Lisa Hickey believes that the “presumption of male guilt” is equally damaging to both men and women.
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One day, when I was 22 years old, I was walking to the bus station from work, deep woods to the left of me, a fairly busy road to the right. I see a guy up ahead coming towards me, slightly older than me, muscular, wild hair and wild eyes. He might have been high. He’s looking straight at me as we approach each other, I keep my eyes on the sidewalk til he passes.
A moment after we pass he spins around, grabs my arm – hard – and starts walking with me. He doesn’t relinquish the hold on my arm. “Give me twenty dollars,” he says. When I say I don’t have twenty he stops us, glares at me, and says “Would you rather I rape you?”
And my first thought was, “Oh, no, not again.”
I’ve written before how my first sexual relationships weren’t exactly stellar. I was sexually abused by my father. Became a blackout alcoholic soon after swigging a bottle of Tango (vodka and something suspiciously close to orange Kool-Aid) at age 14. Spent most of college so drunk that…well you can read it here. But certainly having guys have sex with you while passed out counts as rape. Nor was it the first time a guy had asked me if I wanted to be raped. The first time that exact question was put to me was in a pick-up truck driving down Mass. Ave in Cambridge MA, just outside of Central Square. I had to take off my seatbelt, decline the invitation, and hop out at a red light in one fell swoop.
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So here I am, being asked that same question again. I look at the woods. I look at the street next to me. I calculate whether I can wrestle free of the guy’s hold on my arm, jump in front of a car, have the car stop before it hits me. I decide to go for plan B, and negotiate instead.
“Look, I have $10. I can give you $5. I need $5 for the bus ride home.” I take the money out of my jeans pocket with my free hand. A five and five ones.
“I’ll take eight,” the guy says, and much to my surprise, he does, actually leaving me with enough money for the bus fare. He pushes me to the ground and dashes off. No cars that drive by even slow down.
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I believe I am qualified to talk about what it’s like to be a female victim of sexual abuse. Not just once, but many times, over the course of more than a decade. With more guys than I actually remember. I guess you could call that “rape culture.”
And so, Hugo Schwyzer writes an article on that very thing today “In Rape Culture, All Men Are Guilty Until Proven Innocent.” I should be overjoyed. Hugo is saying that it is ok that I presume men are guilty until proven innocent. He is asking men to step up, understand why women are afraid, hold each other accountable. I should be glad.
Instead, I am sick to my stomach.
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I am a big believer that we should be talking about this stuff. A lot. I work closely with Hugo. We sometimes agree, sometimes disagree. As publisher, I often let posts get published even if I don’t agree with every word. That’s what we’re about at The Good Men Project. Multiple points of view around provocative, often polarizing topics. Rape certainly fits in that category.
So when we decided to create an editorial section on “The Presumption of Male Guilt”, with 15 different really great contributors, Hugo wrote the above article, I wrote from my point of view on “When Women Fear Men” and Tom Matlack wrote “Being a Dude is a Good Thing.”
And then all hell broke loose. In the comments, on Facebook, on Twitter — three different perspectives and somehow all three of us were talking about it “wrong”.
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Look, I get the passionate rants in the comments section. I enjoy them. But I do have a confession to make: I don’t always know how to talk about this stuff.
Multiple rapes? Sexual abuse? A victim who desperately doesn’t want to see herself as a victim? A small part of a larger discussion on manhood? A way to have very human conversations about things that are really, really difficult to talk about? Am I sometimes afraid to talk about all those things? Check and check and check and check.
But there’s one thing I want to make clear in this whole discussion of “The Presumption of Male Guilt” – the one insight I’ve had that I feel really strongly about. The one I tried to talk about in my article, but maybe wasn’t clear enough. The one I’d like to repeat.
Presuming guilt in males is not good for males and it is not good for females.
1) On a micro level, take the example I started this post with. A guy threatened to rape me. The only thing I could have done to prevent that from happening would have been to not walk out of my house that morning. Being more suspicious, more guarded, more afraid, would have done nothing to change the situation.
2) For most of my life, I have been afraid of men. In fact, terrified. Yes, you can say that I had every right to be. That does nothing to change the fact that being afraid of men sucked.
