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.
Lol @ me for even bothering -_-
you’re a more patient person than I am ha. I don’t want to get accused of being anecdotal but does anyone on here know a guy who’s been accused of rape? falsely or rightfully? cause i don’t. I do know at least 5 people who have shared their rape experience with me, they had absolutely nothing to gain from sharing it with me other than just confiding in a human being.
Okay, at this point I’m going to have to assume NWO did in fact miss the point of the Slavering Beast entirely, but won’t own up to it because admitting he was wrong is ceding ground to The Enemy or something.
exactly what can women do what men can’t do? seriously. What are men actually BANNED from doing? you know, besides raping or killing people, which also applies to women.
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?
Aside from some double standards that affect both men and women, who is stopping you from living your life as you please? you really think if we lived in some oppressive matriarchy you’d be allowed to be a misogynist on the internet? no. The internet would probably be regulated to female only sites and idiot MRAs wouldn’t raid spaces for women on reddit. Sammich and kitchen comments would be punished with a fine.
You have one hell of a persecution complex you know that? more than that. GET HELP.
NWO, I live in the exact same society you do. I’m just as male as you are. You’re talking utter bullshit.
According to him, yes. Look at what he’s said about the US government, and about how he’s so careful to avoid the really super-binding contracts, you know, that one with your name in capital letters.
The “capital letters are corporate!” thing was what sucked me into the comments section of this blog in the first place. (It also made my partner, who is an attorney, blink and repeat the word “what” about half a dozen times in between giggling uncontrollably. Good times.) I’m still trying to wrap my brain around how NWO actually concocts these little jaunts into the land of total insanity, though.
LyssatakeaBow, I’m just bored right now lol.
NWOslave, in light of your piss-poor attempts at satire in this thread, I’m going to give you the (totally undeserved) benefit of the doubt and allow the possibility that you don’t honestly believe that all women should be enslaved.
So, what is it? In all seriousness, do you really believe what you said last night about how all women should be literally owned by a man?
If you don’t actually believe that, you still avoided answering the question that drove you to make that statement. What clothing should women wear to avoid “flaunting her body” or whatever it is you believe women do? Please give examples of NWOslave-approved fashion.
@ Lyssa – Kinda. If you mean legally accused, then no. However, one of my high school girlfriends recently (i.e. seventeen years after the fact) told me about how her stepbrother, a fellow I knew from around town, had sexually abused her. He was never charged with anything and all that ever happened to him is that he apologized to her at her father’s (his stepfather’s) funeral. Not enough, I’d say, but it seemed to be what she needed.
‘Night all.
you haven’t seen riled up NWO. Just try and make women slaves and wait and see what happens.
I’m sorry, but I’ve been laughing for two days now at the thought of NWO trying this. I mean, how would it even work?
And I love that both NWO and MRAL have recently used the defense of, “Other people think I’m a wonderful person and find my rage-fueled bigotry charming! You don’t know them. They live in Canada.”
Good night, all.
I look forward to reading what I’m sure will be NWOslave’s eloquent clarification.
I do, and rightfully so. I went to school with a guy who’s currently spending a very, very long time in prison for raping a little girl. He’s the only one I know directly, I know one of my uncles spent time in prison for similar reasons but I’ve never met him (my mom had cut off contact with him well before for unrelated reasons).
On the other side, I know at least 6 women who’ve been sexually assaulted in some way who are open about it.
Night Seraph and Spearhafoc.
I would imagine it wouldn’t be just them, but other MRAs too. Maybe not all of them, but the real crazies. I laugh at it too, but then I think about the holocaust. You want to believe rationality and morality will prevail, but there’s always a sliver of doubt.
In any case if it ever came to that I’d either die fighting or just off myself. I’d assume Slavey and all the others owning women would just get sick of it too. There would probably be laws that say you can’t neglect or kill your slaves. Knowing them they’d whine that having to feed, clothe and shelter your slaves is male oppression too.
As for their defense, I highly doubt they say the things they do in public. Or definitely not to the extreme that they do online. They’re probably quiet and give off weird vibes. You don’t really know either way. This is why the internet has made me a more cautious person. You don’t know what type of bile the person you just met was saying online an hour ago. Its creepy to think about.
