Question for Pierce Harlan, the guy behind the False Rape Society blog: Do you really think this is the best way to fight false rape allegations?
The real problem here isn’t that he’s recycled an old rape joke; it’s that he’s pretending that rapists are somehow a species apart from ordinary men. His big complaint is that the PSA in question “passes off a criminal deviant as a typical guy.”
Pierce, what do you think rapists look like? They’re not villains out of some silent-movie melodrama, twirling their whiskers and cackling with glee. They don’t have giant R’s tattooed on their foreheads. No, they look like “ordinary” guys. Exactly like them. Rape prevention — and crime prevention in general — would be a lot more effective if criminals could be easily identified at a glance. But the world doesn’t work that way. Most criminals look pretty ordinary, actually.
But the problem with Harlan’s stance here go beyond that. The fact is that most rapists aren’t sinister strangers hiding in an alleyway; the overwhelming majority – something like 70% — are people known to their victims. As someone who writes regularly about rape, Pierce is presumably aware of this, which means either that he’s being completely disingenuous, or that he’s simply pretending that date rape (and non-stranger rape in general) doesn’t exist.
The PSA in question is far from perfect. Aside from the terrible acting, the main problem with it is that it it’s victim-blaming. Its depiction of a rapist as an ordinary-looking guy – and a friend of the victim — is the one thing it gets right.
To get an idea of the sort of person who reads (and agrees with) The False Rape Society blog, here are a couple of comments on the, er, “controversy.”
Here’s a comment from YouTube, posted by someone who obviously got there from Harlan’s blog (it appeared after the video was linked at the FRS; before the recent batch of comments, the video hadn’t had a comment for three years).
So the message is that if a guy is being helpful at a party, he’s probably a rapist? This is not a fair psa. It did better than some though, by highlighting the fact that the female friend ditched her.
Apparently, in this guy’s mind, trying to remove the clothes of a woman almost completely incapacitated by alcohol is just a way of being “helpful.”
Meanwhile, on the FRS blog itself:
Anonymous said…
Wow- just like TV- apparently the only people on earth who ever do ANYTHING wrong are white males- preferably fat ones to give feminists a little extra to hate.
While we’re on the subject of false accusations, here’s a strange bit of paranoid word-salad on the subject that I ran across recently from a Reddit Men’s Rightser.
Is it really possible that anyone – including the author and the people upvoting the comment — could actually believe this nonsense? If so, what a strange, sad world they must live in.
EDITED TO ADD: Holly Pervocracy just wrote a great and highly relevant post on what she calls “Slavering Beast Theory.” As she explains:
In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men. Two species, nearly. … There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts. And they are very, very easy to tell apart. They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting. …
This dichotomy is how someone can simultaneously believe that women shouldn’t go out after dark because rape is such a big problem and believe that tons of rape accusations are false. It makes perfect sense if you believe there are Slavering Beasts out in the dark, but if an ordinary guy is accused of rape, there must be more to the story. It explains why people are angered by rape prevention tips aimed at men–those are insulting to ordinary guys, and Slavering Beasts won’t listen. And it justifies the belief that abuse victims had it coming: either they were abused by a Slavering Beast and should have known better, or they were abused by an ordinary guy and must have done something terrible to provoke him.
Although I think 30 seconds (who’s holding the stopwatch?) is a goofily specific stipulation, what gets me is thinking about what this would be like from the other side. I can’t imagine having someone tell me to stop and then just ignoring that. Hey, I’m not male, maybe there’s some magic autopilot mode I don’t know about, but failing to stop when someone tells you to seems like just as much of a decision to harm them as starting when they don’t want you to.
It seems very difficult to just accidentally keep going.
But I suspect a lot of the MRA fear here comes from the idea that women’s only motive in life is to fuck with men, so they’d tell you to stop just to play “gotcha” rather than because they actually needed you to stop.
Which in turn I guess comes from the idea that sex is an agreement women make in exchange for something else, not because they actually want the sex, so for them to stop sex is basically playing takie-backsies on a contract. If sex is just “lady money,” then stopping sex isn’t an expression of discomfort or pain, it’s an attempted price gouge.
Ugh.
If we want to keep count.
I don’t know anyone personally who’s been falsely accused of rape. Several years ago, I did hear about a local woman who claimed she was raped in the elevator of a train station, but after the police investigated it, it turned out that she had made it up. She didn’t accuse anyone specifically and she had mental and/or emotional problems. The police didn’t charge her with anything.