That in fact, when I stopped being afraid of men, my life changed for the better. Not just a little better, but a thousand times, OMG better. In fact, it was only in retrospect that I could see how disconnected I was from the world before that point. Everything got better after I stopped being afraid of men, stopped presuming guilt, stopped seeing men as sexist, stopped being guarded with them, stopped worrying about them as anything other than people I could connect with – people who had a slightly different but just as valid worldview as I did. Everything. Got. Better.
Thank you to everyone who wrote about this topic, everyone who shared the stories, and everyone who commented.
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photo: aklawstudio / flickr
About Lisa Hickey
What, though, do you mean by “presuming guilt in males”?
If you mean women being wary of strange men approaching them because we’ve been told from little-girlhood that strange men are dangerous, sorry, kiddo; that’s not feminists’ fault. It’s certainly not feminists’ fault that women are blamed if they’re raped and blamed if they’re wary (because attempts at self-protection supposedly indicate “paranoia”; ye gods, what a crock).
If you mean “calling all men rapists”, well, that doesn’t happen. That’s the MRA’s petulant characterization of a very clever, astute attempt to help men understand WHY women don’t automatically trust every strange man. It’s not a real mindset. It’s a lie.
That’s a really good insight:
If you mean “calling all men rapists”, well, that doesn’t happen. That’s the MRA’s petulant characterization of a very clever, astute attempt to help men understand WHY women don’t automatically trust every strange man. It’s not a real mindset. It’s a lie.
In my case, I really was trying to tell the story of myself as an individual, who had a generalized fear of men most of my life. And that generalized fear prevented me from connecting with them as a woman. The “presumption of guilt” came from the title of the whole series we did — the fact that men often do feel they are seen as guilty. So I was responding to that with my own personal POV — and hoped people would find it insightful. I wasn’t trying to over-generalize and say that’s what everyone felt or that it was “feminists fault”.
Good point. Women don’t think all men are rapists. However, they are often wary of men because of experience. It’s true that you couldn’t have done anything to prevent that guy from raping you as you walked along the road. However, many women do find from experience that if they are more wary of strangers, they get into less sticky situations. I have never been raped, but I have learned that my formerly friendly behaviour when I was younger resulted in more men threatening me, following, grabbing me, etc. than happened when I tried to avoid them. I don’t think all men are rapists until proven innocent, but I, like many women, do think my life is easier if I sometimes avoid getting friendly with strangers. When you get bad behaviour towards you on a regular basis, one does tend to try to shut it out or avoid it. It doesn’t mean you think all men are rapists, or that all assholes are rapists either. I wish I lived in a super safe world where I could just be friendly to everyone and never have it turn out badly but until then I don’t feel obligated to give attention to everyone equally.
Excellent Lisa. You’re very good at covering a lot of unpleasant turf without excess rant or words. Your examples, exemplify and illuminate the terrain very well. I share your sentiment and also have had my share of manhandling and attempted rape- and a home-alone middle of the night encounter with a knife-wielding would be rapist- the kind of terror that can burn the flesh off your face ..and I teach gnarly self defense and it gives me pleasure to show women how to refashion their bodies into heat-seeking missiles and weapons of destruction when all else fails.
Should we maintain our caution and do we have shit to be pissed about ? U-betcha. I don’t minimize the horrific realites of violence and rape, nor let men with violating intent off any hook. And I too rant on the ills and controlling evils of patriarchy and men’s violent entilements. Frankly it enrages me and fuels my self defense work and calling for women to harvest their own capacity for (aggressive) self protection. But presuming guilt in all men– ? NO!!
I am aghast by this blanket notion and still digesting it all.
Moreover, there needs to be some incentive for men to be good – if I’m assumed to be a rapist or a potential rapist by a group of people, I’m not going to try to change their minds, I’m going to disengage from them and find someone else to associate with. Same as how I expect a black man would react if I assumed he was a felon and drug addict until proven otherwise, or how a Jew would probably react if I assumed he was a Zionist agent until proven otherwise, or how a woman would react if I assumed she were a man-hating lesbian until proven otherwise. It’s every bit as unjust and cruel. Assuming the worst in everyone I see, even if it were (hypothetically) borne out in the statistics, creates an environment where the best of any group have nothing to gain by being part of it.
