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So the Sigma Nu house at Old Dominion University in Virginia apparently decided last weekend to reinforce the not-exactly-unjustified popular perception that fraternities are basically giant petri dishes for growing rape culture by hanging these lovely banners out for all incoming students to see.
People have already come out of the woodwork to defend the banners as “politically incorrect” humor, as Amanda Marcotte points out on Pandagon, and suggesting that they can’t possibly be referring to rape. She quotes one Washington Post commenter, who claims that while
the signs are crude and dumb … this repulsive habit of charging “rape culture” every time a male mentions sex with a female is even more crude, more dumb, and far more dangerous. There is absolutely nothing in the signs (at least not the ones in the photo above) that even implies non-consensual sex. These lunatics throw around “rape” the way Joe McCarthy flung around “communist” and with just as much concern for truth and justice as he did.
Marcotte, who has encountered more than her share of mansplainy MRA trolls over the years, points out the fundamental bad faith of this “argument.”
Just because the signs imply rather than overtly call for force does not mean they aren’t rape culture. This is how rape culture is, in fact, created: Through winks and nudges, rather than overt calls to force sex on women.
While the banners do not overtly say “rape” on them, the implication is easy enough to see, even for people pretending they don’t see it. …
If you think of consent as something that is freely given and enthusiastic, the coercive element of these signs, which portray women as basically fuckholes who have no say in how they’re used, is staring you right in the face. …
But, of course, that comment shows what rape apologists always do: They suddenly pretend they are aliens from another planet and only learned human language last week and therefore are incapable of picking up on humor, implication, non-verbal communication and nuanced language. They pretend to ascribe to a form of communication so literal that even the slightest bit of metaphor or implication, to hear them talk, sends them spinning into a state of confusion.
Sounds like more than a few MRAs and GamerGaters I’ve encountered in my day. Actually, it sounds like almost all of them.
Happily, the school administrators at Old Dominion University are having none of it, suspending the frat pending an investigation.
Over at Fox News’ Outnumbered show — the one with all the women on it — co-host Harris Faulkner resorted to the old “boys will be boys” argument, saying that
these guys are teenagers and in their twenties and they were probably drunk when they were writing the sign … they’re just having a good time.
Later in the show, after co-host Kennedy Montgomery jokingly suggested she would send her own daughters to a convent to keep them safe, Faulkner declared
I’m going to keep them home in the kitchen.
For anyone playing along at home, this is rape culture too.
Um … how long ago?
Colleges have been the scenes of lots of hook-ups and casual sex since (and date rape)…. well at least the lates 60s and I’m sure they saw their fair share before even if it was less due to then-common intrusive rules on behavior (ie. curfews in girls dorms etc). Hell, if anything colleges are LESS crazy than they were in the 70s and 80s. So, unless you graduated college in the 50s you are just succumbing to the common tendency of the older to romanticize their youth.
@ Ellesar
Oh definitely.
Corbyn: “I like puppies”
New Labour: “Puppies are evil; they’ll wreck the economy and hand the keys of the country to the Soviets. They should all be drowned.”
I’m not even a Labour supporter but I think it’s ridiculous the amount of stick he’s getting.
As to the carriages thing. They have them in Japan. Having said that, a friend of mine was seriously assaulted in Japan and when she tried to get the police to do anything about it her experience was basically:
1. You’re making it up.
2. He was probably Korean
3. You were asking for it..
4. Stop dissing Japan, your visa is revoked.
So, in context, she wasn’t very impressed generally with Japan’s attitude to assault on women.
We did have “Ladies Only” carriages in Britain though until 1977; and you could smoke.
I think your Japan example proves skiriki’s point – if you do not change the culture around sexual harassment and assault then the idea just ends up as another way to blame women.
@ Ellesar
Yeah, it’s a dilemma. Personally I think if women want safe spaces they should have them. I don’t think it shifts the burden on them to ‘stay safe’ or implies somehow they’re responsible for anything that happens if they choose not utilise the space.
It’s a bit like my self defence stuff. I don’t believe there’s any onus on women to protect themselves but it’s an option for women to choose if they so wish. This is a complex subject though. How to teach and not get into victim blaming and all that; especially as I do some classes specifically for people who’ve experienced DV. I always try to ensure I say ‘could have done’ not ‘should have done’. I do often cock that up but they’re a nice forgiving bunch.
