Dear Gentle Readers, please note that this is a post by PrincessPixiePointless, JudgyBitch’s
partner in crime, this contains fewer raindrops and tulips than my last post.
Rape is a crime, currently defined, (in the UK)
I just want to be clear. Because there seems to be a lot of hear say and fucking emotives going on out there on the Internet. So we can all agree.
Burglary is also a crime. We live in a society where we lock our doors, we install security systems, and we do not put our valuables on display. Sure wouldn’t it be nice if we could all trust each other, and not have to lock the world out and ourselves in, but we don’t. We defend our homes in the best of our ability against crime.
I am in no way saying that a woman’s virginity or access to her vagina should be seen as the objects or the contents of a home. I am trying to illustrate that both actions, to steal and to rape are criminal offenses. Against the laws of our society.
Let’s say your house gets robbed. Insurance companies will not cover you if you didn’t lock your goddamn door. Truth. They will look for how thieves entered the property, was it forcible entry or was a window left open. They will ask you all of these questions in order to find loopholes. You must call the police. No police record, no reporting to the police that your house has been burgled and guess what, no insurance claim.
However, there isn’t too much of a stigma about being robbed. Unless your circumstances are highly suspect, no one doubts whether or not you were robbed or if you are actually just trying for a big insurance pay off. No one really blames you. Because YOU were robbed.
The big difference between rape and burglary is that houses can’t yell out in defense, houses cannot scream, kick or bite.
If you have a knife at your throat you make a whole different set of decisions.
Rape is currently up for discussion amongst people and governments that have left that subject to the feminists.
Delhi
and Steubenville.
The Steubenville case, (which goes to trial in February 2013) has provoked such large controversy that the Steubenville police found it necessary to release a web site separating facts and fiction about the alleged incident.
http://steubenvillefacts.squarespace.com/
I have read different articles from a variety of sources to wrap my head around this.
Apparently the boys,(and this is where it gets tricky as I’ve seen some articles implacating she was dragged like a rag doll from party to party, to others stating that she was fingered, as she lay unconscious)
Now, a girl going to a party drinking too much and getting inappropriately fingered is one thing.
wrong and icky.
But the boys filmed the entire incident and then posted it online. Which brings up several questions.
When will Internet laws begin to catch up with the rest of the criminal justice system? We have laws well in place when it comes to paedophilia and distributing pictures of minors, but what about this case. You have an unconscious minor being sexually assaulted by another group of minors and then they distribute that material on line. Now, if an adult had been caught with similar content on their hard drive in a police raid, there would be a hefty jail sentence and they would be publicaly named and shamed.
Yet the creators of the content being minors…where does the law fit in there?
Also, will they be charged for distributing pornographic material in relation to a minor?
But the next question is this. Why did they think it was ok to do it? Does that type of sexual assault to young girls happen so often at parties in Steubenville that the boys didn’t even stop for a moment to question what they were doing? Let alone think that what they were doing was a criminal offense on multiple layers?
Is taking advantage, which is what it was, of a drunk girl so common place that there was no question, no matter how drunk they were that it would be publicly acceptable to post this on line?
Who is teaching these young men about sex? Their fathers, the coach? Was not treating women like meat puppets then filming them not covered in Sex Education that day or did they have football practice and missed that part?
So this young woman not only has to wake up with the world’s worst hangover and piece together what happened, she then has (potentially the feeling of total) humiliation not only by her peers, but her parents and now the public at large.
I am not going to blame her for getting assaulted by a group of footballers. I can’t imagine what that young woman must be going thru, on any level. No, she did not make the smartest decisions, the price paid surely outweighs the naivety of her actions.
I grew up in simpler times, when there was a raging AIDS epidemic and George Micheal was still pretending to be straight. We didn’t really have sex education then, what we had was
and
But we all knew, you didn’t want to be labelled a slut and that going to parties without your friends could lead to trouble.
Recently there has been a meme campaign telling the world (that of the internet) why we need feminists…
Really? I’m not so sure about this one. To say that we do not teach men not to rape is like saying we don’t teach people not to steal. The entire idea is insulting to half of our population by implying that men don’t know not to rape a woman unless he is taught to?
