O RLY?

I’m not interested in playing the “more horrific” game, nor being an armchair criminal philosophy expert. I’m really not. But there’s something disturbing about their reasoning.

Are you suggesting, person who has (every time so far) admittedly never been raped, that a rape victim would be better off dead? The response is usually something like “a murder victim’s suffering is over, while a rape victim has a whole lifetime to deal with what happened.” So that’s pretty much a “yes”. Rock.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I would prefer murder to pretty much nothing, and I think plenty of people who’ve survived rape, torture, and other atrocities may feel the same way. Some probably wouldn’t. But the bottom line here is that I don’t think a bystander is the right person to decide which of these people would be better off dead.

(image source)

Stranger rape is kind of like a shark attack.

Can you always maneuver around these things? No. Albuquerque has an aquarium, and when an evil psycho wants to hurt someone he usually finds someone, and sometimes there’s not a lot you can do can make sure it’s not you.

When you get attacked by a shark, there may be a few people who say that you weren’t observing proper shark safety, or that you must’ve been dressed to look like a seal or something, but most people are correctly going to blame the shark.

Date/acquaintance rape is like a dog attack. There’s an adorable puppy in the park who looks perfectly friendly, and his owner says it’s okay to pet him. Everything seems okay, so you approach him and give him a friendly pat. Then, he tears your face off.

People will have a lot more opinions about a situation like this. You might hear a well-meaning “Did you let him see your hand before you touched him?” or a rueful “You should’ve known better than to try to pet a dog you didn’t know!”, even “You must’ve scared him!” It suddenly gets so much more complicated. Most people will be sympathetic, but a part of their minds may just work overtime to figure out how you were responsible because it’s scary to think that it could happen to them. And hell, they can’t imagine their dogs doing such a thing! Must’ve been something you did wrong. That makes it easier. But they’ll usually agree that you no longer have a face, that things went awry.

To be clear, I’m not saying that stranger rape is worse than date rape, although shark bites might tend to be more damaging than dog bites. I’m also not saying that rapists are like sharks and dogs. They’re actually like people…horrible, horrible people, and they’re completely responsible for their actions in a way that animals aren’t. I’m talking about attitudes here: the similes are about peoples’ beliefs and reactions to these events. Got it? Cool. We’ve got one more…

To some people, partner rape is like a Bigfoot sighting. It’s a ridiculous myth, a concoction beloved of the media and hyped beyond all reason. No harm was done, nothing out of the ordinary actually happened, and only lunatics and members of weird fringe groups believe in it.

But in reality, partner rape is more like a bite from a disease-carrying mosquito, spreading something really nasty, like the ugliest kinds of malaria or West Nile Virus. It is very real, and it’s a global problem. It can be invisible to the casual observer. The victim may have reasons to minimize the event or even think it’s commonplace, but the fallout is devastating. It is also, like a mosquito bite, not the victim’s fault.

People often dismiss partner rape. They’ll call it a gray area, or say that it’s “crossing a line” or “not cool” rather than saying it’s “illegal and disgusting”. It’s hard for many to grasp that a person can be raped by someone they’ve already consented to sex with in the past. It’s hard for victims to grasp that (see: my reluctance to call this rape); it’s hard for many experts-of-everything on the internet to grasp it. It’s obviously especially hard for the rapists to grasp it.

But when consent is absent and sex is happening, that’s rape. Consent must be clear before sexual activity starts. Assume a lack of consent until you have a clear positive indication that something’s okay. That’s the way human beings are supposed to treat other human beings. If you have to wonder whether your partner consents to a sexual activity, you should ask rather than assume. Nonverbal agreement is very possible (e.g. enthusiastic involvement, affirming grins, decisive nods), but if it isn’t obvious, you ask. And for the non-initiator, if you’re the kind of person who thinks consent questions “ruin the mood” and you prefer aggression from a partner, please become an emphatic nonverbal consenter or confirm what you agree to before things start, because an occasional “is this okay?” is a good, sexy habit that I’d prefer you not go around squashing. Consent doesn’t kill the mood. I promise.

After you get to know someone, consent cues can and do get subtler. You can relax a little when you trust each other. But if there’s hint of a “no” signal– verbal or nonverbal– everything stops. It’s your responsibility as a sexually active adult to ensure that you have consent. Every time.

That’s why the old tropes of “wifely duty” and “frigidity” and “compromise” are red herrings in the partner rape debate. There are lots of reasons someone might consent to sex when he or she doesn’t necessarily feel like it. A relationship is sometimes about compromise, and part of that might be agreeing to fuck your husband when you’re exhausted or to bone your girlfriend when you feel too fat. Sometimes it means that the partner with the lower sex drive tries to meet the partner with the higher sex drive halfway. All these things are okay. When you’re part of a loving couple, you often want to take care of your partner’s sexual needs even when you’re not precisely in the mood for it. But consent still needs to happen to get to that point. Compromise never means that the person who wants to have sex gets to force or pressure the one who doesn’t. If the pro-sex person wants to enact a compromise, it’s called “masturbating in the bathroom”. Only the anti-sex person gets to decide that sex is on the compromise menu.

Another thing people tend to say is that false rape reports are common, especially when a woman wants to hurt or punish a lover or gain the upper hand in child custody battles. It never fails. If you talk about rape, someone will probably eventually bring this up. About 2-3% of all reports of sexual assault are false, which is similar to percentages of false reports of burglary and grand theft auto. Lying about being raped is never okay, but this is not exactly an epidemic.

Those who are anxious for the continued safety of partner rapists can rest assured that victims are still reluctant to bring justified charges against their rapists, especially in cases of partner rape. It’s obviously hard to tell how underreported partner rape really is, but very, very, very is a good estimate. Women who are raped by their boyfriends, husbands and exes have a lot of shit to wade through, and sometimes pressing charges is just one thing too many. In addition to all the physical, emotional, financial, and sexual legacies the rape can leave, the victim may be dissuaded from prosecuting even if the police believe her. And if she gets that far, what are the odds that she’ll get a conviction against a man with whom she’s had consensual sex countless times before? Unfortunately, while the myths of gray areas, compromise, and rampant false rape reports persist, the convicted partner rapist is sort of like, well, Bigfoot. Or at least the Barbary Lion.

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.