This is something I could ramble on about for hours (‘You don’t say?’), it raise al sorts of issues. Women often say they find knowing how to defend themselves ’empowering’ but think on the implications of that for example.
Between frats, and the whole stupid manosphere system of ranking men as alphas, betas, and omegas, I’ve started to associate Greek letters with terminal douchiness. It’s like these guys think borrowing from antiquity gives assholery a respectable, academic sheen.
And yet, imagine the male tears and outrage that would result if a sorority hung up banners saying “HOPE YOUR LITTLE BOY IS READY FOR 18 YEARS OF CHILD SUPPORT!” and “LINE FORMS HERE FOR FALSE RAPE ACCUSATIONS!” I doubt we’d be hearing “oh, lighten up, they’re just having fun” then.
This is the flip side of the Alabama recruitment video. The only good thing about either one is that there has been backlash against both.
I know that when I was in college the first time in the 70s, I had no clue about much of the wider world. I would not have understood the anger about either the video or the frat house signs.
In my defense, I thought frats were repulsive back then, never even thought to join one, and I was a full blown alcoholic by that time. [sobered up a few years later, finished a degree in early 2000s]
So, I’m willing to believe the girls thought they were making a silly little video and the boys thought they were making silly jokes, it’s an indictment of the culture, not the individuals.
I say boys and girls because I think they were being childish, whatever their ages are.
I’m not condoning the behavior, and shutting down the frat house is a good thing. It’s just that I’d like to think most of the boys were being immature jerks rather than rapists.
http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md5uvy6Dfu1rkrwp7o1_1280.jpg
Well, the frat is suspended, the creeps could be expelled. Wonder if they are laughing now. This type of behavior is not acceptable.
Falconer, assuming that was directed at my post, what was that directed at? Do you think they are rapists? that they should have known better? Not being sarcastic here, just don’t know.
If that was directed at something else, sorry, came directly after my post.
Oh how I wish a sorority or any other all female house would actually do this to prove that double standard.
I hate how men are allowed to say the worst, most offensive things and we’re expected to suck it up and have sense of humor. But feminists particularly are expected to constantly bend over backwards to keep our language neutral and our tone even and refrain from snark in order to prove that we’re not men haters. If frats can chant about raping bitches, I can joke about male tears.
Here’s the thing. Sororities at the University of Alabama have a history of racism and keeping black pledges out. I posted a link to a story about that in the post about that video. And I think we all know that frat brothers are accused of rape all the time. I don’t know about this specific house, but one of the brothers in the frat that was chanting about raping bitches was accused of rape.
This stuff isn’t harmless and it isn’t just jokes or cluelessness and we can’t blame the culture entirely without holding individuals accountable. Making misogynistic jokes enables the kind of entitlement and objectification of women that lets men believe women’s bodies are there for the pleasure of their boner and it’s okay to do whatever it takes, including rape to access our bodies. You’re basically just using the same excuse that been used to excuse toxic misogyny that has always been used. Boys will be boys. How is the culture ever going to change if we don’t hold people, especially people in the most privileged groups accountable for their role in shaping culture.
Way to completely remove their agency. People make plenty of stupid mistakes at that age, but they’re not children. And being young isn’t an excuse for being racist or sexist. Being called out is the only way they’re going to learn. Dismissing them as just kids isn’t going to cut it.
You have that luxury. Women don’t. I don’t give a fuck if some or even all of them haven’t raped anyone yet. Any woman on that campus is perfectly justified in treating any guy living in that house as a potential rapist and steering clear. As we’ve outlined upthread, there are plenty of red flags there to suggest that they could very be rapists.
And as much as people are dismissing this as a joke or immaturity on the part of these guys, you can bet your ass that if any woman is ever raped in that house, all of a sudden people are going to be saying “she should have known he was a rapist, look at those signs! What was she doing going into that house anyway?”
Women are always supposed to assume a man has good intentions. Until the man rapes a woman. Then she should have known he was a rapist beforehand.
