I can't decide what I like best about the article. On the one hand, I really enjoy how it completely eclipses the pain of being raped by someone you liked and trusted in order to concentrate on the real pain of being a rapist when you're deep down inside a really nice guy who just doesn't know better than to fuck sleeping women:
To some of you, it may sound ridiculous when I say that my friend is a really sweet guy. He was devastated at the allegation of rape, and even more so at my confirmation that it was rape. We spent a week or so exploring how this could have happened. Not excusing it, but trying to understand it. With him, the conversations were painful and beautiful, and he understood.
Painful and beautiful, ya'll! Why, he's practically an Anne Rice vampire. I'll bet his soul is the color of rainbows and his farts smell like puppy breath.
On the other hand, there's gems like this:
Within the community at large, there were much harder discussions centering on how it was that he thought penetrating her while she was asleep was okay, but any discussion of her behavior leading up to it was taboo. Any suggestion that her behavior may have led to -- NOT JUSTIFIED OR EXCUSED -- the rape was met with screams of “victim blaming” and “rape apology.”
That's us hysterical womb-driving feminists, always screaming shit like how women's actions don't lead to their rape and that any suggestion otherwise is victim-blaming bullshit that puts the focus on the poor signal-misunderstanding rapist who genuinely thought that being passed out dead-drunk on a bed next to him was an obviously signal that the woman wanted to be fucked in her sleep without giving any prior consent to do so. MEA CULPA, I GUESS.
1 comments:
What I really don't understand is -- the woman didn't even really do anything for someone who is victim-blaming to blame her about. She flirted! She danced with him! She made double entendres! You need to really be desperate to absolve the guy of blame to say that those things made him "misunderstand" her.
To a large degree, my friend thought he was doing what was expected. And while he was wrong, weeks of flirting, provocative dancing and intimate innuendo led him to believe that sex was the logical conclusion of their social intercourse.
Well, no. Most people would have been led to believe that they were showing interest in sex, not that they had agreed, based on some flirting, to have absolutely had sex. Unconscious sex. Without even discussing it. This is a bunch of fallacies! Appeal to probability. False dilemma.
The author appears to be seriously invested in deciding this was a guy who didn't MEAN to rape, who just accidentally had sex with someone who didn't consent. (Lucky guy: he has a rape educator there telling everyone he's the good guy in this scenario.) Apparently we have to talk about why this guy raped her, but we have to talk about it as if it were obviously true that he didn't intend to rape and we have to start from the basis that he is a good person who just made one tiny error in judgement.
This seriously limits the ways in which we can discuss rape, because we have to spend the entire time assuring the men they are nice guys who, ok, sure, they raped someone, but no worries, we still like them.
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