Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo by Mithu Sanyal (2019) (read in 2019)

“This answer is as plausible as it is wrong. It doesn’t explain why we care so much less for our sons—after all, all violence is horrible even when it doesn’t involve sex—nor why we measure rape with a different scale from those we use for almost anything else. When we look at the murder statistics, for example, we find that two-thirds to four-fifths of the victims are male13—yet no one jumps to the conclusion that only men can be murdered.”

“This lead [sic] to the paradoxical view that the less desire a woman felt, the more desirable she herself was, whereas a lusty woman was seen as degenerate and therefore desexualized (that is, defeminized).”

“Driven to genius or crime by his overwhelming phallic energy, man was no longer suited for his accustomed role as representative of the moral order. Who better to fill this vacancy than woman, who, due to her lack of passion, was rarely tempted anyway? As guardian of the divine order (according to Hegel) or the moral order (Rousseau), she also carried the responsibility of controlling male sexuality by modifying her clothes and behavior so as not to ignite men’s highly inflammable libidos. (Emphasis added.)”

“These almost telekinetic powers by which women caused men to become criminals are even more surprising given that, at the same time, women’s supposed lack of sexual energy was translated into a lack of criminal energy.”

“It’s easy to sneer at out-of-date gender norms, but as soon as rape comes into play, all these outdated norms still reverberate through our present discourse. The bulk of our “rape knowledge” is based on ideas about masculinity and femininity that most of us would dismiss as plucked out of thin air if we knew what we were referring to. But, being invisible, these ideas take on the mantle of natural laws.”

“Foucault dates the “birth” of the “homosexual” to 1870, thirteen years before the “birth” of the “rapist.” Men who had until then done and loved lots of different things—painting, riding, playing an instrument, reading books, and the “crime of sodomy”—suddenly became “homosexuals,” people whose whole being was defined by having sexual intercourse with people of the same gender. The rapist “became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood in addition to being a type of life, a life-form, and a morphology … Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.””

“Nobody in their right mind would treat a person who has been in a car crash as if the accident had changed their personality, but that is exactly what happens to rape victims.”

“It is only through narratives that we communicate our inner world to the outer world. The alchemistic way we turn experiences into memories is necessarily a creative and complex process. We tell most stories again and again, looking at them each time from a slightly different perspective. As soon as the story is one about rape, however, all these different perspectives become condensed into one hard truth about the victim’s life.”

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that victims should just pull themselves together and everything will be puppies and kittens—rather, that the price for recognition, for empathy, and perhaps even redress can’t be that every victim’s life has to become proof of the wrong done to them, that they have to preserve their psyche as a crime scene that can be inspected at any time. “With all the media coverage and attention paid to rape victims in recent years, we still lack models that praise women for getting on with their lives rather than just getting through them,” observes Veselka.”

“By invoking the figure of “a woman who has been raped and felt paralyzed with fear,”—i.e., a real rape victim, Neustatter doesn’t have to speak for herself but can “protect” an imagined victim.”

“A participant in one of my workshops confessed: “For a long time I didn’t think I had really been raped because I didn’t show the appropriate symptoms.” Another added, “Oh, I do think I am traumatized, but I am not just traumatized by the rape—and I’m not allowed to talk about anything else.””

“But perhaps the most moving was the young woman who had been raped only a few days before. She came to my talk and said that my book had been important to her because “I don’t want to give the perpetrator the right to change who I am.””

“Nearly four decades later, when sociologists Cheryl Benard and Edit Schlaffer interviewed teenagers who wanted to get on with their lives after the crime, the zeitgeist had changed for the better and worse. Victims could expect a lot more empathy, but mainly for psychological problems resulting from the rape; if they didn’t display these problems, that was seen as problematic itself.”

“Indeed, the anti-rape movement of the ’70s had often neglected to challenge—and sometimes outright endorsed—racist portrayals of black rapists lusting after the flesh of white women. Much of the anti-rape movement assumed that most rapes were committed by black men, because it was black men who were mostly being convicted for rape. Tragically the (predominantly white) women’s movement wasn’t able to look at their own position in the tangled web of power relations, and certainly not at their own entitlement. If the men and heroes of the traditionally left-wing student and civil rights movement treated discrimination on gender grounds as a “distraction,” so too did the women’s movement treat class and race as distractions, and gender as the root and cause of all discrimination.”

