(hat tip to Groundedchuck)
Trigger warning for rape.
Before you read this story, you might want to take a deep breath and take a look at the tiny turtle eating a strawberry, for purposes of not attempting to kill the entire world.
A seventeen-year-old boy was raped by his eighteen-year-old girlfriend and is being forced to pay child support. The girlfriend in question admitted in front of him and his parents that she “made him” have sex, but currently seems to believe that it wasn’t rape.
Let me count the rape-culture fail in this story:
1) The lede. High school romance? HIGH SCHOOL ROMANCE? Getting raped is high school romance to you people?
2) The statement of Jessica, the rapist: “To destroy my entire family for the simple thing that he didn’t want to pay child support, that’s a very selfish thing to do.” Well, you know what else is selfish? Forcing people to have sex against their will. That’s very selfish.
3) The apparent belief that Kris, the rape survivor, continuing to date Jessica meant that he wasn’t “really” raped. Of course this whole “men can’t get raped” meme wouldn’t have the slightest effect in making it difficult for him to conceive of his experiences as rape. Never! And no one ever has trouble leaving relationships, especially ones that (reading between the lines of the news story, which described it as “tumultuous”) may have been emotionally abusive.
4) The deputy whom Kris reported his rape to who never followed up on the fucking rape survivor and seemed skeptical that a man could be raped. Seriously? Law enforcement, what the fuck? Crime is crime, regardless of whom the crime is perpetrated on. Do your fucking job and investigate it when people report felonies to you. That isn’t going above and beyond the call of duty; that is literally your job description.
5) The idea that age of consent laws somehow don’t apply to boys. Newsflash: “consensual sex” between a fifteen-year-old boy and a thirty-four-year-old woman is not consensual sex. It is rape. The same way that “consensual sex” between a fifteen-year-old girl and a thirty-four-year-old man is not consensual sex, but rape. The power dynamics in the relationship and the immaturity of teenagers make free, full and true consent between a teenager and an adult impossible.
6) The fact that a man who passed out drunk at a party and was raped by a woman, who got pregnant, has to pay child support.
7) AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH MEN CAN TOO BE RAPED HOW LOUD DO I HAVE TO SCREAM SO THAT PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE ME
Child support is a complex issue and a lot of people have different opinions on it. I find Clarissa’s take compelling:
The fact that a person was created during the commission of a crime in no way reduces that person’s need for food, clothing, medical care, and education. Imagine baby Anna and baby Jessica. Anna is a product of a passionate loving consensual sex act. Jessica is the product of rape (whether by a man or by a woman). Is Jessica going to eat less? Will she be less deserving of visiting a dentist? Should she have fewer toys than Anna? Can anybody reasonably argue that one of these kids should be punished because she has a criminal for a parent?
On the other hand, my heart rebels against the idea of making a person pay child support to their fucking rapist. Of course, the non-rapist should get default custody; however, in cases such as Kris’s, where the rape survivor doesn’t want the child, the situation is far more complicated. Ideally, in that sort of situation, the rapist would have been prosecuted and convicted and their child put up for adoption, but the fucking deputy’s fucking lack of response has prevented that one from coming to fruition.
So I don’t know what to suggest. Child support is already a search for the least bad option on a giant list of really shitty options; adding rape only makes all the options shittier.
The problem is that the law is focused on the best interests of the child and not the best interests of society as a whole. Is it really in society’s interests to force Kris to pay for the child? What we are creating is a society where millions of men have no vested interest in the well-being of society, as a whole, and the primary cause of this is worrying about individual children. We have abortion, and, yes, it is possible to have one very late in the pregnancy. The easy solution to this is that, at birth, the state… Read more »
@Druk:
Haha ok, my bad. Carry on.
(Thanks. Research always helps. It usually results in less knee-jerk judgements 😀 )
@K: Sounds like the movie they were talking about was a comedy, so I decided to check out the scene to see if the producers of the movie were to blame for trying to make light of rape. IMO, they didn’t make like of rape at all. If I were triggered by such things, that scene would be a nightmare. The scene ends with an unexpected turn of events that is unrelated to the rape, and I can see how one would think that part is humorous. I’d go into more detail to explain but I don’t really like to… Read more »
“I really love how a comment section can be so bleak one moment and then full of good old-fashioned cheer the next.”
