pm (UTC)And, to be clear, I'm not blaming the anti-rape movement (is there a better phrase for that) for peoples' unwillingness to take them seriously. But that doesn't mean they couldn't do things that would make it harder not to take them seriously.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 11:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 11:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 02:10 am (UTC)He was a tall boy with what gets called an athletic build, though he was not an athlete. His hair was light brown, a bit wavy, long enough to ruffle and not long enough to do something as avant-garde as pull back into a ponytail. He wore jeans and t-shirts, jeans and polo shirts, just like any ordinary high school student. He was active in his school's drama club, playing a minor role in the Threepenny Opera that year, with his hair spray-dyed grey and, perhaps, one speaking line. He played Ultima games on a computer with a monitor that only had green as a colour. He listened to Peter Gabriel, and lent me all the Wild Cards books that had been, at that point, released, one at a time, in order.
He met me through a friend of his, someone I shared a classroom with sixth period, and may not have known that I was technically not old enough to be in high school at all, let alone not a junior like the others in that class. He was the first boy who was kind to me, who treated me like a person who might be attractive, rather than an object to ignore, a nonentity, a target for bullying, or the unobjectionable but not charming one-of-the-guys. He said that I was beautiful, though I did not believe him, me at awkward, gangly, barely-fourteen, barely-adolescent.
After he let me go, after I fled to the bathroom and emerged, he was sitting on the couch he had pinned me to when he was trying to pry off my clothes, looking at the wall, his head resting on his hand, looking stricken and depressed, and even in my still-increasing dissociation I thought that he realised then what he had done and was ashamed or guilty about it. He never said, I never asked. But he had never asked me anything, asked if I wanted to be sexual, checked to make sure I was all right. Asking was not a thing we knew how to do, me barely more than a child, him ... I suppose he was old enough to know better, but nobody teaches such things.
Everyone else, everyone I told the story to, has always been more furious with him than I have ever been able to be. Because he was such a nice, ordinary boy. Much better than many of the others I had known.
I wonder sometimes if - now that this is half a lifetime or more away for both of us - he ever remembers the girl he nearly raped. If he has any understanding of what he left me with. I like to think that he hopes that I'm all right, that I recovered from the trauma I'm sure he saw. That would mean that he really was a nice, ordinary boy who made a horrible mistake.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 11:21 pm (UTC)Because what happened to you is awful... and also, very complicated. And I think that any discussion of it that leaves out that complicatedness is going to mean that people aren't really understanding what you mean when you talk about it. And that's also got to kind of suck.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-19 11:33 pm (UTC)And that particular layer, the one in which he was this ordinary arty geekboy, it's not one I've dealt with often lately, because I've been trying and trying to convince myself that it wasn't my fault. And it's ... hard for me to do that and keep any level of focus on the layer in which he was an ordinary, arty geekboy who didn't mean any harm but happened to be an idiot. (Because as I mentioned at Rax's place I've internalised a lot of the blame-the-victim shit.)
So it's hard for me to hold in my head that he did something awful to me and that he was anything other than ... an event that happened to me, I guess ... at the same time.
And other people are more likely to see him as a monster than I can, because once upon a time I almost knew him.
So. Damn. Complicated.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-23 09:41 pm (UTC)Truly madly deeply yeah.
And I suspect that it's okay for you to not be trying to live on all the layers at once, if that makes sense. Like, if you're intellectually aware of the layer in which he's just this "ordinary arty geekboy," it's fine if what you're feeling is more on the anger/understanding it's not your fault level. You can go back and forth between them. I think we have to do that, in order to make sense of things like this.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 12:26 pm (UTC)Not disagreeing with anything you've said, but adding a thought.
You say, "We have a mental image of a rapist."
I add, we also have a mental image of a rape. For most of us, it probably involves physical force being intentionally used to overcome or deter some degree of expected objection.
And that mental image of a rape is just as unlikely to match any particular event called a rape as is our mental image of the rapist.
This has at least two problems:
First, our friend who committed a rape probably didn't do that. He might have genuinely believed that she was willing or even eager. He might not have realized his behavior was taken as threatening. She might not have realized his reasons for not wanting sex right now weren't going to be overcome by seeing her tits. None of this means the act was in any way okay, but it does mean your friend didn't have to be a monster to commit it. (And yes, it's also possible that they actually did do that.)
Second, much like in the race discussion, when you accuse someone of rape, the listener tends to assume you're accusing them of the stereotypical rape. Feeling confident that no one they could call a friend could actually do that, they reject the accusation entirely, rather than considering what actions might have actually occurred that are being described as rape. I wish we had a common vocabulary that allowed us to distinguish some gradations of rape, between "intentional rape by threat of force" and "unintentionally compelling someone into sex who didn't genuinely want it," but we don't. And "rape" is such an emotionally charged word that people react very strongly to it, typically assuming the worst possible interpretation... and some people intentionally take advantage of that, clouding the facts of any particular case even further.
Tangentially, the second problem also colors my interpretation of virtually all rape statistics. For example, I often see statistics saying that some percentage of women in such-and-such a category have been raped, and I don't know how to understand that. You could be lumping together everything from "overcome by violence while screaming" to "realized the morning after that it was a bad idea," with most of them closer to the latter end, in which case it's a problem and I feel bad for them, but I don't feel like major social action is necessarily called for as a result. Or you could actually be saying that, yes, they were all threatened with violence after clearly saying no, to the point that they were unable or unwilling to resist, in which case I'm prepared to be both surprised, and convinced that some sort of action is really necessary.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-21 08:43 pm (UTC)I agree with this wholeheartedly, and think that it is a substantial part of the problem and a reason behind people saying, "no, he would never do something 'like that'".
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