We have been having a fairly notorious trial here in Concord of a student at the very prestigious St. Paul’s School. He was a senior “prefect”: (a student chosen to a junior leadership role), admitted to Harvard (subsequently rescinded), who is accused of having raped a freshman girl. Labrie [the accused student] is accused of scraping the inside of her vagina with his fingernails, biting her, and spitting on her as well as the rape itself. The victim is 15, but since NH law provides that for a sex act to be statutory rape, the rapist must be four years older than the victim, Labrie must be convicted of forcible rape.
What is most disgusting about this is the context.
“Labrie told detectives about school’s culture of seniors collecting girls’ virginity before they graduate – a ‘tradition’ called the ‘Senior Salute’ ”
A tradition at the school, they say. This is what parents pay $60,000 a year for.
I invite anyone who thinks that rape culture is a myth to explain away this “tradition.”
Falconer,
Thanks, I understand that now. That was not my intent at all. One of my basic assumptions in life is that most people are good. That’s what I was trying to say.
The commenters on this blog force me to think hard when I post. And I still screw up, my apologies. It is never my intent to offend anyone here. IRL, it would be easier to convey nuances that get lost in written word.
It’s not that they don’t have agency so much as they don’t use it. I’d like to imagine that many in the fraternity thought that the signs [and what they represent] were stupid and horrible, but nobody was willing to stand up and say that, so that a small minority were able to do what they wanted.
Maybe that’s just hopelessly naive on my part and the frats are riddled with men who congregate there because they can prey on women with little consequence. I hope not.
I was young and ignorant once, my hope is that the young men involved were young and ignorant as well, not evil. Doesn’t mean they should go unpunished or that they should be trusted.
Does mean, that, if they aren’t evil, that they can learn from what happened and become better people.
Of course, because when we do it, even in retaliation to men being shitlords, we’re suddenly evil, evil femicommunazis, and we’re the reason why people “hate feminism”.
Because the moment that they even so much as suspect that women might treat them the same way they’ve treated women over the course of gods know how long, suddenly they get scared. Because they know the way they treat women is shitty, and they don’t want to be on the wrong end of that particular social construct.
But of course! Men’s feelings are prioritized over women’s safety and comfort all the time! Men shouldn’t have to have their feelings hurt, so women can just suck it up! Telling a man that he’s being a shitty person who’s making women feel unsafe by acting like (and sometimes being) a predatory asshole is misandry because it hurts his fee-fees, and that’s the most important thing, besides his peen! [/sarcasm]
Of course, feminists being categorized as “man haters” and “ugly”/”unfuckable”/”Not good wife material” goes way, way back, and nothing MRAs or other anti-feminists say is anything new.
But we’re still expected to be nice to the poor menz and their fee-fees because that’s just what women do.
We’re expected to coddle them and all their bullshit, and when we don’t, men will shift the goalposts and say they’ve “won”. In fact, they’ll try to get us angry just so they can “win” by some stupid fucking rule of “you can’t get angry”, because we’re the ones with the most skin in this “game” of theirs, so we have more to lose, and we’re naturally kind of fucking riled up about it, and we’re naturally pissed off that these shitheads are refusing to listen.
[/rant]
“Rowdy and Fun, hope your baby girl is ready for a good time…”
This one is probably the most nuanced. It plays on the stereotype of a protective father who wants to defend his daughter’s purity. This concept is patriarchal in nature; a girl’s sexuality isn’t her father’s property. Their assertion that they are going to steal young women’s “innocence” is aimed at the fathers, in an attempt to frighten and emasculate them. On top of that the signs are rapey as they tap into this perception of a girl’s sexuality belonging to others. If they are giving the girl a “good time”, whilst believing that a girl’s sexuality is her father’s concern, they implicitly don’t care about consent and whether the girl is really enjoying herself. “A good time” is clearly an innuendo for sex, it isn’t about sexual satisfaction for women, at least in the sense of mutually consensual sex.
“Freshman Daughter Drop-Off”
This one is less complex. Whilst subtle, the idea of women as a commodity is present. Again, there is an undertone of patriarchal power-play with the fathers who see the signs. “Your daughters belong to us now” is at the very least implied.
