Thursday, April 12, 2007
I am not a rapist, part II
All they know is that someone they like and respect has felt attacked by blog posts, but they don't know which ones.Anyone who knows this is flat out wrong, and boy does it explain why people are responding like they are. I don't feel attacked by anything I read. I am not attempting to attack back. I feel enlightened. The things I have read lately have connected rape to me in a visceral and emotional way, when before it was a remote and intellectual problem. I am trying to explain how the commentary I've read has made rape real and personal as an issue.
/preface.
So, here is me digging into some specific language, and how some of it prompted my post.
From kyaram's lj comes a couple quotes:
There are instances when the man is coming on to a woman, for sexual reasons, and there is no force, but she is uninterested and unable to express her lack of interest with words, and he just doesn’t see her lack of interest. He is not purposely raping her; he just can’t see that she’s not interested. It’s still rape, though not as clearly defined.
The Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women found that 38% of sexually assaulted women were assaulted by their husbands, common-law partners or boyfriends.
From Anna's LJ, another:
[the media stereotype of rape] makes it easy to spot the victim, spot the rapist. It means never having to consider what rape is about, what rape statistics show us. Rape victims vary from infants and toddlers up to great grandmothers in long term care homes. The vast majority of them know their rapist. A significant number are related to their rapist.
These last two quotes are just example citations and reinforcements that [physically coerced, violent, perpetrated by stranger] is a small subset of rape. That the bulk of rape takes place in an existing relationship, and is at least as likely, possibly more so, to involve non-physical coercion. What this does to 'not exclude' me is expand the concept of perpetrator to "anyone". If a rapist is usually not a violent stranger, but in fact a trusted associate, then I and most everyone I know becomes a potential rapist.
This scares the hell out of me. If trust and caring do not significantly act to block rape, what does? How can we deal with it? How do we stop it? If, as kyaram suggests above, someone can perpetrate rape without even realizing it then how can we even identify it? If rape can happen across lines of trust and love, then I can be raped. Then I can rape. If rape can be perpetrated without conscious intent, then I may have already done so. If I do not then examine myself and my actions, then I am intellectually and emotionally dishonest at the best, and a monster at the worst. I am ethically compelled to seriously consider if I am a rapist. I am ethically compelled to seriously consider if I have been raped.
So I do this. I review my life and my relationships pretty carefully, and as objectively as I can, and conclude "Nope, I call bullshit. I'm not a rapist." I examine my life and those close to me, and do the same.
I get kinda mad then. So I go back and dig into the stats and the numbers, pretty comfortable that I'm going to see misrepresentation of the actual studies, or sloppy research or the like. And I'm stonewalled. The numbers look solid. Enough different groups in different areas are coming up with consistent data that either it's:
A: A conspiracy. (Which I reject out of hand. I find most conspiracy theory kind of mysterious and cute and utterly full of garbage.)
B: A statistical anomaly. Technically possible, but wildly unlikely. Like "pigs will develop wings through natural selection arising from being fenced in but not roofed over" kind of unlikely.
C: Pretty much true.
So now I'm forced to again reconsider myself and the people I love and trust. Again, I'm faced with a pretty limited answer set. Either:
A: None of them are rapists. A statistical anomaly, but entirely supportable given the sample size.
B: Some of them are rapists.
A is the comfortable answer. It lets me say "Whew, that was close. For a second there, I was from a family of monsters and horrible people. Good thing rape is still something that happens to other people."
B is the less comfortable answer, but again, intellectual and emotional honesty compel me to examine it.
...
This is really being hard to write, and is sucking up half my working afternoon, which isn't fair to my employer. I will keep writing about it, though, because I'm not even halfway done unpacking my thoughts. I have yet, for example, to explain how this leads me to the 'people are calling me a rapist'. I will add one clarification: When I say people, I mean everyone who is talking and discussing rape, including myself. It's linked to that thought above, that everyone is a potential rapist, because the comforting illusion that only monsters rape has been removed.
James
Labels: I think too much
posted by James at 4:44 PM
17 Comments:
I'm probably gonna wait until you unpack everything you need to unpack before commenting much here, but something jumped out at me (well, in the sense that I read this, went to work, came home, stopped in the bookstore for two hours, stopped in another book store, started walking the rest of the way home, and then on my way past the petrol station this occurred to me):
Have you really never seen those statistics before? Like, *never*? If so, is this an Alberta thing, a guy thing, or a James thing? I wasn't raised in Alberta, so I don't know if that could be it, but I've known that stat since I hit puberty.
