quizzical pussy

Does this happen every year?

The day after Valentine’s Day my laptop broke out in a rash of news articles and blog entries about sexual violence. Maybe it’s because sometimes rape feels like the other side of the sex coin that Valentine’s Day embraces, or maybe there was a coordinated effort/awareness day that I didn’t know about. Maybe the day-after-Valentine’s Day thing is a red herring and President’s Day is the real culprit. Maybe it’s Zeitgeist. I suck at Zeitgeist sometimes.

Breda got a day-early jump on the trend when she wrote about a video that was posted on ManUp, a campaign whose mission is to stop violence against women. The video’s original source is Omnipeace, “a humanitarian fashion brand that donates 25% of all profits to charities promoting peace, education, human rights and ending extreme poverty in Africa by 2025.” The video, which I’m going to call the iRape video, uses violence against women as a trope to call attention to ongoing violence in Eastern Congo over conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, titanium, and gold ore). The video isn’t just about rape, really. Rape is one “weapon” being used, and it’s not the only intolerable thing happening there: Omnipeace uses rape in the iRape video because sexual assault is especially visceral, horrifying, and to many the rape of a pregnant woman (which this video depicts) is even more so. The overarching issue is that electronics manufacturers (and by extension, consumers) are fostering violence (definitely including rape) when they buy these minerals from the wrong people and out of the wrong mines in the Congo. The escalating war crimes, the unchecked violence, and how corporations are providing economic motivation for them to continue, are the larger issues, and rape is but one really, horribly disgusting aspect of all that.

The iRape video does the job it was designed to do. It communicates the problem and even appropriates pop culture images culled from the once-ubiquitous silhouette commercials for Apple’s iPod. Surely Apple is one of Omnipeace’s biggest targets here, if only because it’s emblematic as an industry leader. In the sense that it presents information about conflict minerals and violence in the Congo, it accomplishes a lot in ninety seconds.

But it raises some issues. Some of us…well, I… think making rape into a cartoon/parody is just a shade tacky. Even the “iRape”… “iSuffer” copy in the video is so flippant it kind of makes me sick knowing that they don’t mean it as a joke, they’re only accidentally presenting it as one. When you use rape as a supporting argument or an attention-grabber you’ve just invoked something complex and rife with emotion– sometimes raw, throbbing pain. I also think it’s worthwhile for organizations to make it very clear when reposting and sharing the iRape video that it isn’t about rape in general. It’s pretty specifically about rape as a war crime, and to me it’s more successful at highlighting a regional conflict and its related atrocities than it is at saying anything about violence against women in a broader sense.

Breda linked to iRape via ManUp, “a global initiative to engage youth in preventing violence against women”. Theirs is an admirable goal, and I haven’t a clear enough picture of them yet to say whether I agree with their politics and methods or not. But clearly their mission isn’t specific to the Congo. So the fact that ManUp has the Omnipeace iRape video as the lone offering in the “Media Center” section of their globally-minded website seems like a counterintuitive decision because it depicts a very specific type of rape in a very specific context–with little surrounding explanation–on a website that has a very diffuse goal.

In war-torn Congo, rapists are certainly often armed. Non-combatant civilian women have no practical means to defend themselves nor access to legal justice. The details are far removed from what many of us might experience in other parts of the world (and in this and many other respects we are so damn lucky). Here in the United States, for example, that isn’t what rape usually looks like.

Breda’s point that self-defense knowledge and preparation (particularly access to and training with firearms) are key to preventing violence against women is an important one. Her declaration that “…the only way to stop violence against women is to make it a very, very risky endeavor,” is nothing more or less than absolutely true. There are dozens of ways to educate and mitigate and hope the bad guys stop being bad guys, and some of these can help, but they’ll never eradicate sexual violence. Only a culture that tolerates no rape and gives women the tools to enforce that standard would have any chance of existing beyond the threat of sexual violence. I’d be thrilled to see more organizations focusing on teaching women how to defend themselves, and spreading the message that it’s completely appropriate to do so. We shouldn’t be expected to leave our protection solely in the hands of men/authority figures/social change campaigns.

But it bears repeating that “you can fight back!” is not the same thing as “you should’ve fought back”, because I think sometimes people conflate the two. You can’t tell a rape victim she (or he) should’ve been “better” at being assaulted and violated. Well, obviously you can, but if you do, you’re an asshat. Empowering women to stop sexual violence dead in its tracks is good; expecting women to claw, shoot, gouge, or maim their way out of every such situation, and wondering what’s wrong with them if they don’t or can’t, is just another way of blaming the victim. Blaming the victim really needs to end, people. Rape isn’t just a physical fight, and even if it were, not everyone has the strength or reflexes or equipment to stop it. Sometimes sexual violence isn’t exactly what you expect it to be, and if we don’t have a clear and realistic picture of what diverse scenarios rape can include, we definitely can’t stop it, decry it, loathe it… in fact, we’re in immediate danger of tolerating it in many of its more insidious forms.

Ladies, are you prepared to fight whenever you’re on a date? Are you prepared to claw your best male friend’s eyes out at a moment’s notice? Would you kill your husband rather than succumb to forced sex with him, or might you take the abuse, and maybe even blame yourself for it? If you’re an average American silhouette woman bopping around to your iPod in Everytown, USA, the armed soldier bogey is probably not what you need to worry about. The scary shadow you need to keep your eye on is the inky outline of the devil you know.

I’m not saying that all the men in a woman’s life are potential rapists. I am saying that 77% of rapes are committed by non-strangers, and sometimes it’s hard to see these coming. If you’re a man and just felt a glimmer of umbrage reading the examples I gave at the beginning of the previous paragraph, your reaction should provide one flash of insight as to why women might have a disincentive to remain ever-vigilant and prepared against acquaintance rape. Often men want and encourage us to be on our guard with every guy… except with them, of course.

Britni posted a great piece on marital rape and the mythical gray area it presents. I want to address some of the things that occurred to me while reading it, but that will be its own blog entry (Soon, my pets. Very soon…) because I’m not writing a goddamn dissertation here. I’m just some chick on the internet who happens to be not so fond of rape.