I‘ve been traveling, so I’m a bit late getting to the whole “Don’t Be That Girl” poster controversy in Edmonton. For those of you who don’t already know all about it: A group called Men’s Rights Edmonton, closely associated with our favorite Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, has been putting up some pretty obnoxious posters parodying an anti-rape poster campaign called “Don’t Be That Guy,” turning the anti-date rape message into one that targets alleged false accusers of rape.
Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams has a pretty good dissection of the whole thing here. As she notes, one of the biggest problems with the “Don’t Be That Girl” posters is
the idiotic defensive assumption that [the original “Don’t Be That Guy”] campaign expressly created to educate men and women about consent merits a hateful, finger-pointing response. And it makes the classic presumption that getting drunk, hooking up and then crying rape is a standard chick operating procedure — an idea that is based, by the way, on no solid statistical evidence.
That’s as good as far as it goes, but I would go a bit further:
I don’t think that MRAs are really concerned about false accusations. If they were, they would be working with groups like the Innocence Project that actually help men (and women) who have been wrongly convicted for crimes they didn’t commit.
No, it seems to me that what they’re really worried about is true accusations.
MRAs, with these posters, and with their endless whinging about the alleged complexities of sexual consent, are trying to push back against the date rape awareness campaigns of the last several decades. MRAs and PUAs like to pretend that consent is a complicated and weirdly arbitrary thing — something that women decide to bestow or not to bestow on a whim, and that women sometimes like to retract after the fact.
Feminists say that whenever there is a question about whether or not you have consent, you need to stop and ask. MRAs and PUAs pretend that this somehow means the death of spontaneous sex if not all sex altogether.
Ironically, for all their complaining about the allegedly blurry line between consent and non-consent, many MRAs and PUAs want to keep that line as blurry as possible. But unlike feminists, who want the blurriness to be resolved before anything happens, most MRAs and PUAs seem to want “blurry” to count as “yes.” That is, unless a woman is shouting no, guys are good to go, and if a woman later says she was raped, it’s because she’s “That Girl” and she’s arbitrarily decided to revoke her consent after the fact.
That’s what’s so insidious about the “That Girl” poster campaign.
And that’s why those responding to it should point out the history of the people sponsoring the campaign. Men’s Rights Edmonton and its spokesperson, Karen Straughan (Girl Writes What) are both closely connected with A Voice for Men, which is actively helping coordinate MRA activism around the issue.
So it’s worth pointing out what A Voice for Men has previously posted about rape — and perhaps putting some of these things on posters.
AVFM founder and publisher Paul Elam blames date rape on its victims, writing in one notorious post — which regular readers here will no doubt remember — that women who are raped after drinking and going home with a man are “begging” to be raped:
I have ideas about women who spend evenings in bars hustling men for drinks … paying their bar tab with the pussy pass. And the women who drink and make out, doing everything short of sex with men all evening, and then go to his apartment at 2:00 a.m.. Sometimes both of these women end up being the “victims” of rape.
But are these women asking to get raped?
In the most severe and emphatic terms possible the answer is NO, THEY ARE NOT ASKING TO GET RAPED.
They are freaking begging for it.
Damn near demanding it.
And all the outraged PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.
Elam has also said that if he is ever on a jury in a rape case he will vote to acquit even if there is clear evidence that the accused is guilty, and he has urged other men to similarly “nullify.” Here is his exact quote:
Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.
The post of his in which this quote appeared is now missing from the AVFM site, but he has confirmed he’s said this elsewhere on the site. [EDIT: I’ve been informed that the original post is also available via the Wayback Machine here.]
Meanwhile, AVFM Editor in Chief John Hembling takes a certain pride in his callousness towards rape victims, and has gone so far as to make several videos in which he’s announced that he doesn’t care about rape, and that if he ever sees anyone being raped, he will simply walk on by. (You can find excerpts of both vidoes here.)
There are many other examples of the site’s utter contempt for rape victims, but perhaps the most telling is the site’s use of the term “rapetard” to describe people who take the issue of rape seriously.
The people behind the Don’t Be That Girl posters claim that they’re merely trying to protect innocent men from false accusers. Their real agenda is much more insidious than that.
Prosecuting false accusers is a genuine rape issue, such people are not only victimizing the accusee, but exploiting genuine victims for their own benefit. The assertion that a drunk man and a drunk woman have sex = the man raped or somehow took advantage should be challenged and discarded. The notion that men are patently immoral and must be reminded that rape is wrong is just weird. If the purpose of the ‘don’t be that guy’ campaign is to demonize male sexuality and terrorize women, it is certainly effective. Much more dubious is whether it will reduce instances of sex assault. Why does this exist, rather than, for instance, and anti-roofie awareness campaign? Is it just a case of “women shouldn’t have to”?
