What is Rape Culture?

[jimhines]

Last night, I posted the following on Facebook and Tumblr:

It’s not that Ken Hoinsky ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund his book, “A Guide to Getting Awesome with Women,” filled with advice for aspiring rapists, like “Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant.”

It’s that 732 people backed his project on

Comments

[la_marquise_de_]

Applauds. Thank you.

[teaberryblue]

Right. The biggest problem, and the thing most decent men don't understand is that, while they're making sexist jokes that they think are jokes about sexism (or rape, or domestic abuse) because they'd never do that themselves, there is that one guy in their friend group who is seeing it as support for his actual beliefs and behavior. Most men would never beat a woman or rape a woman, but when they say things that are precipitated by the assumption that none of the men they are saying them to would do it, either, they're in effect telling that one man who has or will rape a woman that his friends agree that it's okay

[lietya]

...Wow. And of course the unspoken assumption behind your third friend's reaction is that "not being alone in a room with him" is ruining that other guy's life. Because assuming that men have a *right* to a woman's undivided, private attention isn't creepy at all.

"Men telling women to be careful actually pisses me the hell off, because most men do not know what it means to live their entire lives having to be more careful than they would like to be."

Thank you for concisely expressing something I've been trying to explain for ages (to myself, about why I get so pissed off by that one).

[teaberryblue]

Yeah, it's like the rape culture version of tech support asking if your cable box is plugged in when you've already told them you can read the digital display.

[lietya]

Good analogy! Not that men painstakingly explaining things to women when the woman is an expert doesn't have a long and storied (and nicknamed) history. ;) But this is exponentially more egregious.

[temporus]

I suspect when people accuse you of having a distorted view, Jim, what they really mean is: "I'm afraid you actually know what you're talking about, with a lot more facts and information to back up your assertions. So I'm going to try to distract the conversation and accuse you of stuff you never argued, so that I can feel superior and/or have the conversation I want instead of dealing with the serious, important topic you're trying to shine a light on so that people can maybe make better future decisions on how to behave."

Or something like that.

[jimhines]

I think it depends. In some cases, especially for men, it's easy to simply not see the problem. Which means when you finally run into someone talking about how prevalent it really is, there's a big old cognitive dissonance reality-crack that the brain has to struggle to reconcile. I don't think it's always intentional derailment.

[temporus]

I don't think its always intentional. And I get the cognitive dissonance. I've been there. And to be honest, it's far easier to see news reports of the horrors happening in some far off country. Where there's war, and you hear of local bands of armed "revolutionaries" going through a small village on some other continent, and raping all the women at gunpoint who are of a different ethnicity/tribe from them as a punishment, and think to yourself: well *THAT's* a rape culture for sure. So if I'm not out there doing that, I'm not in a rape culture

[cissa]

I know my husband was baffled at why I was scared to stop at the grocery store after teaching an evening class (so it'd be dark, and I'd get there at maybe 10+ pm). HE wasn't scared to go into a deserted parking lot in the dark! And I said yeah, that's the difference between being male and female.

[redbird]

I have seen a few claims that all men are rapists. The claims have come from men, who do not say "all men except me," and who are arguing that because secretly all men are rapists, we're wasting our time trying to stop or punish rape.

The last time I saw this claim, I note, it was from Scott Adams, whose usual response when called on anything he says is "ha, gotcha! I was just trying to get a reaction! My fans know better than to believe a word I say." I would like to believe that the man who thinks that "I'm just trolling you" is a defense isn't really waiting for his next chance to commit rape, and that we should somehow believe "I didn't mean it" rather than the original statement. Though "I'm not a rapist, I just like seeing people upset, and it's worth making lots of women more nervous" isn't a description of behavior, or a person, I want to be anywhere near.

[jimhines]

Ugh. Scott Adams fell off of my list of folks to read a few years back for similar remarks.

[mtlawson]

I think you described the vast majority of Reddit right there.

[mcjulie]

I have seen a few claims that all men are rapists. The claims have come from men, who do not say "all men except me," and who are arguing that because secretly all men are rapists, we're wasting our time trying to stop or punish rape.

That view strikes me as almost the textbook definition of rape culture -- that rape is not a crime committed by someone who chose to do something they knew was wrong, but is, rather, an inevitable fact of nature, like thunderstorms, and it's my job to get out of the rain.

[6_penny]

See the current news photo's of Nigella Lawson's husband choking her at a restaurant table as an illustration of a culture that is tolerant of violence towards women. No one at that restaurant - including the photographer- called the cops!
Her husband calls it a 'playful tiff'!