I was sexually assaulted when I was 24. Fortunately, I was rescued by two friends before he could do more than force his fingers into my vagina. I don’t think he even considered it assault although he held me down and unzipped my jeans, all the while I was telling him to stop and trying to fight him off. As he was leaving, he laughed and said that regardless, he had gotten into my pants. I think to him it was more scoring than violence or assault or rape. My friends and I didn’t think of calling the police. Now I might but then we didn’t. I was just glad it wasn’t worse. And even today, I have doubts he would be prosecuted. I think it would be dismissed as ‘he said/she said’ and since we had been drinking beer and smoking pot, not the best of victim or witnesses.
Quackers: Who is stopping you from doing anything? who is forcing you to get married? who is telling you where to work? how and where you can spend your money? where you can go? who you can talk to? WHO?? who is banning you from doing any of this? what is stopping you?
Women have rights. There are even some laws which require they be treated in the same way men are.
Sometimes they are even believed when a man disagrees with them (say… a charge of non-violent rape).
He’s not allowed to have sex with children. Women have jobs (which means some man, somewhere, doesn’t have that job).
People say he ought not harass women.
Obviously he lives a life of crushing burdens, working like mad to support the women who so oppress him.
And if he hits one of them? He will be arrested.
The horror.
Lurker42: good luck asking the MilkBoy about the meaning of, “treated like sluts.”
He can’t even answer the less provocative question about what women should wear (the closest he has come is to say, “what men tell them too”… how the different opinions of men factor into the question of sluttiness is then a new question).
From context I think it means that a woman who is, “flaunting her sexuality” can’t “torment” men by refusing to have sex. Sexy clothing = consent.
Ami Angelwings really summed things up perfectly, that the MRA’s interpret “he said/she said” as “he said/she lied”. I think it’s strange that they call a woman’s word about rape to be “mere accusation” but they rush to defend the man as a victim of a false accusation based on his word alone. It never occurs to them that sometimes a guilty person will lie and say they didn’t do it. There are some people that can be caught red handed committing a crime, and will still lie and claim they’re innocent. It’s not uncommon.
Hahaha, that one was great. Also great, the very next post asks how you evalutate claims, as if preponderance of the evidence isn’t a standard of proof or anything.
I often skip NWOs post, but those ones were hilarious.*
That’s okay, we have don’t have the version of Title IX that MRAs believe in here in the US either.
You know, one of the most frustrating things about this myth that rapist are rare beasts is that it is plays off of a truth-that most men do not rape, and that rapists are commonly serial rapists. The problem is that the mythos of the rapist beast monster presumes that one can tell by a whole collection of things (esp. bigoted things like race and class) which men are and are not rapists at a glance, and that people are either human or monster (that it is impossible for people do choose to do good things and also choose to do bad things). Whereas one cannot tell a rapist at a glance, and, if anything, the groups of men who are least likely to be presumed beastly are often the most likely to be in a position to rape with impunity. Society should stop making excuses for the men who rape, often serially, and stop reinforcing their bad behavior by rape apologism.
*fyi, NOW, we are laughing at you, not with you
I know logic really isn’t their thing but do they at least understand why citations are needed that false rape accusations are a common problem..? I can believe things commonly occur that I don’t see personally or even people with similar (say, middle class-ish) lives don’t see but not without someone giving examples!! And the story where the guy lost his job over a false sexual harassment claim that really does suck and i’m sorry that it happened to them. There will always be douchebags out there both male and female who disrupt someone’s life but as you said it didn’t make the guy hate women. Also Wisteria, that assault sounds horrible i’m sorry that happened.
In other news, though still very much on-topic, Omega Virgin Revolt has announced that he’s supporting Herman Cain, specifically because his response to multiple allegations of sexual harassment against him apparently makes him an “anti-feminist”.
@Wisteria: that sounds horrendous, and there’s no question that it should have been a police matter – but I can see why you didn’t take it further.
Wetherby – Ugh. That whole post.
Not “claimed.” Not even “stated.” Pointed out. Because sexual harassment never actually occurs, so if you have zero personal knowledge of a case, you have all the knowledge you need to know it’s a false accusation.
Besides, the man said so. What more proof could you possibly need?
