If women are blamed for their own victimization, what happens to men? Bridget Welch explores how the dichotomy of virgin-slut forces an equally ugly dichotomy on men: rapist-protector.
Originally posted at sociologyinfocus.com.
I recently posted on how the birth control debate reinforces the dichotomy of women as sluts or virgins. If women are responsible for their own virginity, the post explained, and then women who fail in anyway (whether it is having sex or taking birth control) are sluts. But where does this leave men?
Men are the ones attempting to make women fail in purity protection. In other words, its men who are attempting to tear into the wrapping paper of a woman like a little kid on Christmas day. They are licking the proverbial lollipop and making it unsuitable for rewrapping. Because women are responsible for their own purity, men are never responsible for a woman who “falls” — regardless of WHY she falls. In this way, women are blamed for their own victimization — to the extent of being at fault for their own rapes.
The Daily Show summarizes this with a discussion of views on women in the military:
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
To summarize: Men are either too protective of women to be in the military with them, or they get “too rapey”. In her invite of men to come see her all girl punk band, “Prehistoric Rape Machines,” Samantha Bee summarizes: ”come on down. Protect us. Rape us. It’s your choice. Two choices only. Two choices.”
If we think about it, we can see how the two choices that women have (virgin or slut) and two choices men have (protector or rapist) are tied tightly together. In a book of interviews of men’s perspectives on rape, Tim Beneke summarizes the perspective of victim blaming. While I will not detail the entire argument here (there is a selection of this book available), two points are telling for our purposes.
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First among these is that “a woman who assumes freedoms normally restricted to a man (like going out alone at night)” (or perhaps like joining the military or having control over her own reproductive activity) “and is raped is doing the same thing as a woman who goes out in the rain without an umbrella and catches a cold. Both are considered responsible for what happens to them.” Why is that? Well if you walk in the rain you know you are going to get wet. If you go outside all womany at night? You best know that you are going to be raped. Why? Because, according to this logic, women are responsible for keeping themselves safe from men who can’t maintain control over their baser instincts.
Second, if a woman is attractive or dresses attractively, “she attacked him with her weapon so, of course, he counter-attacked her with his.” In other words, a man is not responsible if he rapes a woman who looks or dresses a particular way because he was provoked beyond his ability to control himself. In other words, the way she acted, talked, or treated that man makes her rape her fault.
In both, a woman acting in a way she is not supposed to (as a slut) results in a predictable result — a man raping her. What that means is that it is the woman’s fault. She should have KNOWN better. Basically, she should have known that men are “prehistoric rape machines.”
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What is slutty behavior? Evidently moving into a man’s domain (e.g. entering into his work place, being outside or in other ‘dangerous’ places at night, etc.), dressing provocatively, being too attractive, or even, as recently suggested, taking birth control are all ways to present men with something they cannot refuse. Men will have no way to control their urges and they will rape. Or so goes the popular narrative that blames women for their own victimization and men for being weak. If a woman is virginal and stays in her own place then she will be protected by men.
So men. How do you like being prehistoric? Either rapist or protective caveman. Does it feel limiting?
As a woman, this whole thing makes me sick. I don’t want the type of woman I am allowed to be so constrained. I don’t want to have to rely on men for protection from other men. I don’t want to have to assume that no space is a safe space and that I need to constantly police my own behavior to not step a toe over some invisible line. But as a wife of a very good man and the mother of a little boy that I hope will grow to be a very good man (not to mention a father, three brothers, some step-brothers, nephews, great-nephews, and male friends), I am disgusted that the virgin-whore is paired with the protector-rapist. “Only two choices. Two.” Indeed.
Dig Deeper:
- What are the dichotomies for men and the one for women. How do they relate?
- If men are supposed to be protectors, how is it that they do not get blamed for failing to protect a woman when she is raped? Is there times when they are blamed?
- It is common knowledge that men are sex machines – always wanting sex and doing anything to get it. How does this stereotype play into victim-blaming for women?
- Watch this Limp Bizkit video. A lot of the messages we get about who women and men are (and what they should be) are given through the media. What does this video tell us about victim blaming
Photo by Orin Zebest/Flickr
The whole discussion of rape is inherently problematic because rape is a particularly emotionally and socially charged subject and is an accusation that is easy to make and often very difficult to prove. So many of us are so tempted to fall into the blame, shame and gendered mindsets that we either miss what is actually import or get it horribly wrong. In a case of rape our discussion should revolve around the defendant and the plaintiff, NOT the victim and the rapist, NOT the man and the women.
