in the minority of the decent
After McLaughlin Group this morning was a show running a story about U.S. soldiers in the military raping other U.S. soldiers. After some initial statistics that were woefully unsurprising and some first-hand accounts, came a particular story of a soldier assaulted by a man she had probably called a friend. After all, they played sports together
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It's silencing an unacceptably harmful opinion. It's suppressing an infectious disease. You are speaking to everyone who ever hears or reads your words, wherever spoken or written. Some of those people may have been victims, and some may become victims in the future, and some may interact with victims, or interact with someone who will interact with a victim. However many carriers it passes through, the virus eventually reaches a victim, and there it causes nothing but hurt. Months later, years later, decades later, they're still hearing, "It's your fault." So they blame themselves. They hate themselves. Some, doubtlessly, even kill themselves.
But there are the few who supposedly avoid being victims by taking this hateful "should have known better" rhetoric to heart in time to restrict themselves from going to certain places, interacting with certain people, doing certain things, etc., etc., before it gets them in trouble. Meanwhile, they must watch as their male friends do all these same things with complete impunity. And they may be able to recall the times when they fearlessly - unaware of the danger - did these things themselves, and how much fun it had been. And they may miss it; their happiness suffering from the boundaries they've had to place on themselves. All because modern western society - in spite of its proclaimed love for liberty and equality - isn't interested in making these things safe for more than one half of the species. No women are "saved" by victim-blaming rhetoric; they are only controlled. Somewhere out there is at least one girl with misty-eyed dreams of becoming a soldier - a defender of her people - who saw this TV program and tearfully, perhaps after days of miserable inner-conflict, chose to abandon her dreams and persue something else instead. Or maybe she just had a friend at a nearby army base who told her from personal experience that it wasn't safe for a woman to be among her own country's sanctioned defenders. Neither scenario is a triumph of informed decision making. They are only a despicable tragedy; the noble dreams of a completely faultless person shattered by nothing more than her society's callous indifference.
And your words affect men, as well. You, and the choir you're part of, are saying that just because they are men you expect all of them to be capable of committing rape. This sentiment fits seemlessly into - and even echoes portions of - the continuum of impulsive, sub-human, "caveman" behavior expected of men as part of the male ideal - what "a man" supposedly is and, somehow, should be; strengths and weaknesses both. How many men think it is entirely natural and, moreover, reasonable for them, as men, to have an increasingly hard time "controlling themselves" exponentially proportional to the amount of temptation - deliberate or otherwise - supposedly presented to them by a woman (or women)? And believe, with complete sincerity, that this should at least partially excuse them for any harmful actions they take while under the "influence" of a woman's body (distinctly not the woman herself)? And then how many men do away with the self-deception entirely and openly embrace a predatory vision of man, seeing women as "conquests" and having no concern for their well-being, in fact believing - subconsciously or otherwise - that it is the nature of man, and sex, to always do women harm, and even part of the appeal: getting women to do what they don't want.
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