This lovely poster, meant as a sarcastic response to this “10 Top Tips to End Rape” poster, has gotten 759 upvotes in the Men’s Rights subreddit. Well, 759 net upvotes. It’s actually gotten more than 1200 upvotes, and 450 downvotes. Because, clearly, trying to stop the small percentage of rape accusations that are false is totally so much more important than trying to stop rape itself. Mocking rape prevention programs and promoting a culture in which women (and men, and genderqueer people) are afraid to come forward with real stories of rape for fear of being harassed and ridiculed is really the only decent thing to do. Plus: Lulz!
Here one commenter explains the “logic” behind the poster:
The discussion is, well, what you’d expect from r/mensrights. But don’t worry: some people have stepped up to critique the poster.
That’s right, solidwhetstone, your rapey poster wasn’t rapey enough!
—
There is some
here.
I had a friend who was raped by a guy she was dating, and had previously had consensual sex with. She never reported it, because the guy pretended like he thought she was only “playfully” resisting him… She just broke up with him and moved on with her life. That’s a pretty typical rape story as well.
I had another friend whom I actually think made a false sexual assault claim. I had gradually begun to understand that she was a compulsive liar who made up all kinds of stuff, when she started telling all our friends that a certain guy had pushed her up against a wall and tried to tear her shirt off at a party. This guy was always sleeping around, but I had never seen him overstep somebody’s boundaries like that. One night I’d gone home with him myself, totally intending to have sex with him, only to black out at his couch because I’d been drinking way too much that night. And I woke up fine and unmolested the next day. Considering a) the girl was a compulsive liar and b) if somebody doesn’t take advantage of a girl who’s passed out, it seems a bit unlikely that he’d violently assault somebody, I think she just made that up. However, she never went to the police with her story.
I didn’t tell her I didn’t believe her about the sexual assault, but I did try to call her out on some other lies where I knew with absolute certainty she’d made things up. But she just went on with her lies, inventing more and more incredible stories, and eventually I just couldn’t be friends with her any longer. Another friends of ours, however, broke with her over the sexual assault thing and openly supported the guy.
In any case, one must be seriously messed up to lie about something like that. It’s not like one has anything to GAIN from it. It’s not like telling people you were sexually assaulted or raped will increase your social status or gain you popularity.
ronalon42 — I’m glad you are sharing your story here, and I didn’t necessarily mean that I found what you said triggering. Much more so, I’m triggered by the assholes who have stopped by this thread to say that rape isn’t a big deal hur hur, and only some rapes count as rape. I’m sorry that it sounded like I was saying you were triggering me!
“The Competitive Enterprise Institute are the same ones who tried to rehabilitate the image of CO2: “Carbon Dioxide–they call it pollution, we call it life.” So, yeah, they’re a right-wing think tank.”
Carbon dioxide: it’s what plants crave!
WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE TREES?
Thanks for the hugs everybody.
But what about teh treez?
Snowy: I don’t understand their whole “regret” wording.
It’s because the people who say it see sex as something which soils women. So, the reasoning (such as it is) goes that by having sex she regrets the woman is now “unclean”.
But if she can foist it off on the world as, “rape” then she is absolved of having chosen to besmirch herself, and so is clean; and wholesome, again.
clairedammit: I have a theory that some men (the ones who probably aren’t rapists but stick up for them) are afraid they’re going to rape somebody accidentally.
Back when I was a callow youth, and almost completely inexperienced in the ways of women (I knew they liked sex, but had not much in the way of clues on how to arrange for a mutual interest to be explored, most of my encounters were because she [metaphorically] clubbed me upside the head and dragged me back to her cave), I was afraid of just that.
The idea that someone might decide, ex post facto that I’d raped them made me a bit more reluctant to try to express my interest. As I got more experience I figured out that I could make my interest plain, and even make sure that any negative response I got was serious (this was in an age where “enthusiastic consent” wasn’t taught the way it is now).
I also had a lot of female friends, who made it plain they liked sex, and that when women were interested, it wasn’t hard to get them to say yes. So I wasn’t prone to the sorts of sly games to “convince” someone to “say yes”.
But at the age of 18-21 I was a bit afraid of committing “rape by misadventure.”
Cliff:
Yeah, he has kind of a shaky grasp of how laws work. Given his I’m-rubber-you’re-glue rhetorical style, I wonder if he was arrested/sued at some point.
NWO:
I’d sort of like to know how Cliff’s “there are no slavering beasts” post went through the Slavey-brain and came out as this. Did he only read the parts that were quoted/paraphrased to be refuted? Did he read each paragraph in isolation?
Cliff:
Seconding this, though with the addendum that if you don’t feel you’re missing out by not having sex (I don’t think the word “virgin” is useful) go ahead and don’t, there’s nothing wrong with making that decision and you don’t have to justify it to nice people.
I’m a fan of the theory that Owly wears enhanced reality goggles that make everything he reads into misandry. So when he read Cliff’s post, all he saw was “Men… are slavering beasts.” This is the only rational explanation of which I can conceive.
(The goggles also make him think he’s writing really thoughtful social justice commentaries in Dvorak rather than Qwerty.)
But at the age of 18-21 I was a bit afraid of committing “rape by misadventure.”