“You can drop off Mom too”
This one takes the cake. Up until now, they could have been trying to intimidate the young woman, her mother, or her father. However, it’s now clear that the father is the only one being addressed directly here. This is a power-play between a group of man-children and a perceived cult of frightened fathers who are terrified of their precious daughters being besmirched in some way. Note that the father is the only one worth addressing; the actual agency of the women involved is apparently ignored.
Now tell me that these signs weren’t;
a) intended to intimidate
b) formulated in a concerted effort to create an atmosphere of sexual fear
[and at the very least]
c) highly offensive banners which betray implicitly sexist biases and opinions among a group of young men who are supposedly adults.
In some ways the low-level version of this bothers me even more: How guys can constantly be mildly obnoxious or unpleasant and everyone is “Oh, that’s so him” but if a woman is ever like “dude, knock it off” then it’s time to have a Conversation.
@PI & Twiggins
http://media.giphy.com/media/ZU9QbQtuI4Xcc/giphy.gif
(Hey, Twiggins, are you new? If so, go take a welcome package with extra candles, you deserve it. … And I just noticed that the welcome package is currently missing due to the whole layout redo bizzo. Oops. Consider it an IOU, then. =P)
Welcome Package.
Regarding the train cars, I think that the whole community may be better served if the whole line became the “safe space” and not only given cars. If funds are going to be spent, let them be directed towards more investigators/investigations of complaints, roving transit officials, and more public service campaigns calling out the bad behaviour.
I don’t know how prevalent the harassment is, and whether there’s more than just harassment of women taking place on the trains. I think it may serve everyone better to target the harassers and not to try and isolate those being harassed* into a “safe” space.
*there’s more than just cis-women being harassed on a daily basis I’m sure, and creating a safer space for them may have the unintended side effect of further focusing harassment on those who are not permitted into the “women only” spaces. How many designated train cars can the line handle during the rush hour crush for harassees before the focus has to shift to the harassers?
@Paradoxical Intention
Those were some good links, thanks for the read. And yeah, it’s completely bullshit, fuck those double standards and fuck the absolutely bullshit idea that you ‘lose’ by getting angry at offensive shit literally designed to make one angry.
That’s something that is inherent to male culture. You show emotion = you lose because everyone knows that emotions are for sissy little girls. 4chan does this a lot. It’s a constant pissing contest of “who can not react to this unbelievably gross or disgusting gif”. On the playground boys try to ‘fake out’ other boys by lunging out them. If the boy recoils or has any sort of reflex, it’s HAHAHAHA YOU GOT SCARED HAHAHA.
IMO The emotions/logic dichotomy exists to reinforce the bullshit idea that men and women are ‘wired’ differently. And of course, logic is considered superior to emotions. How convenient! This is why every shitty antifeminist youtube page starts with “I use logic and rationality to analyze things…….” Nevermind that this usually segways into “OMG I’M SO PISSED OFF AT FEMINIST FREQUENCY WTF!!!!111!!”
At the very least, sexist asshats who spend their whole lives trying to suppress emotions end up having close to zero self awareness.
@Berdache, sorry, that was aimed at the whole situation. Those banners are disgusting and I didn’t have the energy to think about it.
@Falconer,
No problem, making me think through my ideas is never a bad thing.
Bedarche,
I’m the one who took issue with your post and specifically addressed your points. I’m a little confused about why you’ve completely ignored that but are obsessing over Falconer’s nope gif.
Ugh at the right-wingy comments. Especially that Washington Post one: the comparison between McCarthyism and using the phrase “rape culture” falls flat. I guess his logic goes something like this:
McCarthyism: someone has left-wing associations, gets called a communist =
feminism: someone says/writes a sexist message, gets called a rapist
This doesn’t work because if you write a sexist message for people to see, your chances of being prosecuted as a rapist for that is about zero. You might be fired/demoted/suspended for breaking a conduct policy, and that’s because you wrote something harmful. In McCarthyism, people were fired and blacklisted for supposedly being communist spies when in many cases they’d done nothing wrong.
On a more personal level, my brother’s starting university – in a different province – next week, and this post is giving me protective big sister feelings. I don’t want him to be harassed by people with predatory attitudes. The people who have predatory sexual attitudes are often bullies in general, and my brother’s sort of short and shy (like me).
At least he’s learned to think compassionately and critically and wouldn’t fall for this bullshit. I hope.