Hardly a week goes by without the public being told how rape culture and victim blaming are being perpetrated by ‘the patriarchy’. Monday, September 23, 2013 offered us the mother lode of mythical feminist thinking in the form of Una Mullally in The Irish Times.
It’s not that Una said something unique, it’s that she managed to fit so many fallacies into one article that really makes her applause worthy.
Una begins with criticizing police for advising people to “protect yourself from violence” by exercising caution when meeting people online. The reason for this advisory is that a woman’s bones were discovered and the missing woman seems to have met someone via a dating site on the internet before turning up dead. Apparently this is ‘victim blaming’.
I used to get emails all the time from female friends who wanted to forward me the latest warning on how a man might kidnap me by hiding in the back seat of my parked car at the mall. The warnings always came from female friends and they always had my best interests in mind. I never once emailed them back “how dare you blame me for parking my car!” I did start sending all emails to spam if they had “fw:” in the message line but the proper, civilized response is “Thank you. I’ll pass the message along to everyone I know.”
Una, and her ilk, also need some basic lessons in Crime Solving For Dummies. If you watch television at all you might have come across shows like CSI or Criminal Minds in which they portray rather likable, well-meaning detectives who investigate crimes. The first thing they do is ask apparently bizarre questions like “Who, what, where, when, why… and how?”
The answers to these questions help solve crimes.
When a police force investigates someone’s online dating habits it can lead to information, like the identity of the killer. They can also help divulge the method of death, which can help police link one murder to other murders. While they do this investigative work they sometimes have microphones shoved in their faces asking for a public statement in order to inform the people who write and read the news.
The reason police offer warnings to the public are because the public wants to know how they can avoid showing up as a set of bones on the next news report. They get scared. This information is intended to help them feel safer.
“Societies are in a crisis over how men treat women,” Una claims. Now, this is news to me. Society is in a crisis over international wars, terrorism, bank fraud, the resulting economic collapse, and a general lack of faith in either the press, politicians or ‘God’. Most of the women I know are far more concerned with having a bad hair day and failing to look attractive than in having a day where too many men show them unwanted attention.
She claims “potential attackers are rarely instructed to exercise vigilance.” Yes, Una, they are reminded every day by the fucking law. It’s as illegal to commit a crime today as it was yesterday. They are told to not be violent by being faced with jail if they break the law. If we were to instruct them to “be vigilant” we’d be telling them to not get caught. Yelling at him “that’s illegal, you know!” will not solve the problem. You moron.
“Men, don’t rape” is Una’s next solution. This is part of the whole rape culture myth. For some reason, women, like Una, think that other men are in a unique position to give each other rules about sex. They aren’t. If men want sex from women, women are in the unique position to tell them how to go about achieving their goals. What feminists are doing when they tell men that only they can stop rape is basically like a teacher telling a class of inferiors that she will punish the whole class if they don’t tell her who put tacks on her seat.
According to international law, collective punishment is wrong.
The sentiment embedded in the demand for men to fix women’s problems is the idea that men are the problem. The error of this idea, and it’s not Una’s fault for believing this because feminism has ingrained it into her mind, is that men do not live in this world within a cocoon. Boys are born as helpless babies, just as girls are, and we are mostly raised by women.
Though men appear to rule the world, that is because women treat them like gophers: Go get me stuff.
A man’s worth in our world is not assessed on how much wealth he possesses, it is based on the level of happiness of his woman. Every politician knows he’ll do better if he has a happy wife at his side. Don’t be shallow, ask better questions. Why do men commit crimes? I’ll posit this: because they need more stuff to make a woman happy or because they have been rejected by a woman shaming them for not being good enough and feel they have nothing left to lose. Committing a crime has a penalty. They need a reason to risk that penalty. It’s going to be primal. Think… think… are you with me?
The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck and she can turn the head any way she wants.
Feminists claim that men objectify women but it’s women who think that men are just walking, magical penises and that the penis has the mystical quality of getting them stuff. We’re less concerned with how they get us our stuff than in making sure we get the shit we’re after. One of those things is security so the problem for women is not in how to get men to stop being aggressive, it’s in how to get them to be aggressive but stay out of jail so they can keep providing the stuff that makes us happy.
The problem is not men. Men just want to be loved and respected. What women make them do for that respect is what drives some of them crazy.
“Men, stop hanging your threat of rape over dark streets.” This is Una’s impassioned plea. The streets are only dark if you decide that you have no agency, no power, to affect the world around you. The threat in walking out your door every day exists for both men and women. I’m sorry to inform you, Una, but you could die at any moment. Men face a much greater risk of physical assault every day than women do but they still keep walking out that door.
Being that women are equal, I think we should meet that threat on an equal basis.
