The Rabbit Hole

Legally, it does not count as rape. But are you going to tell the person who was raped that? No. Are they going to feel better knowing it wasn't the dreaded rape but sodomy?

The point that was advanced before this extraordinary claim was that men don't know to fear rape like women do. That's absolutely true--women live with the fear of sexual violence in our society and men do not. But the "false equivalence" between rape and other forms of penetrative (or not) sexual abuse is bogus unless you literally think it's about sex. This is a common and completely bullshit error because rape is never about sex, it's about power. And any way that you forcibly compromise another person's autonomy and exert power over their bodies against their will, you're committing a crime as spiritually akin to rape as the real thing. Defining things as "not rape" to clear up anatomical issues you can argue. Saying "men can't be violated as a woman, in all but the anatomy, is a sexist statement.

Really, in a thread about gender issues, where no one will admit that the female characters are undermined and cast aside, it does not surprise me that no one will acknowledge sexual abuse of men. That's why so few men report it--because they should be able to be violated. That kind of thinking COMPLETELY REPULSES me.

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negativeq.livejournal.com

Jacob is a pedantic windbag. I gave up on his BSG recaps ages ago. I was sick of him inserting scenes that NEVER HAPPENED ONSCREEN. I was tired of him forcing me to accept his interpretation of the show - so I find it amusing he is annoyed at TrinityVixen here for telling people how to think.

He thinks he is so damn smart for transforming recaps into classical thesis papers. Just recap what you see on the screen, please.

And believing men cannot be raped is disturbing.

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I liked a few of his long-winded things because they would, on occasion, make me think. (I'm thinking here mostly of Cain, on whom I came to look less harshly as a result of his analysis.) But yeah, no more. I argue things to a hard-headed point, too, but when it's over something sensitive like gender or sexual abuse (as opposed to stupid things like "OMG TEH HOTNESS OR TEH NOTNESS), I don't believe in drowning out opinions. I listened to every thing being said up to and including the point where I was attacked personally. Then I stopped because we're no longer debating issues or hearing one another; I'm just being told to shut up and stop thinking.

Not believing men can be raped? WTF. He thinks it's some sci-fi bullshit, or that's how he equated it--like a man being raped is some stupid bullshit that makes a show look futuristic. On behalf of male victims of abuse and rape, I fucking beg to differ.

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I think I'd be forced to say something like, "This is not actually a rebuttal, just a statement of the insularity of your worldview," and then link them to some of the essays on privilege coming out of RaceFail. (See, wank can be an opportunity for learning!)

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Oh man, where were you a couple of hours ago when I responded? That's way better than I got off.

Of course, I would DEFINITELY have been flagged for that. Because my snarky comments about other people's opinions are more deletion-worthy by dint of the fact that I don't agree with the majority. I've been flagged before for trying to argue a "I don't see why everyone is so [blanky] about [blank], and I don't think I'm the only one." Like I phrased it in such a way that I was like "Am I the only one?" and was immediately told "You can't recruit people to your point of view." So, to recap, I can't "recruit" but it's totally okay if people gang up on one another otherwise and say "Your opinions suck." Looking for confirmation that I'm not alone = BLASPHEMY. Telling people they suck and to take their opinions back to their sad, lonely nowheres = Totally okay.

The parallels with RaceFail are, as we discussed, so very not comforting to me and reassuring at the same time. I've been silenced, like the RaceFail people, in such a way that they can pretend I wasn't silenced, I was proven wrong, shut up. It's never going to go away, though. Silencing it makes it worse--the resentments will only build.

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Every one of these racism/sexism/other -ism wanks is substantially the same. Whatever disempowered group it is, the dynamics that play out are exactly the same. And it's because one side is completely blindered to the fact that they have a viewpoint and are not, actually, speaking objective truth, and the other sort descends into screaming and kicking that it never changes anything and will play out again, someday, in a new form. The only thing to be gained is that perhaps some bystanders will start to think critically about these things.

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I wish that weren't the case, but you've nailed it. Wow.

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This is speaking entirely out of context, and I'm sure the TWoP person is being an idiot, but I would say that while rape is equally devastating to both sexes, women are trained to be afraid of it far more than men. At my high school, the girls had an afterschool class about daterape that told us the statistics and taught us to be aware and be wary of men, especially when young, single, and in an urban area. The guys just had a class that taught "don't rape women!"