If we understand rape to be “the intentional act of having sex with someone forcibly and against their will (or against their consent)” then we may gather that men and women can both be the victims and the perpetrators of rape, and so the gender distinction is not relevant to our case. If we are made to understand that we do not know whether or not someone is a victim or committer of rape prior to proper court case, then we may understand that the victim/rapist dichotomy is a false one and a dangerous one as well.
Blaming and shaming tactics have no place in a court of law and should have no place in a discussion of rape and justice. To say that a victim is to blame for crimes committed against them is simply senseless, to blame is to assign responsibility and the person responsible for a crime is the committer of that crime. To blame a victim for a crime is to say that they have committed a crime against themselves, this can only make sense if you have some really wacky ideas about what justice is. For instance, if you believe in distributive justice (i.e. the sins of the father are passed unto the son) then you can make sense of victim blaming and the blaming of all men for rape. This ridiculous notion of justice enables one to transfer guilt from offending parties (the rapist) to a non-offending parties (the victim and all men).
So, no, the victims of a crime are never to blame for that crime and neither are groups of people who have not committed that crime. These conclusions are easy to come to once we recognize distributive justice for the immoral, illogical horse shit that it is. Yet, we must realize that it is a seductive concept that will enter our thinking if we do not guard against it.
@Al: “So, no, the victims of a crime are never to blame for that crime”
Al, while your position makes sense, it’s too simplistic: in real llife, sometimes the victim IS partially responsible for what happened to him/her.
To make things clear, I will avoid rape examples:
- A pedestrian was run over by a car: did the victim cross the street suddenly? Out of crosswalk? Was it dark? Was he drunk? Was the driver within speed limits?
- A man enters a store branding a (toy) gun, doing a prank, and he gets shot by the storeowner (this actually happened here in Italy). Is the victim to blame? (at least partially)
You see, many times there are “gray zones” in life, even in a crime. Again and again, life is not black&white.
If two people go in a date, they get drunk, they have sex, and the day after one claims rape… what did really happen? Things get hazy.
I totally agree with you, justice should work the same regardless of the gender. Still, it’s not as easy as you put it.
I don’t think you understand the mechanics of my last post. I am divorcing blame from a discussion of justice. To blame is to hold one accountable for one’s own faulty or wrong actions (or lack thereof). We assign criminal guilt to those who have committed crimes. We cannot use our blame for a victim of misfortune as means of conferring guilt upon that same person. Yes, a careless and drunk pedestrian is at least partially to blame for their being struck by a car, that is to say, they are accountable for the actions which had led up to that event, their consumption of alcohol, their public drunkenness and their neglect to check both sides of the road. However, this is not to at all to say that that person is in any way and to any degree guilty of the crime of manslaughter or reckless driving. Unless we believe in something like distributive justice, we cannot blame a victim of a crime for that crime because we cannot hold a person accountable (at least criminally) for the actions of others, in this case the driver. It is the driver and not the pedestrian, who we are attempting to assign or absolve criminal guilt of. If we find that the driver has not committed the crime of manslaughter or reckless driving, than they are not guilty of that crime and in turn we have good reason to think that no crime has been committed, but rather a tragic misfortune has occurred. Crimes are, after all, committed by criminals, and if the only person who could have committed some crime has not, then you have no reason to think there was a crime in the first place.
Again, blame has no place in a discussion of rape and justice because being stupid or unfortunate are not crimes. Blame is faulty emotional construct that too often enables us to confer the guilt of one party unto an innocent one.
Once we give up on worrying who is to blame and give up on our preconceived notions of justice we can begin to address the events you listed above with some accuracy. The first question asked should not be is so and so is to blame but rather is this story true and if so what evidence do we have to discern that truth? The second question would be, well, was a crime committed? By whom? Against whom? For what reasons? If you conflate blame with guilt then you are apt to think about these things poorly. Well if someone is to blame (and someone is almost always to blame for something) then someone is guilty, and if someone is guilty than they must be guilty of something and that something must be a crime, therefore a crime has been committed. You are now left with the unmitigated assumption of a crime and are merely assigning guilt for that crime according to who is to blame and for what, which is often why you can run into scenarios where you can find guilt in a person for crimes committed against themselves. This is one reason why blame has no place in a discussion of rape and justice.
If a woman walks home in the dark, drunk, alone, through streets she does not know and dressed to attract as much sexual attention towards herself as possible(including predators hiding in our midst), she invites danger to her(though any rape is still the blame of the rapist)
So who is responsible for her? If not her, then the rapist? Rapists are scum, quite frankly. They will continue to be so, no matter what our opinions are. That leaves everyone else.
I find the concept of those not involved in a situation, having to endanger themselves(rescuing her/him, to be inclusive) because someone was unwilling to take precautions, troublesome.
That said, I am ready to change my view if a good counterpoint is made.