Trigger warning for rape apologism.
From Gawker and Jezebel we have a horrific story of a woman who, after a consensual hookup, held a man prisoner in her apartment and forced him to have sex with her multiple times. Thankfully, the man was able to call the cops and the woman was prosecuted for sexual assault.
The media coverage, however, is terrible.
Gawker tagged their post “first world problem.”
Rape. Teenagers complaining about their iPhones getting poor reception. Same level of problem, amirite?
First of all, rape occurs in developing countries! Rape of men occurs in developing countries. Hence it is not a First World Problem but in fact an Everywhere Problem, and given the rates of rape in some developing countries it is to a very large degree a Developing Country Problem.
Second of all:
RAPE IS NOT A FIRST WORLD PROBLEM
RAPE IS NOT A FIRST WORLD PROBLEM
RAPE IS NOT A FIRST WORLD PROBLEM
GO BACK TO REMEDIAL BEING A DECENT HUMAN BEING, UNIT 4, WHY YOU DO NOT MAKE LIGHT OF RAPE
WHY DO WE BELONG TO THE SAME SPECIES
Jezebel, despite being a “feminist” blog (in quotes because of their history of fail) which should know better, described the rape as follows:
By all accounts, however, the initial hook-up was consensual and, even after being stopped from leaving, the man had sex “several more times” with the woman who detained him.
So Jezebel. If someone goes home with someone and has sex with them consensually, they have revoked their right to not consent to any subsequent sex in the future? Or does it only apply the same night?
Also I appreciate your new and exciting “X was raped, therefore, they were not raped” argument. I have to say, that is… not an argument I have seen before. It is certainly unique. Yes, unique is a nice thing to say.
Alsoalso your “I wonder if people are going to ask if he was wearing a miniskirt” was not okay. No, they are going to do a different, delightful kind of rape-apologist bullshit. Such as referring to him as “sexhausted” in the headline! And generally considering that he is not a Real Man and he probably really wanted it deep down anyway.
Comments from Gawker:
I know there are some up in arms about laughing at a sexual assault, but there’s a grave difference between a man who wants to leave and apartment and woman who wants to leave an apartment. If he were willing to be violent, he could have left at any time, whereas no matter what you’ve seen Angelina Jolie do, if he doesn’t want her to leave, she’s not leaving. Don’t diminish the actual crimes women endure by comparing it to a guy whose parents clearly taught him violence is only a last resort.
[Next to a picture of two raisins] The man’s testicles were found just minutes after the police arrived.
From Jezebel:
I’m not defending the way this article is written at all, but I just want to throw it out there that maybe one of the reasons why female-on-male sexual assault isn’t taken seriously is that men are generally much stronger than women. Granted, I might just be particularly physically weak, even for a girl, but I don’t think there’s any guy I could literally force myself on. I know I’m going to get screamed at for thinking this, but I just have a hard time imagining that an adult man couldn’t seriously hurt a woman, or at least get her off of him. Not saying it can’t happen, I just think it’s probably pretty rare.
I can’t get over that she tried to have sex with the police officers who arrested her. I’m sorry, but that bit is truly hilarious. #Idofeelbadthough
At first I was gonna make a comment like “A woman wants sex so bad she wont let him leave, he found a keeper” but then I remembered that they met at a bar and were drunk that night… There’s been time’s I would have chewed my own arm off had it been handcuffed to get away from the person you’ll see the next morning, in sunlight, with a sober (albeit hungover) state of mind. Maybe men can be raped after all, I feel for this guy.
For Christ’s sake. Men don’t always want sex! Men can be raped! This is 2012, this should not be a freaking new concept. Thankfully, for most of the commenters, it wasn’t. Jez commenters, you have restored my faith in humanity.
In case anyone is wondering where this went, she apparently learned her lesson and was better prepared this time around:
http://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/nymphomanin-findet-neues-opfer-muenchnerin-zwingt-mann-anderthalb-tage-lang-zu-sex_aid_745153.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2137297/Munich-nymphomaniac-Second-victim-weeping-street.html
And a mentally ill out-of-control person can be really scary and intimidating, even if he/she isn’t that physically strong. (I hope that doesn’t come out as ableist… I have a psychosis disorder myself.)
The 47 year old woman arrested got charged for several offences, but was released after a short while by the police. She promptly went on to re-offend. This thime she picked up a 31 year old man of african descent on a bus and kept him captive for 36 hours before he managed to escape and was found crying on the street by passer-bys. When the police turned up at her apartment she opened the door in the nude and demanded sex from the police-officers. A unfulfilled wish for children and a desire to get pregnant was the motive given.… Read more »
My response to Jezebel’s recent victim-blaming posts:
http://jameslandrith.com/content/view/3871/79/
There isn’t a lot for me to say that the others have already beaten me too.
Except when it comes to Jezebel and its discussion on gender issues, I rank them up with Manboobz and trashy tabloid papers with manipulated photos made to look like bigfoot on the front page with Elvis, The Easter Bunny and Santa Claus traling behind as a headline story.
Just more proof of my feeling that Jezebel is completely worthless
Yet another reason I avoid Jezebel like the plague. Anytime they “charitably” turn their eye to male survivors of assault they always, ALWAYS, turn it into a discussion about female survivors. Yet, if you dare try to do it the other way around, you’re accused of distracting from the main point, or railroading the conversation. Argh! *hulk smash*
It really isn’t that hard to open your eyes to a male perspective and still be a feminist. Or to not turn it into a rant about “female oppression”…
Jlandrith: that Penn State story made me furious. What nobody said was that if they were girls it would not have happened, because nobody in their right mind would give an adult male unsupervised time with eleven-year-old girls.