Anyway, a more lucid criticism than the idiot straw men set listed in the article above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHLMfGz3VAI
Why do necro trolls have such terrible reading comprehension? Women get told from a very young age that we are responsible for preventing people from raping us. One campaign that pushes that responsibility back onto everyone, and you lose your fucking shit.
Dude, you realize that the purpose of campaigns like these is not to tell decent people that rape is wrong, but to educate people that having sex with someone who is incapacitated & unable to consent is rape. This is helpful both for people who don’t know that and need the education, but also for bystanders who witness something and intervene.
So of course you don’t like campaigns like this. They might actually reduce rapes, and trolls like you don’t seem to find that a worthy goal.
Yes, because rapists don’t terrorize women – that’s all those anti-rape PSAs.
For the millionth time; nobody is saying men are inherently immoral. However, we do live in a misogynistic culture and 1 out of 6 women have been raped so apparently we do need to remind men that rape is wrong.
As has been pointed out, there was a reduction in sexual assault rates following this campaign. You could have gotten on Google and found that out for yourself instead of going through the trouble of necroing this thread with the same bullshit we’ve heard a million times before.
It’s also very telling that you equate predatory behavior with male sexuality. Why are you such a misandrist?
Justanother troll from PUAHate?
Much more dubious is whether it will reduce instances of sex assault.
That’s not what the data indicate: Vancouver sees 10 percent drop in sexual assault
The secondary takeaway is that of the investigated cases, more than half involved alcohol.*
The tertiary is that 60 percent of the assaults reported weren’t investigated.
So the overall response: even with an active and visible campaign to raise awareness, was that 6 out of 10 people who said they were raped were ignored.
And this, you aver, means that men are victimised by “false accusations” to a level which means it needs to get at least as much attention as rape does.
You are an idiot.
*the quaternary takeaway is that most of the cases which were investigated were probably not prosecuted, for whatever reaso
Yeah, it’s bullshit. You could say that a false accuser was exploiting public sympathy, or the person they were accusing, but exploiting actual victims? Nope. It’s just the kind of thing someone says when they’re (ironically enough) trying to drum up sympathy for their (deeply stupid and misogynistic) argument, or. more charitably, if they just don’t know how to logic.
Let’s just pretend that period after “or” was a comma, shall we? I’m sleepy.
An anti-rape PSA followed me to my car late one night. True story.
cassandrakitty
I have to disagree on this one; the classic defence for rape is that the victim is making a false allegation. However much you might dislike the logic the reality is that the jury will have always been exposed to media representations of women making false allegations, which means the judge will always have to cover it in the advice to the jury.
The reason that police officers, prosecutors and judges say that false rape allegations reduce the chances for justice for the victims of rape is that they are familiar with the way juries react; I have no logical basis to dispute it…
Nope, sorry, not buying it. What’s going on there is that a sexist society is blaming the victims (women) for the fact that they’re often not believed, on the basis that it’s the fault of other women, rather than the fault of a society that’s saturated in rape culture that encourages people not to believe women who say they’ve been raped. It’s a similar argument to the one racists make when they blame the existence of black people who are actually criminals for the fact that society often assumes all black people to be potential criminals.
There’s also the issue of how disrespectful it is to actual rape victims to falsely accuse someone of rape. But I sometimes think this is related to how flippantly people treat the issue of rape in our culture. We aren’t really socialized to see it as a “true” crime.
Basically the reason people make that argument is the same reason that juries default to “oh but I heard about this one woman who made a false allegation” – women are assumed to be liars, particularly when it comes to rape. You (and the judges, and the cops) are taking the existence of deeply embedded misogynist ideas that state that women always/usually lie about rape and using the existence of a very small number of false allegations as justification for that prejudice. My college textbooks are all back in the UK, but they covered this. Many police departments, and many judges, treat women who make rape allegations as assumed liars until proven otherwise. Go read the things judges have said from the bench during rape trials, particularly in the UK, if you want to figure out why they’re really not an unbiased source when it comes to this issue.
Telling men not to rape is “demonizing make sexuality?”
So rape is an inherent part of male sexuality?
How misandrist of you, justanother.
