This is Rape Culture

CeeLo Green Tweets That It’s Only Rape If The Person Is Conscious, Then Deletes His Twitter Account

Let me get this out of the way first.

no.

No.

NO.

NO!

Rape is non-consensual sex.  If someone doesn’t consent to a sexual encounter of any kind (not just PIV sex, but oral sex, anal sex, fondling or more) and you continue trying to have sex with them

THAT IS RAPE!

Only YES means YES.  If you think the actions of your partner or partners are ambiguous with regard to consent, make sure you get a clear signal before you proceed.  If alcohol or drugs are involved, and you don’t know for sure if the person’s judgment is impaired- DO NOT CONTINUE.   Don’t be that person-usually a guy-messing around in that grey area.  If it’s a grey area, just back off.  Wait until a time when your partner or partners is of sound mind and body and can make a properly informed decision.  Sexy funtimes should be something all people involved consent to, so that they can *all* enjoy.

That’s what CeeLo doesn’t understand.  He doesn’t understand what rape is and why it is so horrible. It’s a massively intrusive violation of the bodily autonomy of another human being.  It’s an imposition of power from one individual to another.  It’s one person (or more) dominating another, saying “I will do what I want to you and your feelings on the matter are inconsequential”.  That’s not sex.  That’s rape.  

GET CONSENT!

If that means you have to literally ask your partner(s) “Would you like to have sex with me?”, then do that!  Get a clear answer.  No answer? No sex.  

I’m not going to copy/paste any of the bullshit CeeLo said in his Tweets. They’re available at the above link.  Needless to say a Trigger Warning applies.

 


 

 

Perhaps you’re uncertain what the phrase ‘Rape Culture’ means.  If you’re one of those people, this is for you:

In reading through feminist forums and articles online, particularly in articles about rape or sexual assault, I notice that sometimes in the comments section, people make statements about how rape culture is just a phrase that’s made up to make men look bad or to make it seem like rape is something that happens far more often than it actually does.

And, given, after reading these comments, I could have easily dismissed them as just simply fodder written by online trolls and gone on with my day.

But it really got me thinking.

Perhaps some people truly don’t understand what rape culture is.

After all, if you’re hearing the phrase for the first time, it can be really confusing.

We understand the word “culture,” from a sociological or anthropological viewpoint, to be things that people commonly engage in together as a society (ranging from the arts to education to table manners), and we find it difficult to link the word “rape” in with that concept.

We know that at its core, our society is not something that outwardly promotes rape, as the phrase could imply. That is, we don’t, after all, “commonly engage” in sexual violence “together as a society.”

To understand rape culture better, first we need to understand that it’s not necessarily a society or group of people that outwardly promotes rape (although it could be).

When we talk about rape culture, we’re discussing something more implicit than that. We’re talking about cultural practices (that, yes, we commonly engage in together as a society) that excuse or otherwise tolerate sexual violence.

We’re talking about the way that we collectively think about rape.

More often than not, it’s situations in which sexual assault, rape, and general violence are ignored, trivialized, normalized, or made into jokes.

And this happens a lot.

All the time.

Every day.

And it’s dangerous in that it is counterproductive to eliminating sexual violence from society.

So what, exactly, does rape culture look like? How does it present itself?

Well, to see what I’m referring to, take a look at the examples below.

Because if we don’t understand the meaning behind the concept of rape culture, or if we have a skewed interpretation of the meaning in our minds, we may find it easy to deny its existence.

And you may think that some of these examples are isolated, one-off situations. But in reality, they’re part of a larger societal trend.

That is rape culture

Please go read the 25 examples listed.  It’s not meant to be a comprehensive list, but it should give a good idea of what is meant by the phrase ‘Rape Culture’.

 


 

 

Mississippi gay man says Baptist teacher raped him for three years so he’d hate men

Trigger Warning: Homophobia, Religious Bigotry

 

A Gulfport, Mississippi man says that he was repeatedly molested by a teacher at the conservative Christian school he attended in the 1990s, beginning when he was 14 years old and ending when he was 17.

The Washington Blade reported that Jeff White said his teacher at Bethel Baptist School in Wills, Mississippi justified the abuse by calling it “ex-gay therapy,” designed to make White “hate men.”

White told the Blade that he was enrolled at Bethel from 1996 to 1999 and that his appointments with the accused teacher took place every Wednesday.

“He would rape me because I was gay and because it would make me hate men and make me change,” White said in a July interview.

White’s parents sent him to the school when he came out to them at the age of 14. The teacher is now an associate pastor at Bethel Baptist Church, which operates the Christian school. The church is known for its hardline approach to Christian doctrine.

“[Bethel’s pastors] looked at Southern Baptists like they were liberal faggots, like they would say from the pulpit,” White told the Blade.

 

SIGH.

What did I just say above?

Rape is non consensual sex.

Rape is about power. It is not about sex.  It is a violation of the right to bodily autonomy and integrity that all human beings have.  To violate that autonomy by having non-consensual sex is to treat someone else as if they are less than human.  You are robbing another individual of one of their fundamental human rights:  the right to decide what happens to and with their bodies.   If you do that, you are a rapist, and you are treating another human being as subhuman.  As a thing.  As someone beneath you. I can’t express the depth of my disgust with peopl
e who do not recognize the humanity of others.  Yes, that means I’m disgusted by rapists.

That disgust is amplified in this situation because we have a teacher, a person in a position of power and authority misusing their power and authority over a child in multiple acts of rape.  Then to add to that, the teacher raped this teenager as some form of fucked up conversion therapy.  “Hey I’m going to violate your human rights and treat you as a thing, but it’s for your own good.  You won’t be gay any longer.”  In addition to the lack of respect for the rights of another and the abuse of  power, this teacher is also a homophobic bigot who thinks sexuality can be changed (and by rape of all things).  All major psychological and psychiatric organizations in the United States condemn the use of so-called “conversion therapies”.  Homosexuality, contrary to the “teachings” in religious texts, is a natural expression of human sexuality (animal sexuality as well).  As I’ve said repeatedly, there is no moral component to homosexuality (claims to the contrary rest on divine commands…suffice it to say, morality does not consist of being told to do something by an invisible, inaudible, undetectable entity, being, or energy; morality concerns the interactions between human beings and determining what actions are right or wrong, good or bad based on the desired outcome).   The actions of this Baptist teacher are deplorable and I hope he goes to jail for a long, long time (this is example #98490 in ‘religion poisons everything’).

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This is Rape Culture
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One thought on “This is Rape Culture

  1. 1

    “Corrective rape” isn’t corrective.
    It’s simply rape, regardless of whether it’s done to “fix” a lesbian or to “fix” a gay man.
    Why is this—apparently—so difficult to understand?

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