It’s like the weather. The old saying is don’t complain, just wait.
I just noticed this question on the IMDb forum, asking for examples of “Films with a man getting raped by a woman” http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000122/nest/188938880?p=1
One of the comments: “LOL yeah. I haven’t seen the movie itself, but someone linked to the clip of the rape. It was actually pretty funny [[laugh]]”
ughhhh.
Isn’t this great?
I really love how a comment section can be so bleak one moment and then full of good old-fashioned cheer the next.
Excellent!. 🙂
Oh, happy birthday SuperGlucose.
I love a good horror movie 😀
Well then get a good horror movie, but something other than Friday the 13th, and make some popcorn!
Hahaha I suspect I will get no presents at all except a girl telling me she wants nothing to do with me and another girl introducing me to her boyfriend XD
Advise your children: don’t be born on friday the 13th.
superglucose, happybirthday in advance, hope u get lots of presents 😀
White Knights are dull and can be called out on their obviously misogynistic paradigm (unless they happen to be me, who white knights for every friend and acquaintance he has: seriously, I stick up for my goddamn friends and if you don’t want me at your side for every battle I see then you better not have me as your friend), and 2nd wavers haven’t been right.
Plus raging and screaming at obvious hypocrisies is sort of a hobby of mine if you couldn’t tell 😉
“thanks. That made me feel really good even though I’m not entirely sure what I did to deserve such an honor.”
Oh that part comes latter. The White Knights will tear you apart in the arena to a howling crowd of 2nd Wavers.
Happybirthday in advance, by the way. and a word of advice to a Libra who just wants everyone to get along – it just doesn’t work like that. If you can’t stand the confrontations yourself, get other people to do it for you. Being a good manipulator is the whole point of being a Libra anyway.
Well, good birthday wishes in advance.
@Jim, stillInverted, Simon, Kenshiroit and Eagle: *BLUSH*
Well I um…
My birthday is the 13th of October >.>
I really…
thanks. That made me feel really good even though I’m not entirely sure what I did to deserve such an honor.
I like it, Ken.
While we’re being looney, I’d like to say that the title of this post makes me think of a circle of native americans scoffing in unison at something.
ANYWAY, my heart goes out to all victims of abuse, and I hope I won’t make the mistakes that happened in this thread if I ever need to accomodate a survivor.
@Jim: the third oktober 😀
@stillInverted: Seconded! 🙂
And I will start the beatification process. St. Superglucose, what date do you want for your saint’s day?
I nominate superglucose for Patron Saint of NSWATM.
“4.) While we should acknowledge that the Rape of Men by Women and Domestic Violence where a Woman is the Perpetrator against a Male Partner is Wrong (and can cause terrible damage to the Man), we are Naive to Believe that in terms of Numbers (and in some cases the levels of abuse – related to domestic violence) that Equal (or close to equal) Numbers of Men are abused by Women as the opposite” You need to stop with the rape culture shit right now, mister. “I did not and do not want to minimize the pain and hurt that… Read more »
@Geo: You’re bringing up an important issue. But this is not the place for it. There are lots of important issues that this isn’t the place to discuss. For example, we aren’t talking about the dangers of polio and the world’s failure to expend more effort to erradicate it. Clearly an important issue, just look at the damage done by Polio when it ran rampant. Yet that would be completely off topic here. What did come up here was an article where: 1) A guy claimed to be raped, and other people claiming he’s lying. This is fairly standard when… Read more »
Superglucose, I could just hug you.
Thanks so much for putting all my thoughts into words for me.
Geo: im sure you are a good person, and you have good intentions. And you are doing somethin good outhere, no doub. Kudos to you. My advice to you, take what the users at this blog tells you, trust me thise are valuable inputs. Some of the people here went through hell. So they have a first hand experience on society’s reaction on men’s suffering. Take this at hearth and learn from it. Make this as a mantra: Violence is not a gendered issue. Dv is not a women issue, rape is not a women issue. Its a human issue.… Read more »
I’m sorry about that but this blog got me out of a really scary place where I was about to kill myself. I hated myself for who I was and this penis I bear. To have Geo come in here and spout the same bullshit and crap that brought me to that point? Yes. It pisses me the fuck off.