Overall, the importance of size is often exaggerated. To take an extreme example from pop culture: Why was Hannibal the Cannibal scary? Not because he was a particularly big guy, but because he was so disturbed that he wouldn’t hesitate to chew somebody’s face off. From the article we really don’t know much about the case… She might have been bigger and stronger than him (shocking truth: Not ALL men are stronger than ALL women), she might have been waving a knife at him, or perhaps she just went completely bananas and seemed fully capable of doing ANYTHING to him.… Read more »
Jezebel previously posted a piece that claimed Teh Menzezezezezezezez Don’t Be Victim-Blamed:
http://jezebel.com/5858079/what-if-penn-states-coach-had-victimized-girls
I disagreed with this “smmo” person in the comments and now I am suddenly labeled as an “MRA.” I am so sick of people with weak-ass, cookie-cutter arguments they don’t even understand themselves trotting out the MRA boogieman to silence male survivors.
Confessions of an idiot:
I, too, once thought that it was difficult for most men to be raped because of the strength issue.
I have long since learned that, strength or not, you must be in a mental place to use it. Some men, BECAUSE THEY ARE PEOPLE, are not. We can’t blame them for that.
“Don’t diminish the actual crimes women endure by comparing it to a guy whose parents clearly taught him violence is only a last resort.”
Okay, y’all, it’s official.
Quakers cannot be raped.
Also…rage…just…rage.
Attempts to dust off my old Jezebel account and scream to high heaven failed; fortunately the commentors are on it.
As for Gawker itself, though, not surprised; commentors always victim-blame and trivialize. Still remember the teen girl whose pics were lifted and posted to some perv site and all the men (and a couple women) that blamed her.
Badly written satire, huh? It seems that’s a common excuse for articles that really have no place being published. I understand that not everyone is going to understand a given satire, but you really have to be eminently dense to think that Swift’s “Modest Proposal” was a sincere exploration of the economic benefits of cannibalism. Mind, I’m not sure I could write a satirical take on rape culture, but Doug Barry wasn’t even trying.
The only good thing about the Jezebel article was that the vast majority were disgusted by the article, and the rest thought it was badly written satire meant to parody stereotypical responses to rape.
I was heartened to see that nearly every comment on the Jezebel article is about how fucked-up and offensive their coverage of the story is.
Yeah I remember reading this article and imagining how people would react if it were a woman in that circumstance. It is interesting the way that it is spun when the man is the victim.
Often the media will treat boys who’ve been sexually abused by older women as if they “got lucky” and treat men who’ve been raped or abused as “biting off more than they can chew.”
Luckily the majority of news papers I read seem to take a mature approach and are often sympathetic to the message that men absolutely are victims.
I do wonder whether one of her threats was “if you hurt me trying to resist/escape I’ll call the cops and complain that you assaulted me”. It’s one of the many, large holes in the “men are stronger” line, and also very popular with abusive women. I’ve just spent a couple of hours compiling a submission to the New Zealand review of their approach to victims of sexual violence so this is in my mind right now. Most of the report is pretty good, but some parts are somewhat slanted because it was done by women who work only with… Read more »
That Gawker comment that suggested women can never defend themselves against men was also bullshit btw. So, suddenly it’s a) only rape if actually physical force was involved and b) completely impossible to defend yourself against rape if you’re a woman? Wow. Such feminist way of thinking. I’ve been sexually assaulted twice, both times when I was riding the underground, and managed to fight the guy off in both instances. Not by being stronger then them, rather by sort of taking them by surprise by going completely MAD rather than being scared into submission. If a person doesn’t behave as… Read more »
That’s just horrible. Feministis have discussed over and over again that a woman might have been raped despite the fact that the man didn’t actually use brute force to keep her down. And now they’re suddenly “oh but men are stronger than women!”.
Ozy: is that your tumblr? What really bothered me was the way the Jez article did a sort of preemptive derail, in that the last paragraph pointed out all the ways people blame female victims, as if to imply that noone ever blames male victims (and not just in terms of rape… does the name Trayvon mean anything?) No, Jezebel, people won’t debate whether the man was a “slut.” they’ll find other ways to humiliate and blame him, probably THE SAME ONES YOU USED IN THE REST OF THE ARTICLE. (on the Gawker article, someone pointed out that commenters mocked… Read more »
Earlier today, I responded to that first Jezebel comment you quoted. I’m posting it below in case the mods there delete it: “The problem is not that men are more often than not stronger than women, but that physical force is quite often NOT even employed in cases of rape. Most women who’ve been raped were not physically beaten down in the act. The violence implied is often enough to gain compliance, or threats of violence against someone else, blackmail, etc. Physical force from a guy in the bushes is the minority in rape cases. I was drugged and raped… Read more »
Yeah, those articles were HORRENDOUS. I remember that Jezebel ran one of those When Rape Happenz To Teh Menzezezez, It Is Always Taken Seriously stories where they deny that men are victim-blamed and make the false argument that Teh Womynz Always B Victim-Blamed, So See Womynz Has It Worserer.. That was bad enough, but at least it was a serious attempt at discussion. This latest piece of garbage proved the first piece completely wrong.