Say that society changed and I, as a man, was presumed guilty in a legal sense in the event of any accusation – rape, harassment, abuse, whatever. Name your feminist cause, I’m presumed guilty. Why would I bother to interact with any woman I did not already trust? Any slight emotional instability, any trace of feminist ideology in a woman, and I would have nothing to do with her. Too risky. Why would I bother to get involved when I see another man making questionable moves? The person reporting any crime is nearly always a suspect as far as the police are concerned. Why would I ever get involved and intervene on a woman’s behalf in the face of that risk? I’d simply not get involved. I can think of one woman who might be raped or dead today if I had not intervened on her behalf – but she was drunk enough at the time that, in a world of presumptive male guilt, she would have been unable to tell which of us was the good one.
It’s not so unbelievable. How many poor black neighborhoods are full of otherwise regular, innocent folks who simply refuse to talk to the police about anything? Who believe, with fair reasons, that the police do not have their community’s best interests at heart?
None of that is unreasonable. We live in a world where a five year-old playing doctor is a sex offender. If we take the feminist assertion that rape accusations are not believed often enough as a fact, for argument’s sake, then look at the world presumptive male guilt creates: in the short term, all this does is inflict the same injustice on another group (which is fine if two wrongs make a right, I suppose). In the long term, it casts doubt outside of the legal realm on the word of any woman. What man would ever believe a rape claim if he knew that in all cases, the woman’s word was enough? How many men need only be convicted by word alone before other, innocent men stop seeing it as justice? What would those men think of female accusers? Even honest accusers would not be believed, since the men were convicted on word alone, and not on evidence.
The solution to oppression has been, historically, to rise up and become the new oppressors (taking for granted the feminist claim of persecution, for the sake of argument again) I’m not surprised to see Schwyzer acting the part of les collaborateurs – there are always some of those. Glad to see there’s some sense in the other authors, at least.
Good article, Lisa. I agree that blanket condemnations are counterproductive as well as unfair. Like telling young girls “strange men are dangerous,” it’s a form of conditioning that hurts an entire demographic of our society in the name of Better Safe than Sorry. But toxic messages like that are never justified, and it’s appalling that they go unchallenged as often as they do.
I agree with Lisa and I believe is true that when you change your mindset from “all men are bad” to “not all men are the same” your life changes for the better. Now that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful and take security measures. If I see someone, man or woman, who under a reasonable standard is behaving in a strange way — following you, spying you, etc. — then we should take measures and protect ourselves because crime do exist. But accusing every single guy walking dows the strees and minding his own business of being a rapist is damaging to everybody. And, by the way, do you know that a high number of kidnappings are commited by women precisely because kidnappers are aware that most people won’t be suspectful of a woman near a child? This shows, that crime doesn’t have a sex.
For the zillionth time. Feminists do NOT say “All men are BAD.”
Nor is it the fault of women or feminists when the dominant conversation is about how women should be afraid of men because men are animals that can’t control themselves or are “biologically driven” to be violent or lustful or whatever crap is being spewed now.
Quit, for God’s sake, blathering on about how wonderful life is when women get their act together and be “nice” to strange men. Tell MEN to talk to other MEN about being the kind of MEN that women DON’T NEED TO BE AFRAID OF.
Honestly. Pandering to maintain the status quo isn’t edgy or brilliant. Put the blame where it belongs for a change. Things might REALLY change if people weren’t too cowardly to do that.
@Cara, Why put the onus onto men to talk to other men? Why don’t we tell everyone to tell each other to be the kind of men and women that others don’t need to be afraid of? I’ve seen fear in men and women of strangers, since we know nothing about them we simply rely on what we’ve been trained to think which biases our view of who they are. Eg raising women to be afraid of men because a few are rapists easily raises that suspicion of all men, or raising men to assume women are gold diggers, men cheaters, and every other stereotype.
We have elevating levels of females raping males, cdc stats pretty much say 1.1% of men and 1.1% of women were raped (male stats are for “forced to penetrate” which many will agree is rape) in the last 12 months, 79.2% of the males reporting female rapists and I think it’s 99% for the females reporting males as rapist. So that’s what, 40% or so of rapists are women? Also being as rape as counted in a way pretty much that only males could commit it, it can bias the result as female-female abuse is most likely going to be under the “other sexual violence” category, along with “forced to penetrate”. What does this mean? It means we can say most rapists are male and then portray sexual violence as mainly a male attacker type which can cause a major imbalance in trust against males.