“In the context of the refugee crisis, it’s as if the “defiled” body of the rape victim was the body of the country, penetrated by a dark threat. The difference between before and after “New Year’s Eve” is that it became normal in mainstream Germany—not just in AfD and other right-wing circles—to discuss whether people from “the Muslim world” pose a threat to equal rights for men and women (though, of course, not all refugees are Muslims and not all Muslims refugees).”

“Middle Ages—this does not refer to the actual Middle Ages, though, during which Islamic cultures were much more developed and innovative than Christian ones, but to a fictional Middle Ages halfway back along a fictional arrow of history. This linear model of the development of cultures—with a patriarchal primordial horde at the beginning that develops into women’s-rights-loving modern men and women the further they advance—has its roots in colonialism. Colonial nations could best justify themselves by claiming that they brought the colonized not just culture but women’s rights.”

“Obviously these are very serious crimes, but Rattansi warns: If “honor crimes” are treated as separate from other forms of domestic violence, there is a danger of stereotyping minority communities as more accepting of domestic violence, and an unhelpful distinction can become entrenched between crimes of “honor” characteristic of the East and crimes of passion associated with the West, with the added overlay of regarding minority individuals as more determined by “culture” and those from the majority as subjects to individual aberrations.”

“Accordingly, terms like “honor” and “culture” didn’t crop up once in the media coverage of George Bush’s 2001 decision to scrap funding for all NGOs that provided abortion counseling or referrals.52 This “global gag rule” was introduced by Ronald Reagan, repealed by Bill Clinton, reinstated by Bush, re-repealed by Obama, and re-reinstated by Donald Trump. Likewise, after Trump had been voted into office, nobody was afraid that American tourists might import their misogynistic attitude toward women, after all they had a president that boasted he’d “grab them by the pussy” “without waiting for their consent.”53 If we talk about misogyny in the context of Western countries, we do it as a kind of litmus test for general attitudes toward women, and not as a marker for their “specific culture.””

“Narayan has calculated that death by domestic violence in the United States is numerically as significant a social problem as dowry murders in India. But only one is used as a signifier of cultural backwardness: “They burn their women there.” As opposed to: “We shoot our women here.” In Narayan’s words, “When ‘cultural explanations’ are given for fatal forms of violence only in the Third World, the effect is to suggest that Third World women suffer ‘death by culture.’”

“In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend toward blaming “rape culture” for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campuses. While it is helpful to point out the systemic barriers to addressing the problem, it is important to not lose sight of a simple fact: rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.”

“But why is a fair process for the accused equated to an unfair process for the accuser? And is the opposite necessarily true? Does handling Title IX complaints this way benefit survivors?”

“Kipnis fears that with Title IX, “what’s being lost, along with job security, is the ability to publish ideas that go against the grain or take unpopular positions.” Having been subjected to two Title IX investigations on the basis of her written work, it’s hard to argue with her. “Factor in the accusatory mania and the intellectual incursions of the Title IX troops, and self-censorship rules the land.””

“The higher education regulator in the UK decided in October 2017 to fine universities for “no-platforming” speakers with unpopular opinions, or refusing to allow them to speak. This is a controversial policy, and my citing it here should not be read as a wholesale endorsement”

“Vice Chancellor Louise Richardson at Oxford University argues, in favor of the new policy, ”

“We need to expose students to ideas that make them uncomfortable so that they can think about why it is that they feel uncomfortable and what it is about those ideas that they object to. And then to have the practice of framing a response and using reason to counter these objectionable ideas and to try and change the other person’s mind and to be open to having their own minds changed.”

I mean, duh.

How far off the script am I, that I was temporarily surprised that anyone could have been offended by the preceding chapter?

Wet dream anyone?

Not sure. Or maybe we define ourselves by completely different characteristics? why is defining yourself sexually first and foremost of paramount importance? Is sexuality so much more important than ideas or intellect?

But don’t we do this with everything? Shopping? Stupid movie? Don’t we wheedle for more than sex?

And, just like a victim isn’t the crime perpetrated against them, neither is the rapist necessarily − or even likely − a career one. This applies for most other crime: burglary doesn’t have an apprenticeship program.

Its actually fine regardless of the gender of the parent. It’s a fineable offense in Switzerland to travel during rush hour with a bicycle, but not a pram.

This person’s name is infuriating, like an eyelash in the eye. We have capitalization for a reason. Compounding a bizarre and narcissistic predilection for small letters with a name composed of two common words is only more obnoxious. And the ostensible last name is a verb, to boot. You.might as well call yourself leather sofa. It would be less confusing.