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:
It’s apparently really horrendous of me to have any expectations of any kind of life other than opening my legs to any guy I come across. I’m not sure why I have a brain at all, in that case.
I mean, it’s not like the rest of my life resembles “Clan of the Cave Bear”. Why should my sex life resemble it?
Yep. Which is handy for them, since many of them oppose abortion even in cases of rape. Given that, by this definition, the vast majority of rapes aren’t “real” (i.e. stranger) rapes, it makes the need for abortion following a rape vanishingly small. And given their incorrect belief that “forcible rape” like this, done by a stranger, almost never results in pregnancy, it almost completely closes the highly popular “loophole” allowing abortion.
After all, if you knew the guy/had sex with him before/had sex before/weren’t at home in the nunnery/got pregnant, it couldn’t be “real rape” by their logic. So the entire idea of teaching men not to rape is, for them, silly.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
*barfs*
@nerdypants – You really do get the impression that there are a lot of people who envision a rapist as one of the zombies on “The Walking Dead”: some lurching, rotting creature you can see coming about 20 yards off.
I think I’ll have to get a crossbow a la Daryl Dixon…
I hate how you can’t win.
The guys who say: if women would put out more rape would be solves are also the ones that say she got raped because she was a slut.
Besides it is my body and I will choose who I want to have sex with or if I want to have sex at all.
@drst: Maybe. I think – and it’s just a theory of mine – but I think that their difficulty with this concept might be mostly a consequence of the conservative personality itself. Conservatives score higher than liberals on ingroup/outgroup thinking (Jonathan Haidt), and they’re more likely to think in dichotomous terms in general. The idea that a rapist – a criminal – is most likely to be someone known to them is difficult to square with their instinct that the people they know are part of the ingroup. Thinking of the people you know as potential rapists blurs the notion of good guys and bad guys. And if one’s ingroup is also part of one’s self-identity, then it might also impinge upon their own self-concept.
@ellix24:
It’s funny, but I have some sympathy for those who make that mistake. I remember when I first learnt of the statistic – that a rapist is most likely to be someone known to the victim – and it was a bit of a revelation to me. And this is after the fact of having known several friends in highschool who had been raped, and who had all been raped by someone known to them.
We live in an intensely weird age. So many things are getting better faster than they ever could before, but the loudest sound we can hear is people vying to be the biggest assholes the human species has ever witnessed.
“I firmly believe that our society has no desire to see rape reduced, it is too powerful a tool for fathers, husbands, and boyfriends to control women’s behavior. Using the threat of rape allows them the ability to monitor women’s locations, demand a say in their clothing choices, and easily veto their activities like partying and going out.”
As a father of two daughters…you just generalized rape. Yeah, I want my kids to be raped. I wanna rape ’em both. Who cares that they’re four and seven years old, I wanna rape them. It’s the only way to keep them in line. I want rape to be legal so all us dudes can have the same privilege.
No, wait. That’s not right at all. Come to that, I wanted to throw up a little when I typed that.
It’s absolutely astounding to me, though, that even with “no means no” being part of sex ed curricula (hey, they did it at my school, and my graduating class was a whopping 35) reported rape is still 20% of the U.S. female population. What. The. Hell? Do these guys have no freaking self-control? I thought my drive was unusually strong when I was younger, but bloody hell, I never assaulted anyone because of it.
What do you think will happen if a sizable population of women did get guns to prevent being raped, and used them? I don’t think the stand your ground laws envisioned this scenario.
I doubt the NRA would want to supportive of men being shot when the guys can say “I was just trying to get a date” or “we were just making out”.
I doubt any man would be comfortable in this environment where a woman could shoot him on suspicion of preparing to rape his date, friend, current lover,wife, related family member.
It would give a whole new meaning to “creep shaming” though, and the men who whine about it would actually have something to seriously worry about.
@regeya: I think what ashley’s saying is not that everyone in society wants to rape, but that the threat of rape is used by society, consciously or not, as a way to control women.
happy international women’s day!!
Many schools still practice abstinent only education.
My school didn’t even address rape…..
Regeya, its not that most men want to rape their daughters. Its that the threat of your daughters being raped means you get to grill them on who they are with, what they are doing, where they are, what exactly are they wearing, how late they are out. It means teaching your daughters to be fearful of meeting new people, going to new places on their own, to fear being out at night, to be fearful of consuming alchohol, of giving their phone number to the cute guy they just met, o having sex. The list of things women can’t do in a desperate attempt to avoid rape is astounding. And it is power to controlling parents nd boyfriends or husbands. Most people don’t blink when their sons/ male friends are out, late, with people the parents don’t know, at an unspecified location. And boys start doing this in their teens. Girls are far more closely watched.
And just when we needed an illustration of rape culture regeya showed up to imply that rape is a result of some men having a high sex drive.
OT, but isn’t Zerlina such a cool name?
RE: Kim
Zerlina sounds like the name of a fairy tale sorceress to me. Or someone from Oz. It’s awesome, and obviously intended to have some kind of title appended to it, like Zerlina the Magnificent or something.
She deserves a medal for not turning into Zerlina the Merciless in the face of all this crap.
regeya sounded like a more literate NWO, but still batshit.
regeya, it’s like the HPV vaccine. No one considers themselves to be pro-cancer, and no one wants their daughter to get cervical cancer, but people still won’t get their daughters vaccinated because they want the threat to be there. To prevent them from having sex. Which it won’t.
So anyways, Part 1 Anita Sarkeesian’s “Tropes vs. Women” just came out. I haven’t seen it yet, but I hear it’s pretty good. Also, there are a good deal of dudebros complaining about it, obviously, although now, they actually have something to complain about rather than just something that doesn’t exist yet. Their complaints basically say “I don’t like her tone.”
Who wants to have a contest for worst tantrum in response to that new Tropes vs. Women vid? Well, anyway I’ve started one.
regeya—that wooshing sound was the point going right over your head. The next time you find yourself getting upset at something that seems over the top, take a moment and read through it again.
@Cthulhu’s Intern: don’t forget the complaints about, say, her calling Shigeru Miyamoto sexist (even though she doesn’t).
There’s a massive Shit Reddit Says thread about Tropes VS Women being released, some of which covers reddit shitlord responses:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/19vk8v/meta_anita_sarkeesian_releases_her_first_video/
And for anyone interested, here’s the video:
Some folks are mad about the fact you can’t comment (one jerk said she was silencing dialogue), but after what she went through with folks when she announced it…..
Death threats, threats of rape, spam reporting her social networking, trying to hack her email, leak her personal information (where she lived, her phone number), made pornographic rape game with her image, made a game where you could beat her image up, ect. This attack was on a grand scale and made to silence her.
I think Terroja “The Amazing Atheist” has already taken the cake as far as shitty responses to Sarkeesian go. I don’t have a link, but on his tumblr he said that Sarkeesian has no right to feel unsafe because of rape/death threats because he can’t think of any feminists who have been assassinated. That from the guy who did this just a year ago. I have no idea how a guy four years older than me (he’s twenty eight now) is so stunted that he can go around acting like such a giant evil shitbaby, but there you have it.
What a chuckle duck.
@Great American Satan: It does feel like that side has gotten even nastier. (Just check out the Fox News Forums). Reading this, I couldn’t help thinking what would happen if the anti-rape song, “Holder Her Down,” was done today. It’s told through the eyes of a man who finds the act disgusting and gives his sincere empathy to the victim. He’d be flamed as a mangina who is part of the evil “PC/femnazi conspiracy” even by the females of those groups.