So it could very well be that we’ve pushed a fear TOO much of males, assuming females don’t commit rape or other abuse in even a remotely close level when quite possibly it’s closer than people think. People may not say all men are bad (although radfem’s seem to be close to admitting that), but we can report and use statistics to paint men in a very bad light with bias and this is probably what most people are angry at.
Maybe we truly need to quit trying to get men to tell other men about behaving in ways that make women feel safer, and start trying to get EVERYONE to work towards a future free from abuse. With female-perpetrated abuse rising very fast, or being made more aware of now, simply expecting men to do all of the policing of other men in their behaviour is only really looking at half of the problem.
And yes, in a pleasant society we need to be nice to strangers, and nice to each other. We shouldn’t be profiling people based on gender, colour, religion, belief but give all people an equal chance. We don’t tolerate profiling people on colour, so why tolerate it on gender? Is it right to be stereotype black people or muslims, early to midlife adults? By allowing fear of men to continue we simply send the message that men are less trustworthy than women, it already directly impacts them under the pedophile hysteria currently going on in many areas, impacts their ability to seek help from police or DV shelters, family and friends. Would you support men in being reluctant to want to marry since it’s wildely assumed that women initiate divorce the most and end up with custody (Divorce and custody disputes are potentially quite traumatic experiences) more, alimony etc? Because if stats show women do this more than it’s only fair to start teaching men to be cautious around women right?
A quick look on the CDC shows “The abortion ratio was 234 abortions per 1,000 live births in 2008.”, so nearly 1/4 fetus’s are aborted, a man’s potential child has a 1 in 4 chance of being aborted, should we start teaching men to trust women less in trying to raise a family? Not advocating abortion is wrong or right, simply throwing it in to get people to consider the effects of using stats to justify fears and people could very well use that stat in a harmful way. We can throw in abuse stats where women commit more child abuse (53%, male = 45.2% , and parents commit the most child abuse (81.2%) so should we trust women less with kids? Maybe men need to be more afraid for their children around women?
I completely agree that with the exception of a few radical pockets, feminists in general do not see it as “all men are bad,” and I think the bigger problem is carelessness in language and ‘accidental’ blame. A good example of this is the Slutwalk and the recent incident with the PA Liquor Control Board’s ad where the slogan that came out of the ordeal was “Don’t Get Raped vs Don’t Rape.” The “Don’t Rape” slogan is the same thing men have been told over and over again in regards to date rape. I’ve been to several date rape prevention education programs and talks directed at men (university required it as part of a fraternity) and they all boiled down to the same message over and over: “Don’t rape.”
The problem is, most men think rape is vile and respond with, “Well I’m not a rapist, I don’t want to be a rapist, I’m not going to ever rape anyone, so this message has nothing to do with me.” They tune the message out, just as Odds described.
An even bigger part of the problem is the entitlement belief that I see coming from most activist groups. They take a staunch “I’m right and you’re wrong” approach, and I mean almost ALL activist groups. Most activist groups seem to take the standpoint that society should rise to meet their ideology, rather than crouching down to meet society at eye level and then help society work their way to standing up taller. That is the key difference I see in Lisa’s piece and the Good Men Project as a whole from other gender-focused websites. You see, Cara, you are right, Men need to help men understand how to stop rape from happening and so do women, because if men currently don’t see it as a problem or are tuning the message out, then the burden is on those trying to change society and resolve the problem. Fortunately, the GMP is going about it the right way by talking about things in terms or personal reflection and perspective, connecting to men at their level, as equals, telling men you are great and valuable, and capable of great things, and we need good men like all of you to change the world. It doesn’t tell them, well you better do this, it allows men to come to their own conclusions and make the decisions on their own. And that is the only way to truly change a person’s mind and one by one change society.