I’ve said this before, but I get the impression that most of the guys who express paranoia about false rape accusations are either a) young men with little sexual experience, who imagine it’s possible to accidentally commit rape because women are just that mysterious, or b) rapists.
I can easily believe a lot of male nerds are in group A. I was.
I shouldn’t do NWO’s research for him, but research is fun:
The law commonly referred to as Title IX is codified as 20 U.S.C. §§1681-1688. Those sections can be read here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Now, the reason the burden of proof is on NWO is because no law will or even can have a complete list of what it doesn’t require (or prohibit). Granted, “law thus-and-such requires X” can be disproven by simple exhaustion, but that wouldn’t satisfy someone who believes I wouldn’t say if I did find it. I would point out that it would be pretty stupid of me to provide a bunch of links and then assert that something is not on any of the linked pages if it actually was.
That said, I present 20 U.S.C. §1681 subsection (b):
If anyone wants to check the actual law against the other nonsense NWO has ascribed to Title IX, feel free, I just didn’t feel like looking it up. Of course, someone who thinks a definition of rape that includes the words “without consent” doesn’t take consent into account is not going to be satisfied with any refutation that doesn’t quote a passage that mentions him by name. If that.
It’s pretty stupid to provide a bunch of links under any circumstances, really, since it (understandably) gets the comment put into moderation. 😛
What the MRA folks seem to have trouble understanding is the concept of legal consent. By definition, drunk or drugged people are incapable of giving legal consent. Likewise, people below the legal age of consent are incapable of furnishing legal consent. It doesn’t matter if they said yes or how they acted.
Shaennon: I wasn’t terrified of it, but it was a concern. I happen to be in the cusp-group. The much-mocked “Antioch Rules” were published when I was in college. Date Rape became a widespread concept while I was in college. The “rules” I’d been absorbing (whether I agreed with them, or not) said guys “had to push”.
All of a sudden pushing could equal rape.
I don’t think (given the culture I was in/am in now) that I’d be worried about it, were I to be that age now. My brother (who is 23 years my junior) seems to not be worried about it at all. From the women I know he’s spent time with, he’s doesn’t seem to be at risk of committing rape.
The world was changing while I was young, for the better, but to be living in that sort of social flux is a bit unsettling. Having sisters who are younger than my brother (the youngest is 10 years younger than my brother) I am really glad for the changes, but I’d rather it was more changed than it is.
Of course, I knew NWO had the correct interpretation of Title IX when I saw all the abandoned football fields at all the public schools in this country. Girls would rather play dress-up than put on pads and risk their health chasing a pigskin, so now boys can’t play football.
All those memories I have of freezing my tits off while watching my school’s football team get trounced are obviously wrongthink and never happened.
And because they’re wrongthink and never happened, they must have been put there by the Greys or the Raelians or the Rosicrucians or the Rothsefellers.
@Pecunium,
But at the age of 18-21 I was a bit afraid of committing “rape by misadventure.”
I, too, had the experience of being very, very concerned about obtaining explicit consent before having sex when I was in college. I also naively assumed that women who were interested would be just as explicit about announcing their intentions (“did you get the reading assignment for class and by the way let’s have sex”).
Of course, in the real world, people have varying degrees of comfort with their own sexuality–young people even more so. As a result, I missed out on having sex a couple of times because I missed or was uncertain about signals that were, in retrospect, about as hard to miss as the Grand Canyon. Other times, I made out with women but dared not go any further because, well, no one told me so. It wasn’t so much a fear of committing rape as a fear of rejection; of course, the fact that women might be equally concerned about rejection did not occur to me. Unlike MRAs, however, I regard this not as a tragedy of epic proportions, but rather as a normal part of growing up and sexual inexperience. All things considered, it’s better to err on the side of caution until you’re clear about yours and other people’s boundaries.
Captain Bathrobe; Yeah, I am sure I missed out on some good times. I have only one real regret; because there was one which had some possibility, and each of us thought the other didn’t know we were alive.
It’s more amusing than that; because the situation was such that the MRAs would be freaking out at how, “she led me on”, or something. Never mind that the same could be said of me. Young, dumb,and foolish.
If only either of us had ever complained to the same person(s) that the other didn’t know we liked them…
Water under bridges.
All in all, I’m much happier it went that way, then the other.
From personal and professional experience, the best way to avoid a false rape accusation is to just pay the female. Never failed me yet!
I know you’re just trying to be obnoxious but I’ve already explained why that’s stupid.
Lousy attempts at humor aside, numbers one and six are exactly factually wrong. A drunk person cannot give valid consent to sex (just as they cannot give valid consent to a tattoo, a business contract et. al); sex without consent is rape.
So if I’m drunk and manage to pick-up a sober girl and bring her home, I’ve been raped ? :p Just kidding, we just have to make the difference between “having sex with a consenting girl being a little drunk, but still able to say no, when you’re drunk too”, and “being sober and picking-up a drunk girl on the verge of passing out just because she WON’T BE ABLE to say no”, the latter being as much rape as putting roofies in the glass of an unsuspecting girl. I just think that when you say that, because people can not give their consent to a tattoo when drunk, they cannot give consent for sex, is a bit misleading, it depends on the person.
The satirical graphic on fake rape is great. Thanks. Hadn’t seen it before. It now has 982 votes. I like it that is uses a contemporary African-American image rather than the 1930s Totalitarian socialist concentration-camp era style image in the original.