Every few days, it seems, Reddit has some thread asking the regulars there what horrible thing they would do if they could get away with it. And invariably someone says rape.
The good folks in ShitRedditSays recently highlighted one such comment, from a fellow calling himself nickfromredcliff. As you can see from the edits to his comment below, poor Nick felt somewhat embarrassed and even affronted by the attention.
When I checked his comment again this morning while writing this post, I found he’d edited it again. Gone was his plaintive plea for tolerance; in its place, a bunch of new rape jokes. (You can find a screenshot of his original comment here; at the time it had 39 upvotes.)
Let’s all use this as a learning experience.
And while we’re at it, let’s have a toast for the douchebag.
I agree, even if you didn’t mean it this way Nanasha saying stuff like
sounds kind of like you’re conflating those types of reactions with being broken and damaged when they’re really just as legitimate reactions as feeling numb or going along as normal or whatever.
*sigh* I come back from dinner and find people acting like I am being a jerk and minimizing rape experiences. This is not what I was attempting to communicate at all.
I wasn’t telling you what *I* think, I was telling you what I was *TAUGHT* in various sexuality classes and sex-ed courses in school, as well as dominant narratives that came from my parents (my mom especially- it’s fairly likely that she was molested/raped as a young girl from some of the stories she used to tell me).
That was why I was so surprised when my experience was different.
I had been taught for so long that rape was a monolithic sort of crime that there was no room in those teachings to outline the fact that there are different types of rape or different degrees of severity or different reactions per different people. Even my *college sociology class* portrayed rape as being ALWAYS coupled with violent physical assault (cuts, bruises, etc) and basically all of the case studies were women who were raped by people they didn’t know, which, as you all know, is a very small percentage of all rapes.
@LBT: My name was originally invented for the Swedish dog owner boards I attend and my Swedish blog. It means “the toy dog posse”. Nowadays I also have a GSD, but when I first started attending boards I only had toy dogs. I used to live in a neighbourhood where most people had big dogs and pit bull type of dogs, and when I came walking my toy dogs one neighbour would go “here comes the toy dog posse!”. That’s where the name comes from.
Anyway, I agree that it would be terrible to force somebody to have or not to have a certain emotional reaction. It would be terrible to force somebody to take emotional-numbing pills, but also pretty terrible to force somebody NOT to take them if they were accessible and that person had made up zir mind that zie wanted them. There’s a Boston Legal episode where a raped teenager has really made up her mind, she wants this drug. Her dad, however, is completely convinced that for her own good she needs complete and vivid memories of the rape, so he drags the case to court and wins, with the help of our “heroes”. That ep really made me cringe.
@Hershele: I agree the argument was circular.
@Cliff: Exactly. When it comes to other crimes nobody argues that it would somehow be allright if the victim weren’t permanently damaged, or not even damaged at all (imagine for instance that somebody steals my car, and this causes me NO traumatic emotions whatsoever, and I’m so rich that I can just buy a new car – it’s still a pretty serious case of theft).
@Nanasha: I also think that stories about how COMPLETELY BROKEN FOREVER rape victims are may actually encourage rape. I bet that for some people it’s a real ego kick to hear that between your legs there’s a SOUL-DESTROYING SUPER-WEAPON.
How about you not fucking suggest that rape victims who were traumatized discussing their trauma encourages rape.
@Nanasha, you conflated rape victims whose reactions were different than yours with being “broken”, you were dismissing other people’s different reactions, conflating people with different reactions to rape myths, etc. That’s the problem, not that you were discussing a variety of reactions or rape myths.
@darksidecat
Uh, no. No I did not. I was specifically relating my own personal experience and contrasting it with the experience that I had been TOLD BY EVERYONE AROUND ME that “all rape victims experience,” which led to my resulting confusion and shock.
Everyone experiences trauma differently, and no one should feel minimized by that.
Now excuse me, I need to go pet my cat.
@Snowy:
You took that quote out of context. You forgot to include this part:
“[b]All my life I had been told by society, by media, even by other rape victims[/b] (you know, in those sex ed classes they had you take in high school which inevitably had a “guest speaker day” about how “Rape Is Bad MMKAY?”) that once rape occurs, you’re going to cut yourself, you’re going to cry and sob and freak out and not be able to function for weeks if not months if not years. I was told how women who are raped are broken, damaged and can never have consensual sex without recalling the rape incident.”