Holly: A man said that a woman was wrong… after all,. there are lots of men here who say things, but they are wrong.
Easy! Anytime a woman moves to a new location (different room, different street, etc.) she must stop and get a vote from all the men within visual range of her on what she should wear. Preferably there will be a clear consensus, or at least an odd number of men so that one opinion will win out, but in the case of a tie the woman’s closest male relative can be called to break the tie (this will probably result in a slightly more conservatively/warmly dressed woman on average, sadly, but hey no system is perfect!)
When no men are in the vicinity … um, I suppose she could default to what the most recent vote decided? But if there aren’t male observers then I’m not sure that her clothing possibilities can collapse into any one reality… If a woman dresses in the absence of men, is she really dressed? In fact, I’m not honestly convinced that without a male observer women even exist at all! Women don’t think therefore we’re not–! 0_0
Besides, the man said so. What more proof could you possibly need?
It is rather telling to see how willing these guys apparently are to take someone at their word when that someone is a man.
Provided, of course, that the man in question agrees with their politics and/or social views.
What’s amazing -in regard to the Herman Cain thing- is that, unless something has changed in the last 24 hours, the women who were received settlements are under gag-orders and cannot say anything about what happened. In fact one of them has a lawyer who is asking that the gag-order be lifted since his client cannot provide a retort to what Cain is saying publically. I wonder if he himself is allowed to discuss the incidents and if his dismissal counts as violating the gag-order himself.
At any rate, this isn’t even “he-said, she-said”. Right now it’s “he-said, he-said”.
Oh, I know, but NWOslave’s assumption that everybody is American is amusing. Why should I be personally concerned about a law in another country?
Oh, right, I forgot about the New World Order/One World Government thingy NWOslave believes in. What’s law in one place must be law everywhere else; the Illuminati decree it so. It’s stupid, but I guess it’s at least internally consistent.
Actually I don’t recall seeing Slavey do any of the usual MRA ranting about Foreign Women, who are So Much Nicer, so maybe he just assumes that every other country is excactly like the US, so obviously Title IX applies everywhere.
Pecunium:
Plus, if he steps out of line, a woman will say he raped her, whereupon he will be hauled off to a Title IX court, where someone prosecuting rape only needs a preponderance of evidence where “preponderance” means “something a woman says.”
man, that black hole in NWO’s brain must be getting right close to critical – everything he reads is flashing by so fast as it’s sucked in that he can only catch a few words.
This is the only explanation I have for how he read Holly’s (excellent) post and came up with ‘ feminists think all men are beasts.’
@CassandraSays:
From The Great Book O’Larnin’:
There are no countries besides the US. The existence of other countries is a myth propagated by communists, feminists, international bankers (*wink*), bicyclists and other libruls.
The Earth is a disc, whose surface is covered almost entirely by the United States. The edges consist of a circular ocean whose savage waves ravage the shores of New Sodom (a/k/a San Francisco) and that other place full of independent-film-lovin’, Chardonnay-drinkin’, edumacated freeloader manginas and jack-booted feminists.
On the underside of the disc, you’ll find Iraq and Afghanistan. Although feminists and their evil allies would have you believe that these are countries, they are not. They are places. Even a small child can understand that something that’s a place can’t be a country, but feminists do their best to confuse children, especially boys, by endocrinating them in school.
Thus, there are no Foreign Women. What some men are Foreign Women are actually feminist spies dressed in 1950’s fashions and armed with Betty Crocker Their mission is to double-enslave men who are trying to escape their primary slavery.
no more mr nice guy, thanks for that link. There may be a post in that.
So Earth is actually the Discworld? We here in Sodom by the Bay are delighted to hear it, but so far we’re a little disappointed by the lack of wizards. We are also wondering if sending Nanny Ogg after the MRAs might traumatize them into being quiet for a while.
We are also wondering if sending Nanny Ogg after the MRAs might traumatize them into being quiet for a while.
Words cannot express how much I want to read a fanfic of this.
Schrodinger’s Slut?
I have to say, NWO’s system would involve carrying a LOT of outfits around. Plus a lot of changing in public places. I’m going to have to buy one of those wheelie suitcases.
I’m going to have to buy one of those wheelie suitcases.
Well, since we’re on the Disc already, maybe you can get your own Luggage.
What happens if our Luggage eats the man who just demanded that we change our outfit?