The Pitters' Place

http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-men-are ... -big-deal/

comments are worth reading for once.

I just got done reading that! It's pretty good. David Wong can be pretty sharp when it comes to that stuff.

Good article. And we can tell from the comment up- and downvotes that this was not published on 4chan.

haha yes.

It's both depressing and enlightening how many people in the comments are sharing stories of casual day-to-day sexual harassment and assault. Any change would also have to be from the ground up - traditional legal systems just aren't equipped to deal with things like that, especially since most take the form of mild but frequent. It's not worth the effort (and potential risks) to call the cops every time someone grabs a pussy or makes sexually threatening comments, especially if it's a stranger you have no way of identifying. And if you protest or try to take a photo they might get violent, and most victims would rather just leave while they can.

I once got groped by a stranger at a bus stop who whispered "I love you" in Chinese and stroked my thigh, and I was too stunned to move so I sat there thinking 'wtf', and wondering if I'd imagined it, until my bus arrived and he reached out to stroke me again as I got up. There was nothing I could realistically do; I didn't want to make a scene and I didn't want to miss my bus, and if I just got onto the bus I'd never have to see him again, so I did that. But it sucks to know that people can get away with things like that, many times because it would be too much of a hassle or too risky to take action. Retaliation also means acknowledging that it happened, and it's often preferable to pretend that nothing did so you can just go about your day. A friend was recently subject to a rape attempt in the actual stranger-in-dark-alley scenario - the guy got her pants off and then freaked out and ran when he learnt the hard way that she was trans. And she also didn't dare report him to the cops, because that evidently won't go well for her.

My female friends once swapped stories of creepy guys at the train station. It's like a genre in itself. One of them was aggressively followed by some dude who kept asking her to go out with him, because apparently that's how you get dates.

Well the title of #2 is actually a true statement, but still a great article.

I wasn't sure how that one was related, but it does explain how some people seem incapable of differentiating between consensual premarital sex and rape, and condemning/disowning/stoning the woman to death in both cases. There was some viral clip from a foreign talk show where a woman had been gang raped by three male relatives and ended up pregnant, and the host said it was her fault and scolded her saying she should be ashamed of herself for getting pregnant outside of marriage. I never understood that mindset because one was evidently a choice and the other wasn't, and while I've also been taught to be abstinent until marriage, I was also taught the difference between consensual sex and rape, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be universally the case.

I'm reminded of that document from either the Duggars or some fundamentalist church where girls were taught how to respond if they were raped, by family or otherwise, and one of the points was to ask God for forgiveness, and also apologize to the rapist for tempting them. It's infuriating, and there's absolutely no justification whatsoever to believe the victim is at fault even within an abstinence-only framework.

Anakin McFly wrote:I wasn't sure how that one was related, but it does explain how some people seem incapable of differentiating between consensual premarital sex and rape, and condemning/disowning/stoning the woman to death in both cases. There was some viral clip from a foreign talk show where a woman had been gang raped by three male relatives and ended up pregnant, and the host said it was her fault and scolded her saying she should be ashamed of herself for getting pregnant outside of marriage. I never understood that mindset because one was evidently a choice and the other wasn't, and while I've also been taught to be abstinent until marriage, I was also taught the difference between consensual sex and rape, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be universally the case.

I'm reminded of that document from either the Duggars or some fundamentalist church where girls were taught how to respond if they were raped, by family or otherwise, and one of the points was to ask God for forgiveness, and also apologize to the rapist for tempting them. It's infuriating, and there's absolutely no justification whatsoever to believe the victim is at fault even within an abstinence-only framework.

Indeed.
If the "boys will be boys" apologists of rape culture really believed in the part about all sexual activity outside of marriage being bad, then there would be no groping, no catcalling, no rape.
But there are. And why is that? Because if it happens, who gets blamed? The woman! In the minds of masculists, it's not the man who did something bad, it's the woman who provoked the man, and the man who can't control himself. And because of mentalities like these, we have women being forced under the Burka, or slut shaming, like in your example of the woman being blamed for getting pregnant outside of marriage.

But the upholding of "all sexual activity outside of marriage is bad" is toxic for another reason: In the simple minds of religious fundamentalists, it implies that "all sexual activity inside of marriage is ok." Including rape.
In Germany, rape inside of marriage wasn't a crime until 1997. And those who most opposed making rape in marriage illegal were the Christian right. Coincidence? I think not.

Bottom line: Feminism still has a long way to go, and until they succeed, rape culture exists.

There's a vague undercurrent of apologism in this article...even though he explicitly acknowledges at the end that it's not the point. But, acknowledging the potential for it doesn't mean you're not doing it. This is the same guy that wrote about poor, white Trump supporters in a way that felt overly-sympathetic.

Edit: To clarify, I think the article is well-written...he makes good points about the pervasiveness of rape culture. I just give side-eye to the overall conclusion that people literally don't understand consent, when its really more that people don't value consent...especially of those with less social power. The implication being that people with more power don't need to respect consent as much.

it implies that "all sexual activity inside of marriage is ok." Including rape.

I don't think that's the case, and that people who teach otherwise know that they're wrong but are acting out of their own self interest. My parents are very strict about the no sex outside of marriage - they actually facilitate the pre-marital counseling groups at my previous church - but they are also clear that rape and sexual assault are wrong even within marriage, and if your husband rapes you that's grounds for divorce. So I don't see those views as incompatible, especially since Christianity traditionally deems sex more often wrong than right, and errs on the side of sin.

Which again reminds me of the sad reality that if Christian fundamentalists truly devoted themselves to the 'biblical' ideal of marriage, the net effect on women would actually be positive - for starters, there would be an end to rape and all forms of sexual harassment, and all men would love and respect their wives. But they can't even do that, while still expecting their wives to submit to them, which is the height of hypocrisy.

@Cassius - ha yeah, I read that article too. It made a lot of good points, but at other parts it felt too sympathetic. It was also the article where I first learnt that he's actually a white guy. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, appropriation, but on the other hand it wasn't done out of a desire to misrepresent his race (he said he initially picked it because 'David' was the most common first name and 'Wong' the most common last name, so it was a John Doe kind of deal; he never otherwise pretends to be Asian and includes his real name on his profile), plus he said it was eye-opening when it resulted in him getting swamped with racist hate mail from white people.