So where are young men getting the idea or reassurance that what they did was ok and not publishable? I in no way agree with the whole ‘slut shamming’, ‘she was asking for it’ mentality, but on other side this recent meme that came to my attention early this week I found really puzzling.
At first I thought it was a breast cancer campaign awareness meme. Her breasts looked as though they had been reconstructed (didn’t notice the band aids until closer inspection) she was holding up a cigarette and the words ‘Still not asking for it’ are written on her chest. I thought, well of course you’re not asking for it, but the odds of getting cancer are greatly increased if you smoke! I mean nobody ‘asks’ for cancer…
Then the penny dropped. Aah, it’s an ‘I can have my tits out in public and it still doesn’t mean that it is ok to rape me.’ Well, duh!
But look at the context. We can all bang on about, don’t dress like whores, (people really need to update this old cliché, because even whores don’t dress like whores any more), sure she is half naked in public, in the middle of the day, smoking a cigarette, maybe she’s at a rally. It’s called context people.
Now, put our half naked girl in the middle of a party with a group of sexually charged drunken young men…now of course she is still not asking for it. But she sure as hell is sending out some wrong signals. I mean who asks to be raped? That is why it’s called rape, because it isn’t asked for, or am I stating the obvious hear, no one asks to be raped, as no one asks to be burgled or asks to get cancer.
So all this leads to clearly we live in a RAPE CULTURE, (according to shit I’ve read on the internet) So with today’s breaking headline, I thought i would look at how RAPE dominates our CULTURE…
,
There are a total of 473,000 victims of sex offences every year, for which 60,000 to 95,000 are rape, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
So let’s break that down, let us assume, that each rape, not assault or flashing, is perpetrated by a single individual, although there must be a few serial rapists in there, but i am not a statistician.
So between 60,000 and 95,000, hmm let’s go with the long shot, 95,000, rapes. So 95,000 men that raped a woman, (or man).
The population of England and Wales is, 56,000,000.
According to a 2007 sensus, there were 26,568.500 males in the uk, of that group 17.5 million were between the ages of 16-64. Out of a total of 17.5 million men, there were 95,000 rapes, that represents 0.56 percent of the male population.
So who the fuck is peddling that we live in a RAPE culture? Oh, I know….http://jezebel.com/5967391/fuck-you-rape-culture.
Out of those 95,000 only 15,000 were reported, and only 5,600 went to trial, of those just over a thousand were charged. Now that to me seems like the bigger issue. Or that women feel ashamed to report rape, because, although rape is rape, and no is no, we lived in a fucked up place.
95,000 rapes is still a hell of a lot of rape.
But if you are raped. Report it. Just like if you don’t want to have sex, say NO, scream NO. Getting into bed with someone and then changing your mind is ok. Yes, you feel like a right asshole and yes people can sulk about it, but the majority of men will not rape you. They may call you a bitch and not want to go out with you again, but there you go.
We do not live in a Rape Culture. We also don’t live in a culture of fluffy feathers and reindeer. We live in a culture that propagates constant mix messages to everyone when it comes to gender, identity and sexuality for both men and women.
We must start teaching our children how to be honest with one another when it comes to their own sexuality and desires and the pressures they are under. We must stop shaming the 95 plus percent of men that don’t rape. We must stop banging on about this rape culture finger pointing victimizing of women nonsense. We must stop telling woman not to dress like sluts. We must all work towards mutual understanding and trust and bring the end to the hyperbole of rape culture.
and wait for what February brings.
all the best.
PPP
judgybitch 
Unfortunately, experience has shown me that women are completely incapable of thinking rationally when the four letter r-word comes up. Analogies don’t work, thinking doesn’t work, nothing does. To say anything at all against the feminist frame of ‘rape culture’ leaves you branded a victim-blamer, and no-one listens to another word.
I’ve used the burglary analogy too, and all it gets is ‘how dare you compare women to property?!’ and ‘you’re victim-blaming!!!’.
