Strawmanning Rape Culture (Part Two)

[Content note: sexual assault]

In the first half of this post, I covered three strawman arguments against the concept of rape culture. Read that post first! Then, here are three more.

“So you’re saying that all men are rapists.”

Nope. Men are more likely than women to be rapists for all sorts of reasons that are both central and tangential to rape culture. For instance, aggression is encouraged in men but not in women. Women are treated as sexual objects, there for men’s taking. Even a woman passing by on the street is considered fair game for sexual comments and come-ons, simply because she happens to exist and be attractive to someone. While women can and do become rapists (more on this later), they aren’t taught from an early age to think of men as something they should just “take” whenever they feel like it.

It is, in fact, the reactionary, anti-feminist position to claim that men are by nature rapists, and you see conservatives dancing around that claim all the time. They’ll say that Boys Will Be Boys and men can’t control their sexual urges when they see an attractive woman (all men are heterosexual, in case you didn’t know)

Feminists understand that, because of a variety of cultural factors, men are much more likely to accept and commit rape than they otherwise might be. Feminists believe this is 100% solvable.

Schrödinger’s Rapist, a common component of rape culture arguments, is also often misconstrued as claiming that all men are rapists. It is not.

Claiming that we’re saying that all men are rapists is an easy and lazy way to write off our arguments by making us seem like every boring stereotype of feminism that has ever been trotted out.

“So you’re saying that only women get raped.”

No. Women do comprise the majority of rape victims because women are systematically disempowered by sexism. Similarly, queer people, disabled people, people of color, and so on are disproportionately likely to be raped. People who lack privilege are more likely to be the victims of all sorts of crimes, but with rape there’s the added dimension of rape-as-punishment–a hallmark of rape culture. People are often raped to be “put in their place.”

Obviously, none of this means that men do not get raped. First of all, being male is only one type of privilege; a man could still lack others. Second, rape culture means that nobody is taught good sexual ethics unless they teach themselves. Women who do not understand and value consent can rape men, as can other men. I think that one of the reasons women are relatively unlikely to be rapists is because they are so strongly discouraged from being sexual aggressors, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

Men are affected by rape culture. It’s the reason male rape victims face so much shame and blame; it’s the reason prisoners (who are disproportionately male) are so likely to be raped and why people still think this is okay to joke about. The recent revelation that women are not the only ones being targeted by rapists in the military is another example of this; rape is used as a form of bullying or hazing of men as well as women. That’s rape culture in action.

Rape culture affects (or at least appears to affect) women more than men because of sexism, but when it comes to rape culture, everyone loses.

“So you’re saying that rape victims are the only type of crime victims who ever get blamed for what happened to them.”

Victim-blaming is a component of rape culture, but it’s not the only component and it’s not exclusive to rape culture. It’s likely that rape culture increases victim-blaming by teaching people scripts about sexual assault that blame the victim (i.e. the “What was she thinking going out to that bar alone” script and the “Why would she flirt with him if she didn’t want to have sex” script and the “Well if a woman goes out wearing something like that, what are men supposed to think” script). Because of rape culture, basically everyone grows up learning to think about and discuss sexual assault in this way.

But victim-blaming doesn’t originate with rape culture; if it did, it indeed wouldn’t make sense that we blame the victim in many, many other situations–being sick, being mentally ill, being the victim of some other crime, being abused by one’s family or partner, being discriminated against, being poor, being unemployed. Basically every terrible thing that can conceivably befall a person is something that people have tried to blame on that person.

Why? Just-world fallacy. Believing that other people are to blame for their misfortunes helps us sleep better at night. We will be more responsible and prudent than that. We will not wear slutty clothes and go out drinking. We will be smart with our money and work hard and thus never end up poor, unemployed, and homeless. We will not be weak enough to succumb to depression; we’ll pull ourselves out of it.

If that sounds cruel, that’s because it is. But it’s also a very understandable response to the horror of a dangerous world where terrible things seem to happen to good people all the time, a world we realize, deep down, that we ultimately have little control over.

People do in fact blame victims of crimes other than rape–for not locking their car, for leaving their bike with an easily-broken chain, for going out with a laptop bag, for going to a “dangerous” neighborhood, for not being careful enough with their credit card information, for being “stupid” enough to fall for a pyramid scheme, for wearing a hoodie and being mistaken for a criminal and murdered. They blame the victims because the thought of doing everything “right” and still becoming the victim of a crime (or other misfortune) is horrifying.

This is why teaching people rational thinking is so important. Rational thinking doesn’t just help you get stuff done; it’s a necessary condition for a just society, because victim-blaming is incompatible with a just society.

Victim-blaming isn’t all there is to rape culture, though. As I mentioned when I discussed other crimes, rape is dismissed and hand-waved away in ways that other crimes are not, so the fact that victims get blamed in all sorts of situations doesn’t mean rape culture does not exist.

It just means that advocates of rational thinking and social justice have our work cut out for us.

Strawmanning Rape Culture (Part Two)
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