I’m still officially on my Man Boobz staycation, but I felt I needed to mention yet another example of a woman saying that men can stop rape … and getting rape threats in return.
Political analyst Zerlina Maxwell went on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News earlier this week and made the terrible mistake of suggesting to a hostile audience that men aren’t really doing any favors to women by telling them to arm themselves against rapists. Instead, as Salon notes, she said this:
“I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there.” She told Hannity, “You’re talking about this as if it’s some faceless, nameless criminal, when a lot of times it’s someone you know and trust,” adding, “If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.”
Indeed, increased rape awareness has contributed to a dramatic decrease in rape over the last thirty years.
But apparently a lot of men were shocked – shocked! – that a woman would suggest that their patronizing advice was less likely to prevent rape than rape prevention education aimed at the demographic group that is responsible for the overwhelmng majority of rapes. That is, men.
So, naturally, the angriest of these men decided they would show Maxwell just how wrong she was … by threatening her with rape on Twitter.
Here’s just one example:
Rape culture in action.
Maxwell’s supporters have stepped up to defend her and her remarks, and have started a hashtag — #TYZerlina — to continue the discussion. If you’re on Twitter, join in .
Here’s the Fox News segment in question featuring Maxwell:
@poxy: The reason that I brought up the case of the 11 year old was in response to your statement that, with child abuse, we don’t have to bother with stuff like ‘grey rape’, and that it’s utterly condemned by society. For children under the age of about 9 I’d agree with you, however in this case of the 11 year old, the defence attorney and many members of her community believed that she was at least partly responsible for what happened. My point being that, yes, we have come some way towards utter condemnation of child sex abuse, but we are not all the way there yet.
I’d disagree with you there. For starters, there were many in her community who believed that e.g. how she dressed was relevant (NY Times article and critique). Second, desperate as the attorney was (there was video evidence of the rapes), he is not going to make an argument that absolutely will not fly. Imagine for example that she had been a toddler instead; no attorney in their right mind would try what he did, no matter what the toddler said or how it “consented”. The fact that he tried it says that he thought here was some small chance that it might work.
This is true. I suppose the conversation got a bit confused because not all child sex abuse is committed by true paedophiles, and not all paedophiles abuse. I was responding to your comment about child sex abuse broadly, rather than just that committed by paedophiles.
Though you should see, in acknowledging the fact that these men are unlikely true pedophiles, you are also acknowledging that these men were not driven to do this by their orientation, which raises the possibility that this is something that can be educated out of them. (As an example of educating child sex abuse out of someone, I’d give Mestary from Najibullah Quraishi’s ‘The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan’).
There are a few assumptions embedded in that, probably the most dubious one being that ‘rapist’ is an unchangeable orientation like paedophilia is, and thus cannot be influenced by education and beliefs. I have seen no evidence that this is the case. Instead, I see evidence where the beliefs that communities hold about women and male authority lead to rape, to the point where the society might not even realise that a rape has occurred nor understand it to be a crime against that girl/woman. A few examples that spring to mind include the FLDS church, Old Testament law, rabbinical law re. children under 3, and Aisha the 9 year old wife of Muhammad. These things are fixable – it wasn’t that long ago that marital rape was called conjugal rights!
I think the fact that they thought it was acceptable to try says something. Presumably they’d’ve assumed it could work.
They’re awfully similar. If they don’t believe they have a right to it, why are they whining? (and ‘I’m sad I haven’t gotten laid in a while’ is different from ‘why won’t those bitches fuck me’)
I think it might be an evo psych theory, it appears in my copy of ‘Animal Behavior’ by John Alcock. I’ve only got the 7th edition though from 2001.
I should confess that I was working on the assumption that low IQ directly correlates with criminality, the reasoning being that a low IQ leads to poor decision-making ability, and criminality is a poor decision. But a bit of Googling suggests that it’s not that straightforward, so I’m backing down from that.
@nerdypants Doesn’t surprise me, Bullshit rape apology then as now.
@titianblue: I don’t know what the status of that theory is, but I don’t think that it is or is meant to be rape apologia. I want to quote you a bit from the book:
I suppose it is a bit like the paedophilia-as-an-orientation hypothesis. Saying that it might be an orientation is only an explanation for why certain people behave this way. It’s not saying that it is a good thing. The universe is a cold and indifferent place; many things that are so are not how we would want them to be.
It is quite different from paedophilia-as-an-orientation hypothesis. The one is saying you cannot control to whom you are attracted. The other is saying that you cannot control what you do about that attraction “because evolution”. I call bullshit!