Consequently, movies and tv shows often play on the woman's fear of rape (really often, actually) in a way that has no direct equivalent for men. So I could see some argument for rape as a story-telling trope being inherently about women. I'd never argue that the act itself was, though.

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Oh yeah, no, the threat of rape being worse for women is something I absolutely conceded in that argument. It just is. The corollary was also that men, being built for penetration, are more likely to be rapists. In a society not formed on a rape culture, however, my theory was that all rape would be reduced, not equal necessarily. (A lot of fantasy/sci-fi worlds where there aren't gendered stereotypes present women as raping a lot. If neither gender had power over the other, I don't think either would rape except in isolated cases--pedophiles, etc.)

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Isn't that an interesting statement in itself, though, that the only way many authors can think to show that a sf society has different gender norms than we do is by making women rapists.

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That, to me, is the false equivalence of rape. Our high-mindedness can only go so far before biological reality reigns us in. We have to be able to understand what the limits of biology are and where society and socialization pick up. We assume we can make everything equal in the latter case, and sometimes forget that we can't in the former. Women can rape with objects, but they are not physically equipped to rape, so regardless of socialization, they start at a disadvantage if they want to rape. Ignoring that is just glaringly stupid, not some strike towards equality.

The socialization aspect could explain why women would rape more, but then it wouldn't be a gender-neutral society. Because you would have to move so far beyond equality to a point where women have the sort of insecurity and meanness that plague male rapists today. Rape culture is so entrenched now because it sprang from a biological beginning (the most cogent theory is that men figured out that intercourse made women have children, and once that link was made, they were more likely to start after every female to propagate their line). Female rape has no such analogue, so it would have to be some social revolution (or extreme biological one--disease or some such) that took the sexes and reversed their power structures. Again, that doesn't mean they're equal.

False equivalences are bad!

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To me, trying to prove that women have power in your sf verse by making them rapists just sounds like saying, "See! This is what happens when you give women power!" So...I don't think it works really on any level.

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Good point.

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chuckro.livejournal.com

Women can rape with objects, but they are not physically equipped to rape, so regardless of socialization, they start at a disadvantage if they want to rape.

Are you defining rape as "forced penetration" or simply "forced sex"? Because I really can't get behind the former--that gets into the "rape is always the man's fault" issue. (If the only way a woman can rape a man is with a plastic penis, you keep the same problems as "men can't be raped at all".)

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Fair call, you're right. Women are quite capable of forcing sex without penetration. In fact, in the example being debated, that's what happened--a woman tricked a man into sex that he would not have had had he known who she really was. I called that rape. So I'm sort of defeating my own argument here. You're right.

Biology works against male victims of this kind of rape, too, especially in our society where erection is considered proof-of-purchase, so to speak. (Obviously, I don't agree with that.) Women who rape in that way--through forced "sex" without male penetration--get away with it. If that were the kind of female rape most of these stories were about, then you'd really have something.

Of course, the obsession with "equal amounts of rape" to everyone is not about non-penetrative rape 9/10ths of the time. It's a phallo-centric fallacy that rape can't happen without penetration, but it's one that people fall victim to. This would not change my original assessment that their stories are thusly not less-sexist-than-thou. In fact, overlooking female rape of men with no male penetration is worse than over-reporting female rape of men with penetration.

I still think that, absent a social system like we have where rape culture thrives on gendered imbalances, any cases of rape would be less frequent. So long as we have a power imbalance between the sexes, we have rape culture potential. In a society without it, we would have less support for rape and fewer men or women growing up who would need to defeat their insecurities through raping someone else. I admit it wouldn't go away, but we'd certainly do better than a world like ours where1/3 of men surveyed would commit rape if they absolutely could get away with it.

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saikogrrl.livejournal.com

I never really thought about women being able to rape until I read Val McDermid's "The Torment of Others", where (spoiler!) the killer in her past has raped another woman with a drink bottle (I think it was)... You're right that people don't think of that because women aren't 'equipped'.