I was reiterating the things that had been TAUGHT TO ME by OTHER PEOPLE about what rape was “supposed to be like.” These are not actual beliefs that I hold as an enlightened and educated adult, but they still permeate our culture, and they still highly stigmatize rape victims who do not fall into that narrow definition of what our society has decided rape “is”.
100% this!
The most traumatizing aspect of mine (which involved being blackout to the point where I was completely incoherent, throwing up, unable to stand on my own, and very obviously unable to consent to anything) was that:
1. People who I thought were my friends were in the same house and let it happen. They did not have my back or take care of me like I would have taken care of and protected them in the same situation. They observed a stranger clinging onto me, leading me around, and molesting me, and shrugged it off to avoid messing up their fun party.
2. They later called me a slut for it and treated it like I consented and was the only responsible party (the rapist was a stud, I was a slut)
3. One of the guys who I thought was a close friend was actually jealous of the guy and decided that, to get back at me for daring to “friend zone” him when he never told me he even had feelings for me, he would tell everyone that I also had sex with him when I specifically did not. Leading this group of people to further mock me, and lump the one consensual sex act I had with a person in our group of friends in with a rape and non-existent encounter, as proof that I was a huge slut.
Yeah, the reaction by other people was so much worse than the actual assault. I barely remember the assault, but when people blamed me for what happened, well, I had to completely cut those people out of my life. I couldn’t handle it. And that is what gave me hangups about my own sexuality for years. Feeling like, even if I didn’t have sex (or didn’t have sex willingly) I would still be a slut.
Meanwhile MRAs try to tell me that the phenomenon of women not reporting their rapes isn’t real, that women aren’t shamed into keeping silent. When you’re shamed into feeling at fault for the rape, of course you’re not going to report it! These guys serious make me sick.
@Darksidecat: I didn’t mean it’s ever wrong to discuss your personal experiences. If more rape victims publicly discussed their personal experiences (I’m not implying that it’s a DUTY of course), people would come to realize that there is no “right” way to react, people react differently, and in most cases at least rape victims aren’t completely messed-up for the rest of their lives (and this is not implying that it’s WRONG to BE messed-up for the rest of their lives, one doesn’t decide how to react to such a thing).
What I do think is wrong is writing blog posts or internet forum posts or telling people irl with great confidence that ALL rape victims are damaged for life and completely destroyed by the event, that’s just the way it WORKS. That message is bad for several reasons, one of them being that rapists might be encouraged when hearing about the tremendous power they supposedly possess.
I wasn’t trying to take your quote out of context, and I definitely am not trying to act like you’re being a jerk. Sorry if my comment came across that way. I understand that what I was quoting from you was stuff that you had been taught. The problem I saw was that you were restating what you had been taught, which was that certain reactions = the person being broken forever, and how surprised you were that you didn’t have those reactions/weren’t damaged and broken forever. But you didn’t say anything about how having those other reactions doesn’t mean a person is broken forever, which maybe you thought went without saying. So I was just trying to point out that saying, “well I was taught x idea” without then saying “and x is a wrong idea” can come off as sounding like you do believe x idea yourself, or at least see nothing wrong with it. I’m glad that’s not the case.
Rape jokes break awkward tention in his experience? I hate to think about who he hangs around with.
It wasn’t a joke. He would do it. Women and girls aren’t fully human to guys like this. And there are a LOT of guys like this.
Men are a fucked up lot.
pujeemuhs: People are a fucked up lot. That one happens to be male.
IT WAS A JOKE GUIZ!!!
I MEAN I KNOW ITS MENTALLY LOGICALLY PHYSICALLY SCARRING *RAPE* BUT ITS A JOKE! BREAKING TENSION! AWWW…
Estelle Stewart: There is a wonderful Russian saying about this. Somewhat hard to translate, it basically goes something like this: “There is a bit of a joke within every joke.” The point is, a joke is never solely for shits and giggles; it also betrays the joker’s deeply held beliefs. When a person says he’d rape a woman if he could get away with it, I frankly fail to see what’s witty about it — unless he believes rape, in and of itself, is kinda funny. It doesn’t mean he disagrees that it’s “mentally logically physically scarring”; on the contrary, it’s quite possible that that’s what makes rape funny for him. I don’t advocate shutting anyone up (on the contrary, I prefer for people to have the freedom to reveal what they are really all about) — but the kinds of jokes you make, the kinds of things that give you joy and lighten your mood, tell me a lot about what you are like as a person.