Hi James,
I'm sad to see you have to go through this soul searching.
I've been raped. It's a difficult thing for a man to admit. For me it was more frightening than the times I've been assaulted, or the three times I've had guns pointed at me. It and molestation have had more effect on my identity than any other single input of my life.
I think that there are people who with the best of intentions are using the word rape as a weapon to point at inequality. I think there is something very telling that people who do this quote only the statistics for females. Rape is not a female only problem-- many men are also raped. If you want to see that it's just as devastating on this side of the sex line spend some time reading www.spr.org (Stop Prison Rape.) Rape is horrible for whomever the victim is.
So here's my definition on rape. Rape is the taking away of no, whether through force, or drugs. If your wife can't say no, it's rape. If she chooses to engage in sex to make you happy, just to get you to shut up and go to bed, or any other decision that she decides to make, it isn't rape. If she doesn't get a decision then it is rape.
The fact that you are agonizing over these definitions makes me believe her ability to say no is intact.
Anna: I was aware of rape statistics, in the same kind of abstract way that most people are. The same way that I'm aware of the number of murders in my city, or AIDS deaths in Africa, or the number of people killed in the latest natural disaster.
So I was aware of rape statistics and that rape is bad, but I had not honestly given it attention or critical thought.
Clyde, thanks for speaking up.
I'm not sad to do this soul-searching; it's important, and critical to being human. Humanity is the animal that looks at itself.
Most of the things I've been reading have been pretty sensitive to the existance and extent of male rape. kyaram's livejoural entry (linked in the main post) had a section taking apart some of the myths around male rape.
Also, anyone who knows Raven and I well will pretty much dismiss the idea that either of us is raped as part of that relationship as flat out ridiculous. But if you don't have that context, you can't tell, and that aspect is certainly driving some of this. How much, I'm not sure.
James
Hey James,
Cool. Just to be clear, I'm not pointing fingers at anyone you are conversing with. I just wanted to put out what I've been considering for a while as a definition for rape. To me it seemed more clear, than the one you were being presented. See ya,
Clyde
Clyde, as a note, the reason why the post of mine that James links to only talks about female victims of rape was because it was talking about media depictions of rape and the "rules" we teach women on how to avoid rape, not because I dismiss the idea that men can be raped.
I find prison rape jokes disgusting, as well as the "humour" surrounding male-as-rape-victim. Yeah. That's funny. See me laugh. /sarcasm.
One of my frustrations with "Feminists never talk about male victims of rape" or variations thereof (well, besides that this statement isn't true) is that most rape stats also don't single out victims of lesbian rape. They don't single out gang rape versus single-person rape, they rarely single out date rape versus stranger rape. But what critics point to is that we're not talking about male victims of rape.
I wish more people would talk about male victims of rape. I'm just not certain I should be the one to do that.
I have a lot of thoughts on this topic because it came up in the comments to my post. It's not at all that I dismiss the idea or think it's irrelevant that men are raped. I think it's very relevant and something that needs to be discussed. But, as I said there, it gets frustrating when one can't have a discussion about women without being expected to also have a discussion about men.
Wow. Now I see what you were using my computer for on Tuesday...
First thought: Kyram(sp) is, in my opinion, dead wrong. A man does not become a rapist just because a woman doesn't know how to communicate. She may feel violated, but that's a different issue. In my opinion, rape can only occur if the perpetrator knows that his/her/it's attentions are unwanted.
Certainly, rape can happen within the boundaries of a relationship, even a marriage. Coersion comes in many forms. But the burden of 'No' must rest with the potential victim. Obviously, in cases where the potential victim can't say no (child, disabled, known to be mentally unfit), that isn't the case- but you can't call someone a rapist just because they can't read minds.
Second: I know, or know of, a number of people on both sides of the issue; that is to say, rapists and raped. I don't know any rapists who were not molested themselves. My experience has absolutely been that the '1 in 3' stats are about accurate for women. I can think of a half-dozen women and two young girls off the top of my head who have been sexually abused (note that I do not say raped, I consider the psychological damage to be largely equivalent and rape to be a specific term requiring pentrative intercourse), and could probably think of as many again if I tried; I've known/known of three men, and at least two out of three continued the cycle.