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wellgull.livejournal.com

the most cogent theory is that men figured out that intercourse made women have children, and once that link was made, they were more likely to start after every female to propagate their line

I dunno if I buy that. For one thing (while I haven't exactly conducted interviews, obviously) the same logic probably underlies most sex in the animal world. So if the source of rape culture is a male desire to propagate, then rape predates humanity.

I think it's more about the desire to violate and hurt people. The other just seems too... rational, calculating, almost (though not) forgivable...

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Rape does predate humanity, from what I can tell. It's a consequence of women no longer going into periods of heat. With fertility hidden, men can't predict a woman's cycle and he would initiate intercourse more or less randomly until any sort of pregnancy would result. With time and evolution, the predictability of the menstrual cycle made such efforts less necessary. But yes, I'd say that rape was a biological fact.

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wellgull.livejournal.com

Yeah -- that's the bigger problem of "post-gender" societies (and real-world folks) who basically just make everybody a man.

Masculinity, in our culture, is messed in the head, and we're never going to be fair and just unless we fix the problems in the way masculinity is constructed as well as in the way femininity is constructed.

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droidguy1119.livejournal.com

He is probably (still incorrectly) saying that he doesn't think women can rape men, but yeah, that ignores, as someone else stated, man-on-man rape, and more blatantly, child abuse.

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::nods::

While men aren't raised with the fear of rape like women are in ours or any other society, men have their own complications when it comes to sexual abuse/sodomy because, unlike women, they're not supposed to so "weak" that someone can do that to them. Admission of abuse for men, who "shouldn't" be able to be abused (not being weak females), is thus made incredibly hard, and the bias of opinion is against them. Women may be attacked for "asking for it" but everyone admits that women are "rapable." Clearly, this is not the case for men. Which is sick.

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bigscary.livejournal.com

He's wrong in every meaningful way. And as far as men not being trained to fear rape the way women do, the powers that be are working on that -- forcible sodomy is now openly implicit in the threat of incarceration.

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Not to mention that fear of sodomy is a thread for violent homophobics. Because male privilege is so hard to see past, they actively fear being sodomized on some level and being "made less than a man" as a result.

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The BSG recapper, Jacob, made some half-assed statement about how men can't be raped and any attempt to depict male equivalents of rape were hollow attempts to equalize something that is inequitable...

By women. Specifically, I said that equating female rape of men with men raping women was trivializing and meaningless. With explicit reference to a Farscape storyline, the context of which you either didn't know about or chose to ignore.

For the record, I'm sorry it fell out that way? But it's making more sense now.

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I still don't see the point of ranking. As far as women-raping-men goes, it's usually done to make some sort of point, and in that respect, sure, I can see that it's a meaningless exercise. As in, instead of trying to understand what sexual victimization of men by women does to the victim and how a rapist could be produced in the first place, it's a sort of torture-porn bit of wish fulfillment or something.

I don't get the Farscape reference, but I haven't finished the series. Must do get onto that. But thank you for clarifying. I regret that things escalated as they did. A message board is a poor medium for meta a lot of the time, and I made many mistakes in trying to work my point in on top of that.

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I agree completely.

As far as "ranking," I agree that there's nothing to be gained from saying some kinds of sexual trauma are worse than others.

However, in a narrative, to blithely equate them for reasons of plot or tidy symbolism, is poor writing and lazy storytelling, in my opinion, which was the point being made in the original conversation: not about rape, but about misuse of gender issues and situations in stories themselves.

It doesn't seem like a very blurry line to me, but it's possible I don't engage in television or stories the same way you do, and it could be more personal than "meta" in that case.

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I'm having some trouble recalling what I said back when, but whatever the words back-and-forth suggest to the contrary, fundamentally we seem totally in agreement. I agree that rape isn't just rape with different characters standing in different places. That's just not how you have that happen; even from a strictly biological viewpoint, you have to have different accommodations to enable one gender to rape/abuse the other. It goes without saying that personal/societal views on top of that will conflict the matter further and should be the real subject of interest.

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whatever the words back-and-forth suggest to the contrary, fundamentally we seem totally in agreement
I've always felt that way. It was beyond maddening to see it go so far off-kilter!

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It was and is. I looked back on how frustrated I was (and abusive) and want to slap myself. I blame the show ending pissing me off. Stupid me! Getting involved!

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