@titianblue: There is nothing in the rape-as-adaptive-tactic hypothesis that says that it cannot be controlled, or that people are not accountable when they fail to do so. Even the true paedophile is held to account for their actions. The questions about why people do what they do, versus what we should do with them when they do, are in two separate spheres.
I was not aware that lawyers/families/the majority of the population of some towns where little girls are raped existed in some sort of magical space outside society. What a fascinating new discovery.
Poxy, you are simply not educated enough on this topic to have a useful, interesting conversation about it. Go do some reading and then come back.
(But only if you can restrain the urge to pepper your comments about child abuse with cutesy emoticons, because seriously, that was messed up.)
Thanks, David!
@titianblue:
No, I’m not. That should be some sort of reductio ad absurdum of nerdypants argument who claimed that it’s unsurprising that pedophiles offend. What you quote here is the absurd conclusion.
@hellkell:
I just said that they are not good evidence. Lawyers, if desperate, clutch at every straw they can get. I admit that they don’t try to blame black magic anymore, so you are right, they don’t exist completely outside of society.
But seriously, some of them are just comically unscrupulous. Topgun DUI? The Sandusky hygiene defense? Or if you take insurance lawyers, they’ll claim a person was already dead before the car crash.
@Marie:
Normative or should-statements and rights are very different. At least for most people. E.g libertarians would claim that you don’t have a right to be saved from starvation by your family, but that it’s ethically wrong that they let you you starve. Also, how is “I’m sad I haven’t gotten laid in a while” so different from “Why wont any woman fuck me? Boo-hoo.”?
First government in the world to codify rape in marriage as a crime: South Australia in 1976. Not that long ago at all.
This whole evo-psych claim skeeves me out because justifying rape is exactly how it’s used by rape apologists, “incels” and the like. “If bitches don’t fuck me I will be UNCONTROLLABLY DRIVEN to rape them” is the line of threat from more than just GGG.
Reading is fundamental, Poxy. Go do some before you show your ass in public again.
Poxy: “I don’t really know what this has to do with sexual orientation. If pedophiles can’t be educated not to rape children, the same must be true for men, who for some reason are unable to get consensual sex with adult women.”
titanblue: “Bloody hell, Poxy! You’re seriously positing that hetrosexual men rape women because “for some reason [they] are unable to get consensual sex with adult women” ?”
How the fuck is that reductio ad absurdum? No, seriously. You said, in exactly this wording, “men, who for some reason are unable to get consensual sex with adult women” — in the context of whether pedophiles can “be educated not to rape children”. It takes all of two brain cells knocking together to infer that you meant “men (who rape adults), who for some reason cannot get consensual sex with adult women”.
It isn’t anything like a leap of logic, and certainly not a reductio ad absurdum, to decide that you meant to imply that men rape women because they can’t get consensual sex. You basically said as much!
Which is ignoring the endless troupe about how, wait for it, men rape because they can’t get laid and have to get those desires filled somehow!
That’s why education seems like such a good idea to me. Sure, there are asshole rapists who would rape regardless and just won’t call it by that name because they don’t want to sound bad, but with all the misinformation that goes around about sex and consent (especially all the sources that say that women say “no” when they mean “yes”), I’m sure there are guys out there who honestly think they aren’t doing anything wrong and may honestly think that’s just how sex is: a guy pushing until a girl gives in.
@CassandraSays:
I don’t remember that I said that.
Could you be a bit more specific? What exactly makes you think that way?
Doesn’t it make a difference for you if your neighbor runs over your cat by accident or deliberately, Cassandra?
OK, I call troll. Go back to wherever it is that trolls live when they’re not pestering feminist blogs, little troll.
Cassandra, I admire your restraint in waiting this long to call troll.
I was hoping that zie would make it really super obvious for anyone who was lurking. Thanks for that comment about running over people’s cats, Poxy! That was nice and clear.
“Could you be a bit more specific? What exactly makes you think that way?”
Oh Cassandra the mighty detector of socks, didn’t we have nearly this exact line while Brz, NNY etc where being dumb and altogether too alike to distinguish? (Also, anyone find it odd we have two new “this smells of sock” cases right after they vanished?)
We have had a rush of “I have no point, I just want you to keep talking to me because I’m really lonely and irritating people on the internet is as close to frienship as I can get” trolls recently.
It’s ok, Cassandra & katz, I’m not angry about you. It’s a problem many people have, now I experienced it first hand.
http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=425&start=25#p4115
Yes, honey, other trolls also get labeled as trolls. Run along now.
Yep. Sometimes I wonder if that kind of thing is some holdover from teleological thinking, or some mutant of theological concepts like Natural Law. But I’m probably over-thinking it; they’re probably just using it as a post-hoc rationalisation for their own shittiness.