Long time readers of Feminist Critics: You know the drill, you can skip reading this.
For those of you who are somewhat new, however: The issues of rape and sexual consent are a very important part of discussions about gender. However, they are so important that discussions about other topics can be (and often are) derailed by a casual mention of rape. I’ve seen it happen here repeatedly.
To avoid having a majority of our discussions getting sidetracked onto the question of sexual consent, we have a policy that rape should only be discussed in threads specifically devoted to the topic. 1This means that other ‘open threads’ are not to be used for raising the topic of rape. For that reason, I will periodically create “Consent Threads” which function as a kind of ‘open thread’ for comments about rape-related issues, and a catch-all where such comments that have been made elsewhere can be moved.
I want to emphasize that having a comment moved to one of these threads is not in any way either a criticism or endorsement of the content of that comment. We have lots of thoughtful commenters here who make important observations about this topic, and their thoughts deserve to be read. I just want to make sure our other discussions aren’t repeatedly transformed into discussions about this issue.
This comment thread is a “NoH” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. There is no “Regular Parallel” version of this thread.
| ⇡1 | This means that other ‘open threads’ are not to be used for raising the topic of rape. |
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Also, everyone is talking about the Jian Ghomeshi trial (it’s in Canada) and how the credibility of his alleged victims is questionable at best. Two of the alleged victims might have conspired together, as well.
You got half the press who says “see, the alleged victims fall apart”, and the other half who says “we got to kill due process to make it easier to go to trial and not be counter-examined, or women won’t want to go testify” (yes, they ALL presume ONLY women are victims).
(This comment, and the next, moved from the January 2016 (cold) open thread. — Daran)
This is also interesting
http://scienceblogs.de/geograffitico/wp-content/blogs.dir/70/files/2012/07/i-e76e350f9e3d50b6ce07403e0a3d35fe-Stemple_60-HLJ-605.pdf
On making male victims of rape invisible.
Interesting link, Schala, though a bit long for a casual read. I’d be curious if you found anything specific in that Lara Stemple article that you thought worth highlighting.
The Ghomeshi trial is a bit of a trainwreck; I honestly don’t know what to make of it.
It either used pre-2010 CDC data, or took the heading as the entirety of male rape. Only male victims of male perpetrators of rape are mentioned, with mentions about why male victims don’t report being about stigma around homosexuality. A mention of male victims of male perpetrators being the majority of male victims.
But otherwise, it’s calling to attention that male rape victims are ignored by NGOs and governments dealing with rape. They call it “violence against women and girls” and then equate that with rape and DV, and once their gender-unique plan is put into action, claim they got it cornered. The article claims it’s because women needs were ignored by the UN, government orgs and such before and this (gendering it extremely) is overcorrection.
This sounds fishy to me, as maybe they didn’t tackle war rape 30 years ago or something, but it never was uniquely a women’s issue.
This is especially weird as the document does mention male war rape victims a lot. And claims that when it got reported, they got degendered or more likely their torture desexualized (just plain torture, not rape torture). Mentions are made about men being made at the point of a weapon, to rape their family members to humiliate them (both the one forced to do it and the target), essentially forced incest.
Plenty of mentions that war rape in certain areas is extremely common against men. And often known to be common, but still ignored.
The sad thing is most of the accusations don’t invovle sex, yet its sex assault and people are acting like Ghomeshi is a serial rapist.
Who’s the victim? Issues of consent. Here are three stories somewhat related I think would make an interesting topic of discussion. Let’s lead off with
http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Womens-groups-Cancel-law-charging-women-with-rape
Women can’t rape an adult man in Israel because men lie about being raped. There are interestingly two cases where the rapist may have accused the victim of rape.
http://tucson.com/news/local/prison-caseworker-says-she-was-raped-government-disagrees/article_a6ad447f-3872-5f2d-8560-0d590dc2517f.html
In this case, there definitely was a rape. That’s not disputed (well at least technically. More about that later.). If he didn’t rape her than she raped him as he was a prisoner. The question is who raped whom. Now the reason I say technically is because I don’t know if you noticed that the PREA stats keep track of “consensual rapes”. Personally I think it’s a way to paint men as the primary abusers because female staff commit most of the staff sexual misconduct, but a minority of the “non-consensual” staff misconduct.
The second case is.
http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/11/amherst-student-was-expelled-for-rape-bu
Where it seems that a female student raped a male student then charged him with rape.
Now even if these two cases are rapists actually charging their accusers, I still don’t believe giving an entire gender blanket “immunity” (There may be some ability to prosecute, but not as a rape) because of the possibility that an abuser will abuse the law. We already have that situation.
Those are worthwhile cases to discuss, John Anderson, though it probably bears in mind the old adage about ‘extreme cases make for bad law.’ They do seem to highlight the difficulty in adjudicating sexual offenses once it’s recognized that both men and women can be the ‘bad actors’ in a given encounter. Absent video, how is an objective observer supposed to assess who is telling the truth, if the parties agree that sex occurred but disagree on whether consent was given?
(It wouldn’t surprise me if the electronic recording of encounters were to slowly become an increasingly accepted option, given the ubiquity of devices capable of doing that recording and the growing realization of how difficult it is for third parties to assess what actually happens in these he said/she said cases.)
“Consentual Rape” ? This is where were at in the rape debate, were the term is such a fucking joke that it meaning nothing anymore.
Consentual Rape is an oxymoron.
Wendy McElroy has written a book about the claim that we live in a rape culture:
https://www.amazon.com/Rape-Culture-Hysteria-Fixing-Damage-ebook/dp/B01EENF4HW?ie=UTF8&keywords=rape%20culture&qid=1462903438&ref_=sr_1_3&sr=8-3
I got banned for 7 days for this comment on MensLib subreddit. Apparently it minimizes female rape victims.
Im sure everyone here knows about Brock Turner and drama that’s kicked off over the light sentence he got. Personally I agree that he did get off much to lightly.
But check this out:
https://toysoldier.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/brazen-child-rapist-admits-shell-rape-again-court-lets-her-go-free/#comment-40288
Notice the lack of outrage. I know they are not the exact same situation but there is one thing that does line up. You know how its apparently a bad thing to fall back on a man’s upbringing as why he commited a crime?
From the judge:
Thanks for that link, Danny.