Not MY sexuality. That justanother apparently can’t tell the difference between “male sexuality” and “raping someone who is unconscious” (which is what those ads are freaking ABOUT) really makes me wonder exactly what he thinks male sexuality is.
Because if he thinks “male sexuality” is creepy dominating aggression, he is full of shit.
I know the cool kids have moved on from saying QFT so I’m just pointing up at these words and shouting THIS! THIS! RIGHT HERE, THIS!
And surely there is no element of misogyny here or anything. /sarcasm
I wish I did have my textbooks with me, just so I could find the name of the British judge who quite literally told the jury to “remember that women often lie about rape” from the bench during a rape trial.
(I’m paraphrasing, btw, since it’s been 20 years since I took that class. Just thought I’d make that clear before someone comes back with “ah, but he actually said don’t forget, not remember, so your argument is invalid and now I don’t have to think about how deeply embedded rape culture is, yay”.)
I might give this more than a side-eye if more rape cases ever even saw a jury.
False accusers don’t make justice more difficult for victims to obtain. Only the oppressive norms of society contribute to the injustice against rape victims. That’s why so many people are eager to call female complainants liars despite the vanishingly rare incidence of false rape reports (and an even lower incidence of false rape accusations).
Trust me, we don’t need to do that. We already have hordes of rape apologists screaming about how “DRUNK SEX ISN’T RAPE” while completely missing the fucking points that feminists and womanists make about rape via intoxication.
The posters focus on male-on-female rapists in an effort to bring awareness to other men who wish to not harm women and to stigmatize male rapists. They focus on male perpetration because it’s a feature of a system that oppresses women. It would also be appropriate to make posters stigmatizing female rapists and bring awareness to other women. That would be an actually constructive use of the “Don’t be that girl” posters, yet all AFVM wants to do is to exploit this opportunity for the sake of expressing their views through terrible satire and try to play another tiresome game of “What if the genders were reversed?”
Uh, I have a strong fear of being sexually assaulted, and I don’t find myself terrorized by those posters. I’m glad they exist because they highlight the problem of male sexual violence against women. In any case, it is important to bring to light the reality of male sexual violence against women even if it is a disturbing truth to hear.
Plenty of people already know about date rape drugs. In fact, quite a few women are told to watch out for them. There’s no point. Moreover, it is very common for some men to exploit the intoxicated state of women in order to rape them. Date rape drugs aren’t as common as many people assume.
I’m not watching another boring anti-feminist video. Fuck you.
Yep, tell women (again) to watch their drinks, as if we didn’t already do that. Don’t bother telling men not to roofie women, that would be shaming them for their sexuality. Remind me again why people think feminists are the ones who don’t like men?
cassandrakitty
I’m looking at the research which has been done, and, in addition to the juries and judges you mention, I am considering the position of the Crown Prosecution Service, which you have entirely omitted from your comment.
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the law of England Wales, decisions as to whether to prosecute or not are made by the Crown Prosecution Service; this is an entirely separate organisation to police forces. It is the job of the police to gather evidence, and to provide that evidence to the CPS; they in turn are required to consider that evidence under the policy laid out at:
http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/prosecution/rape.html
It’s very detailed, and you don’t need your textbooks to consider and comment on that policy. For the benefit of any MRAs who may be reading this, it does specifically cover instances where boys and men have been raped.
The sentencing guidelines for judges are also available online, and from 1st April 2014 revised guidelines for sexual offences came into effect, which, in general, increase the punishments; there is a press release on this at:
http://sentencingcouncil.judiciary.gov.uk/media/974.htm
and you can download the new guidelines at:
http://sentencingcouncil.judiciary.gov.uk/guidelines/guidelines-to-download.htm
Incidentally, you have also omitted to mention that the Attorney General also has the right to appeal against sentencing in a case where he believes that the judge has been unduly lenient. One example of that in a rape case can be found at:
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2012/1119.html
where the sentences were doubled.
There is a very long way to go before sexual offences can be comprehensively deterred, since misogyny is pervasive, but I do not think it is helpful to overlook the fact that people are working to try and change things.
Just out of curiosity, are you digging your heels in on this because you don’t like being disagreed with/didn’t like the tone in which I did so, or is there some reason that you’re actually invested in ignoring how deeply embedded misogyny and rape culture are in the justice system?
@Cassandrakitty – was it in Helena Kennedy’s book “Eve Was Framed”?
I seem to have read that too… though, then again, there have been so many cases in my lifetime where British judges said dreadful things during rape cases, it can be hard to keep track.