My wife is 50 and still recovering from being raped repeatedly by a step-grandfather from when she was aged seven to twelve. For five years this monster preyed on her. She remembers losing her virginity to him and also having her first orgasm with him at seven. He made her perform fellatio on him regularly. My wife feel like she was murdered; her childhood and innocence were robbed from her. She was not allowed to mature sexually at a normal rate. After a while, she would leave her body and go to a different place while he was abusing her. For many years, she remembered little of what had happened, just bits and pieces. A few years ago we moved to the town she had grown up in (where the abuse had occurred). My wife started getting more and more depressed and didn’t understand why. We had been together for ten years by this point, so I too was puzzled by the change in my usually vibrant, upbeat, witty/sarcastic wife. About a year and a half ago, she started remembering more and more things. One day I accompanied her to a children’s Bible camp where the step-grandfather had worked for over twenty years as the cook. As we wandered around, we walked by the cabin where he used to live, then on to the main building which included the cookhouse. My wife was totally flabbergasted when she saw a old picture of the staff on the wall with him in it. Eventually, we went into the kitchen. My wife started remembering more and more, how he would take her into the cooler and lock the door and the things that had happened to her in there. By the time, we got back to the car, my wife fainted in my arms she had been hyperventilating so much. She went back to the camp later and complained to the staff why they had a picture of a pedophile hanging on their wall. They threatened to call the police if she didn’t leave immediately. Being a Christian Bible camp they didn’t want to let any skeletons out of their closet. My wife has thought about suing them as she was under their care as a member of the camp while she was being abused, but the statue of limitations has long passed. As for the bastard that did it to her, he is long dead. We found his grave. I had to take a leak. My wife wants to put a plaque on it that says: “Here lies a child molester, may he rot in hell!.” My wife eventually became almost catatonic about a year and a half ago. For several months she would barely get out of bed. She has been in therapy for over a year now and making steady progress. Our sex life is starting to return to normal. I am a non-violent person, but if this man was still alive, I don’t think he would be so for very long. It makes me so angry thinking about what he did to the child who became the woman I love and admire so dearly, that I think I would have castrated him with a dull butter-knife first.
I am glad she is getting help and hope she continues to do so. There are two things I can say — 1) becoming disassociated, the out of body part of it — can continue in everyday life, and it’s not until your wife feels connected to the universe again that she will truly feel alive. And then…it’s amazing, that joy. It can be overcome. She must. 2) They say “depression is worrying about the past, and anxiety is worrying about the future.” Abuse leads to a cycle of both, because it seems impossible to escape the past and unforeseeable to face the future. But living in the present, connected — that’s the way to see through it. Connect connect connect. Stay present. I wish both you and her all the best. Thanks for sharing the story.
I really enjoyed reading this article. As someone who had to work through the trauma of rape by an alumnus of my program, I had to figure out how to be around men again, especially since my program is closely split 50-50 in gender and that my roommate was a male classmate. Avoiding males was not an option, nor is it healthy.
My male friends were wonderful and supportive, helping me learn to thrive again through a variety of means: teaching me different meditation techniques, taking me to try yoga, helping me find a self-defense class, training with me for a half-marathon to commemorate the one year anniversary of living after my rape (living, not just surviving), and helping me learn new skills like cooking or rock climbing and knitting. My roommate was also amazingly supportive, ensuring that I had the apartment to myself after therapy so I had some quite space to relax, offering to take on extra chores and upkeep as I struggled to get back into daily life, and treating me kindly while never treating me as a “just a victim.”
It is not that my female friends weren’t amazingly supportive, but the support from my male friends helped to remind me that what happened was not the norm or okay as well as my rapist was not the normal male. So yes, while I am cautious and don’t live unaware of the dangers in this world, I also am reminded how wonderful my friends are.
I hate rapists!
Why don’t they follow the rules like the rest of us?
3. I have no intention of ever having sex with a woman against her will. I am extraordinarily careful in any interaction I have with a woman so that I don’t offend her and I would never assault her. I was raised to treat all people with decency, men and women.
So to presume I am guilty just because of my sex or skin color is wrong. You reject my humanity by doing that and you draw a line between me and you and call me your enemy. I’m sorry for what you may go through and if I’m ever in a position to help, I will. But for you to assume that I am guilty just because I’m male is so evil it makes me sick. Do you even know how often rape is falsely reported? How would you feel if you were accused of a crime you didn’t commit and everyone just assumed you were guilty? There’s a reason we make sure people are Innocent until proven Guilty, because we don’t want to live like Nazis.
Is that so?