What Una claims makes men more culpable is that they all know someone who is “dubious” and goes to strip clubs or pays for sex. Strip clubs are not illegal and I know quite a few women who married for money, so buying sex is apparently quite legal, too, as long as you get the proper paperwork. Una, you and I both know someone who had a baby to avoid having to get a job. You and I both know someone who married a man they didn’t love. Isn’t that just a little bit shady? ‘Dubious behaviour’, perhaps?
Saying that men can stop rape is like telling a driver they can stop all car accidents or investors that they can stop all fraud. Just because men enjoy sex or do it from time to time doesn’t place them in a unique position to police all other participants. Just like Una can’t stop other writers from saying things she disagrees with.
Una claims that “women should be free to talk to whomever they choose and go wherever they want without threat of assault.” That’s bullshit. No one is free to do that. A person is free to leave their home every day and enter the world of the unknown and they should be assured that if something bad happens society will come to their aid to help them heal. Unfortunately, women are not given this freedom because feminists are hell bent on maximizing the pain and trauma of every female experience.
They are busy convincing women who don’t even know if they’ve been raped to call it rape. If you aren’t sure: it didn’t happen. If the woman doesn’t know, how the hell is the guy supposed to have known? They tell women it’s a terrible thing and that they should go to support groups where they relive the pain over and over and over again until all they are is a rape victim. Some of these girls didn’t even know they were raped and could have moved on but now it’s their lifelong identity and they’ll never get over it. What kind of sick fucks are you?
We have become indoctrinated to believe that rape is the worst crime that can be committed. How the hell did that happen? I can think of a bunch of things that are worse: Murder, having my fingers cut off one at a time while I watch, having my limbs disconnected, waking up in an abandoned house with a tape recorder saying “Hello, Diana, I want you to make a choice…” The list can go on. I’ve seen a lot of films. I’ve been raped so that’s not fiction, but my mind (perhaps more creative than that of feminists) can imagine worse scenarios.
Some rapes are extremely violent, leaving women beaten and in hospital with damage to their reproductive organs. These crimes are not just rapes, they are brutal physical assaults that never go unreported and no one laughs. A man can end up with lifelong damage from getting kicked in the groin yet this is comedy to women. While feminists claim that a woman who is drunk can’t consent, they don’t want to address the problem that drunk women can become so sexually aggressive they assault men. I have a friend who has serious problems after a fall-down drunk friend he was trying to keep safe by taking her home grabbed his testicles in a sexual advance, squeezing so hard he had to go to the hospital. This guy wasn’t trying to rape her, he was trying to keep her from having sex.
Drunk girls are not fun and they are not weak.
Drunk women are responsible if they decide to drive themselves home and get in an accident while doing so. They are equally responsible if they make the decision to have sex. I hear Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is a crazy ass bunch of sisters if you try to challenge them on that.
While feminists claim that a rape culture exists which ‘normalizes’ rape, I insist that a feminist culture exists that ‘rape-ifies’ normal sex. The definition of rape has now been expanded to include when a woman doesn’t say no but thinks it, when a woman decides that sex didn’t go the way she wanted, when a woman has had a few drinks, when a woman is woken up with sex after falling asleep next to a man she has previously had sex with and decided to stay in the bed… The list will continue to grow until we stop it.
Perhaps this is too much information but, for me, sex is my favorite way to wake up. Men have every right to believe that a woman sleeping in the bed next to them is going to be happily awoken. If you don’t want sex, don’t sleep in their fucking bed. We are not children here.
Women don’t own sex, it’s something people do together. It requires communication. Women don’t like it when men lie to them to get sex and men don’t like it when women lie either. It happens both ways. “Yes, I’ll use a condom” or “Yes, I’m on birth control.” There is no one-sided game, it can happen to either gender. If a woman lies with her body language and her actions she is raping the man. Sex is not a written contract. It is something that only the people present can attest to, it happens organically, intuitively and it is something over which people can make mistakes. Men don’t need need an ’emphatic yes’ to avoid rape, you need to give them an emphatic ‘no’. If you think you didn’t have the option to say ‘stop’, you are wrong.
The original case in discussion with Una Mallally’s article (before she made it a rape culture issue) was a woman who decided to go to a fetish site (note that a woman ‘normalized’ SM fetishes with her book Fifty Shades of Grey, probably influencing the dead woman’s choices) and met with someone who ended up killing her. What we don’t know, and don’t need to know, is whether or not the murder was the prime objective or whether the fetish scene accidentally led to her death and the partner tried to cover it up. That’s a job for the police. What we do know is that meeting people in real life whom you only know from online is a dangerous prospect and that the police warnings are extremely good advice.
Women are not free to exit their doors and expect to return safely any more than men are. Every day you wake up and exit the house be happy that you are alive and be happy when you return safely. In the meantime, there are many things you can do to reduce your anxiety: choose to be fearless, choose to be cautious, choose to not leave your house… or the fifty shades of grey in between. The choice is yours and no one is taking that away from you. Women and men both face this risk but, for some reason, only women seem intent on blaming men for all their problems.