I’m interested in all stories whether formally accused or not, but when MRA’s refer to these false accusations that supposedly ruin so many men’s lives i think they are referring to cases that are taken to the court or police which in my personal life I have not seen happen at all, of course there are rape cases but i really do believe that like 95% of rapes are not reported to any authorities and then of course most of them are not false (sorry mra’s, i’d say that for any crime the vast majority of reports are not false). In my fairly average life I’ve never seen a man’s life ruined by any rape accusation not even some guy i work with or so-and-so’s best friend’s uncles. I do believe that something along those lines could happen now and then (to some extent…) but for them to call it an epidemic is just so out there…
I’ve mentioned before a case where a stepfather raped a child. By the time the police specialist unit got around to interviewing the child, months later, it was too late for any medical evidence. The stepfather refused to be interviewed, so the police decided not to take it to court until further evidence came up. (Or the bastard confessed, I suppose)
I know precisely zero men who have been charged with a sex crime they did not commit. I am vaguely-in-some-way-acquainted with two men who were charged with sex crimes they did commit (they both plead guilty, and they both had a LOT more evidence against them than the victim’s word). Neither of those was rape – one was solicitation of a minor, and the other was some variation on sexual assault (I don’t remember the exact charges, seeing as I was about 10 at the time and I only “knew” the guy in question because he was a priest at the church affiliated with my Catholic elementary school).
I know a lot of rape/assault victims who never went to the police. (I see one of them in the mirror every day.)
surely when there’s a child involved mra’s don’t think it’s false? right? i know they get pissy about consent ages and stuff but for the sake of argument let’s say like under 12 they can’t think those are false accusations can they?
Remember that 12 year old who got gang banged, Lyssa, a few months ago?
On top of that, LyssatakeaBow, the child was a boy, so you would expect MRAs to stick up for him. The man had other stepchildren of both sexes, but only one has told me about it.
I knew another man who was found guilty of sexually assaulting children. He confessed to police but I don’t know what sentence he got.
The bloke who broke into my house and jumped on me pleaded guilty to sexual assault, on condition he wasn’t charged with a worse crime. He got a 12 month suspended sentence.
oh yeah, good point 🙁 i saw in the limited media coverage victim-blaming on that (even though she’s a damn child), I’m sure MRA’s were even worse than the media though.
wow all these stories are so awful 🙁 I do see though that so far at least all the accused people were guilty of the crime. It’s just such a fantasy of these guys that it’s a common occurrence for a woman to be like “hm i don’t like this man very much i’m going to accuse him of rape!”. Polliwog, I also was raped and didn’t take it to the police, i was 17 at the time and had definitely internalized a lot of the victim blaming stuff out there.
Lyssa, so sorry that happened to you. 🙁
My best friend was thinking about taking her family to court for abusing her – she hadn’t been near them for at least 15 years. She gathered what evidence she could, medical records and so on, and asked her friends and husband for support. She went to the police who listened and said, yes, we can charge them with X, Y and Z. In the end she decided not to take it to court. She felt vindicated* because the authorities confirmed that what her family had done was wrong, and criminal.
*is that the right word? I mean it helped her stop feeling like it was her own fault.
NWO: You… gather the evidence and if there’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the rapist did it the rapist goes to jail. The same way it works for any other crime. In America, “the accuser says that person did it” isn’t proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Also, the WHOLE POINT is that rapists are NOT slavering beasts, and so it is impossible to tell who is a rapist or not until they get to the raping part.
Alsoalso, civil law is not slavery.
Spear: Well, uh, I think you’re attractive, or at least the picture of you is attractive (I mean this in the least creepy way possible!). I’m not sure if I count as someone you know, though.
My ex boyfriend was accused of raping the woman he dated after me (via the getting her too drunk to consent and doing it anyway method), but she never went to the police. She just told all of her friends about it. I heard about it through him (we were trying to be friends at the time) and he said they had had sex, but it was consensual. I’m not sure who to believe there, as he did have some screwed up, misogynistic beliefs and I don’t know her personally. He was distressed about it, but that was the only negative effect. He didn’t lose close friends over it, he wasn’t jailed or even questioned, he wasn’t punished by his college, and he didn’t lose his job.
Remember that 12 year old who got gang banged, Lyssa, a few months ago?
I remember that. They NY Times and the people in that town basically said she was asking for it right?
Yep. No rape culture at all. It’s totally okay to say a 12 year old was slutty or asking for it. Nothing wrong with that at all!
I’m so sorry to hear all the terrible experiences mentioned too. This shit just needs to stop.