Third: On the one hand it /is/ scary to realise that rapists aren't all boogymen. On the other, it's a lot more tragic; to know that rape is, more often than not, response to childhood trauma and psychological damage, and that in many, maybe most, cases, it's not meant to harm. Hell yeah, of course it's incredibly harmful; don't get me wrong here. But that harm is so very often not the intention has become very clear to me. I don't know if that makes it more or less frightening, really.
I'm losing my train of thought now, so I may have to wait until there are fewer screaming beings attached to my commenting sleeve (literally). Well done not losing your cool, James and Anna both.
To generalize from what Star was/is saying (crossposting from 20 feet away!), and from what Dan commented on in one of your earlier posts...
The language in use here is, as is abundantly clear, imprecise. And no matter how successfully we clarify for our own purposes here, that imprecision means that the statistics you're looking at are far less meaningful than they could be.
I don't think consent is a binary proposition. There is a single clear line - when all of a victim's options, including death, have been taken away by physical coercion. (Never mind canonization stories, and anime, with biting-off-own-tongue as a device.)
But that's the only clear line, and it's obvious that this applies to an incredibly small minority of cases.
In all other cases, consent is a spectrum. It's about the decisions someone is being presented with. When sex occurs, the degree of consent ranges widely, from full-on rip-their-shirt-off agreement, through to painful, traumatic admission that rape is preferable to death.
The borderline cases are where a single binary term, rape, just doesn't have the resolution to capture what's going on.
Imagine the case of a marriage which has begun to go downhill; he's unhappy with it, but trying to salvage it, she things things are going okay just at the moment. (I'm using these genders not as a veiled reference but as a deliberate rebuttal to gender-generalization. This is a pure hypothetical, not a reference to anyone.) One evening, she wants sex, and he - feeling trapped, perhaps, perhaps having fought about just this in the past - acquiesces out of fear of worse things that will come to their relationship if he adds this stress to it at this point. She, perhaps, knows that this fear is strengthening her case, but allows the situation anyway for a variety of reasons, none of them particularly malicious.
His consent has been strained. The threat of dissolution of their relationship is different only in degree, not in kind, from the risk of bodily harm which might convince a rape victim in some much clearer case.
I would not call this rape. But the fact that it's a judgement call means that all participants in research on this are similarly making judgment calls in their responses. (My mother edits and vets research proposals in psychology and related fields. I am not speaking out of ignorance; yes, a well-crafted research project will do what it can to minimize this effect.)
What's more, a situation can result in a scene where one participant's consent has been seriously strained, but the other participant has had no intent whatsoever to do so. Does this imply we must decouple "rapist" and "rape victim" such that one can occur without the other? That perhaps 1 in 3 women will feel their right to consent to have been violated, but perhaps not even an equal number of incidents (much less men) is guilty of willing such a violation? Certainly they don't have insider information about the contents of one another's skulls, so to some degree this must be true.
And even a powerful desire to preserve one's partner's full capacity to consent is not necessarily sufficient. Returning to my hypothetical, suppose the wife does not know her husband has this fear; would fight hard and suffer privation herself to keep him from suffering thus, if she knew. But his terror is intenal. It's also sufficient to entirely cripple his willingness to consent and leave him feeling horrified and abused.
We're all making compromises every day. Some of those compromises have to do with sex; some of them have to do with getting up with the kids. No, James; I don't think the two areas are in any way qualitatively different for this purpose.
If there's any bright line, for me, it's in the distinction between wanting sex for its own sake versus wanting the power, the withholding of consent, or the control. And of course it's clear on which side of that you, or I, would fall. A willful failure to read signals would be a third category, but that gets us into issues of due dilligence, which are notoriously hard to judge. In my opinion, as with fraud cases (the White House recently "losing" five million emails, anyone?), the line there is that it becomes [morally] culpable only when it passes the point where even a marginally [emotionally] competent person would have managed it if they had been trying.
Everything beyond that is human negotiations and the imperfections of life.
Just as an aside, Kyaraam is quoting the sexual assault centre's awareness guide in her post. I'm not sure entirely of her own views on rape and assault, but her comments are the ones in italics.
After saying I wanted to wait till you were done unpacking, I keep coming back to make more comment.
Just as a question:
Do you want links to other men who seem to be going through or have gone through similar feelings? Or would that not help? Or would you like to see them after you're done writing everything and see if that helps?
Anna, I'm Ok either way. At this point I've had enough conversation and interaction (here and elsewhere) around this that I'm pretty comfortable with what I've said; I'm continuing to unpack because it's rude to go halfway and stop.
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