Gentlemen and Ladies, may I have your attention please.
Eve Ensler is over it. She’s over the whole rape thing. Brother, she’s over, shes O-V-A-H![1]
In her own words “I am over rape. I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.”
Ensler is the feminist activist and writer, sometimes remembered for her authorship of The Vagina Monologues. The stage show in which a 13 year old girl is raped by a 24 year old woman, then utters the words “well, I say if it was rape, it was a good rape.”[2]
Well. That was a short article. Thanks for reading it.
It might be that Ensler isn’t exactly over rape. After all, she’s just devoted 847 words to declaring, over and over just how over it she is. But I’m not buying it. She does, after all use the word rape 31 times in her HuffPo piece. The article is almost 4% rape by word count.
Ensler indirectly tells us what she’s really doing by mention of several things she’s “over”.
“I am over Facebook taking weeks to take down rape pages.”
Because that’s bad rape, not good rape.
She makes no mention of the facebook, cafemom and other community webpages where male sexual mutilation and murder are celebrated, and where those pages remain online.
She’s also “over” the /hundreds of thousands/ (no citation for that number) of women raped in the Congo. “still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.” Again, thats women raped, so that would be bad rape, not good rape. However, no discussion of rape’s application of a weapon of war can be undertaken without noting that men are routinely raped in wars on the African continent[3][4][5][6][7][8]. Ensler makes no mention of it, so I guess that’s good rape too.
But she’s over the thousands of WOMEN in Bosnia, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya [..] still waiting for justice.
She’s also over the 1-in-3 women in the U.S military getting raped by their comrades. She doesn’t cite a source for that number – of course, which likely means she made it up.
She’s also, apparently “over women still being silent about rape”. You know, like mentioning rape in the Congo and completely omitting note of any victim besides women. Or completely failing to mention in an article in which the word rape makes up 4% of the total word count – and omitting that twice as many men are raped in american prisons than women are raped in the entire United States[9][10].
So if Ensler is not “over” rape, as appears to be the case, mentioning it 31 times in only 847 words – what’s really going on? She certainly appears to be deliberately omit mention of any victims besides women.
To make myself clear, I’m not raising the issue of male victims of rape to engage in a puerile victimhood-olympics. I’m making a different point.
There is a principal, known in law and in rhetoric called Expressio Unius Est Exclusio Alterius[11]. It means Expression of the part excludes consideration of the whole.
For Eve Ensler, there’s good rape, and there’s bad rape. Good rape ( I’m just guessing here ) would be the kind when a frivolous accusation of a college student destroys a man’s academic and professional career after consensual sex. [12]
In fact, thanks to the legal innovations of ideologues like Ensler, the ultimate trump card of politicizing the personal bypasses the legal checks and balances traditional in western law. Habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser – these are fast becoming relics of history. Monologuing feminists like Eve lack the phsyical appendage they so incorrectly equate with male agency, and conduct their own acts of rape by proxy, using the courts. A false rape accusation is an act of malicious sexual violence which lasts a lifetime. It is rape.
Eve Ensler comes close to admitting that her obsession with rape is not outrage over injury to herself or those she cares about. She is jealous of the rapist.
“And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was 5-years-old”
Because as she wrote back in 1996 – there is bad rapes, and good rape.
“well, I say if it was rape, it was a good rape.”[2]
Her HuffPo piece throws un-cited stats around with carefree abandon, so here’s one more from Ensler.
“There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.”
Why not a trillion?
As mentioned in previous discussions on this site – the number doesn’t matter. Ensler’s lie is built into the structure of her claim. Its not that [some number] of women are rape, or violated, or pressed into soilent green biscuits – it’s that it she provides no context.
[Some number] of women are [forced to drink bleach] ! This creates moral panic. But it doesn’t mean anything. Is the number a lot? Or a little? We cant compare, because there’s no context.
How many men are victimized? That would be context. The lie is built in.
But getting back to Ensler’s obsession with rape. She loves it. She loves the power that being a victim demographic brings her, and as she very nearly stated in explicit terms, her fantasy is to rape, which is why she’s announcing that the war against male sexual agency is ramping up. Not war against rape – no. That would require compassion for victims, honest discussion of the reciprocal nature of partner violence, and it would require deviating from simple and easy narrative that women are victims, and men are just plain bad.
Ensler’s escalation is an embrace of rape by proxy, the disposal of due process, the weaponization of accusation and the sanctity of fabricated victimhood.
Ensler asks a rhetorical question near the end of her declaration. She says “I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?”
Right here Eve, and you’ll find we’re anything but passive.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/over-it_b_1089013.html?mid=52
[2] http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/mcelroy2.html
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/africa/05congo.html
[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men
[5] http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2005/congo.asp
[6] http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-greatest-silence-rape-in-the-congo/index.html
[7] http://www.care2.com/causes/rape-tactic-of-war-in-the-congo-finds-new-victims-men.html
[8] http://www.newser.com/story/66130/congos-new-horror-men-raping-men.html
[9] http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report1.html#_1_5
[10] http://www.spr.org/pdf/struckman.pdf
[11] http://www.duhaime.org/LegalDictionary/E/ExpressioUniusEstExclusioAlterius.aspx
[12] http://thefire.org/article/13758.html