It seems eminently simple that a society should do what they can to prevent rape from happening (just like we try to lessen other crimes), but as long as crime still exists, we teach potential victims how to lessen their own risk.
But try to apply logic to rape, and your argument disappears, because it’s the magic four-letter word that removes all capacity for reason from so many women.
I’ve given up.
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Thanks Kai,
It is an odd one. I have to admit that once upon a time I would be arms up in the whole RAPE argument.
It’s worth to be noted that rape does happen. It’s a crime and it’s horrific. However, the flip side is
rarely mentioned. I once knew a man, who was being intimate with a girl, (this was his first sexual experience) and she was moving to fast, he said no said and then, when she put him inside her, she ended up ripping off his foreskin, to which he had to have
reconstructive surgery for.
On the other hand, as I naive youth, i found myself in situations that one thing led to another, but, as scared as i was to say, no, I’m not ready, i thought i was with you but I am not, never in that kind of intimate situation, no matter how drunk, did the man continue with the story we had set up.
I’ve personally known a woman who cried next day rape, she actually got in bed with a very drunk man, as she said he was ‘worried’ about him, and guess what??? He tried it on. She got out of bed, fled and the next day attempted to totally destroy his career.
The biggest shame of this is to women and men that do get raped, because it is a brutal crime that is humiliating and the media circus has turned it into something else.
yes, it’s a strange one.
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http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/avoid_rape.htm
This is quality advice. It does NOT appeal to emotion, and it’s exruciatingly unpopular in Jezebel-land.
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JB: Please delete the other post that looks like this one – I pasted the wrong url.
I posted this last year. At the time, I thought it was a pretty reasonable stab at what had pissed me off about a rape thread on FB:
Three THOUSAND hits later (on a blog that averages 8 per day), and about fourteen Reddit posts later, I came to understand that I had become a war criminal and poster-boy apologist for “rape culture.” At the end of the day, either I’m evil, or the folks who are reacting to this with wide-eyed incredulity have talkeed to each other so long that they’ve forgotten how to talk to the rest of the public — kind of like hanging out with Marxists and realizing all your words mean something different to that guy.
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Out of curiosity, I ran “the power of math” for the US:
#rapes, 2010, 84,000. Assuming that only 46% are reported, double and round to 200,000. (God, that’s fucking depressing).
Divide by adult male population of 151 MILLION. = 0.0013245. Just over one tenth of one percent, or literally 13 guys out of every ten thousand. (Apparently most of them hang out at frat houses).
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I enjoyed your article. Just thought I’d mention a typo. Near the end you say “We must stop shaming the 95 plus percent of men that don’t rape”.
Using your numbers, it’s actually “99.4 plus percent of men that don’t rape”.
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From the 2003 UK law…
“The person who commits the offense of rape must be a man.”
So the aunt who raped me when I was seven was actually my uncle.
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I’m willing to accept that female-on-male (non statutory) rape is very rare, and can be separate enough to not be relevant to the question of the majority male-on-female rape.
Another part that completely baffles me is the constant response “we need to teach boys not to rape, not teach girls to avoid rape!”.
Aside from the aforementioned issue about living in lala land where deciding rape shouldn’t happen will magically make it so, it is such a terribly false dichotomy.
Where on earth do women get the idea that telling women how to lessen their chances of rape means that we don’t/can’t also support initiatives to lower the likelihood of rapes happening? Once again – tell people not to leave valuables in their car, and no-one assumes you don’t have security cameras and a parking lot patrol to prevent theft. But when the magic r-word comes up, prevention on one side suddenly means we must be opposing any other initiatives..??
Related to your drunk stories, I also find it problematic that when a drunk man and a drunk women have consensual-at-the-time sex, she can later use her drunken state as evidence that he raped her – despite the fact that he too was drunk, and could thus have just as much ‘couldn’t consent’ claim.
Reminds me in some ways of the autism-vaccine thing. Certain groups so thoroughly control the narrative that it actually ends up to their detriment, because nothing can get done when all the energy is spent placating the loud group.
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