Comments on: I do not understand “rape culture” http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/ In a mad world, all blogging is psychiatry blogging Fri, 24 Jul 2015 19:34:41 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3 By: rachael http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-134754 Fri, 15 Aug 2014 16:53:21 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-134754 I thought this was largely well-reasoned and tried to be respectful, but contained some unfortunate logical errors and was ultimately too much rooted from your own experience without acknowledgement of how small your sample size is and how your maleness affects your perceptions here. An example of this is the list of crimes which you have personally seen people victim-blame others about, such as having your bike or wallet stolen. Well, thanks to the magic of small samples, my experience is diametrically opposed to yours: I’ve had my bike stolen twice and my wallet stolen once and nobody ever asked me anything about what precautions I took (the police asked what kind of bike lock I used, that was it). But when people have been sexually threatening towards me (thankfully it’s been rare, but I have had it from both men and women) I consistently field questions about whether I took precaution and what my role was in the situation. And this is the experience of almost all my female friends – in fact I seem to have got off REALLY light compared to most of them. And “in my personal straight man experience nobody extra-badly victim-blames female sexual assault victims, therefore, this does not happen in general” is a pretty bold line to stand behind if you think for five minutes about (1) confirmation bias and (2) who these women are likely to talk about these victim-blaming experiences with (ie other women). I think this is a pretty textbook case of how privilege makes us blind to other people’s realities.

I think there are places where you made some logical errors. You’re totally right that the objectification of women DOES happen because straight men have the most social/economic power, but that does not mean it is magically NOT feeding into a culture that views women as commodities who can therefore be coveted in some weird ownership framework, to the extent that the rape of women is routinely compared to theft and only the magic words “I have a boyfriend” could get strange men to leave me alone in public since I was 12 (I tried “I have a girlfriend” just for fun, but it did not work).

Your point about Steubenville google analytics is also a really misleading and weird comparison – people are nationalistic and racist and uninformed about global politics, that’s why Americans don’t care about Syria, not because they somehow care more about one rape than mass slaughter! There are literally thousands of well-known rape cases in india/syria/sudan/DRC/etc which Americans aren’t googling either, and if 70-120K people were suddenly murdered in the US or Canada or a country that seems “like” the US you can bet it would get more US google hits than any rape case.

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]]> By: *Slate Star Codex* | Nation of Beancounters http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-118931 Wed, 09 Jul 2014 17:43:18 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-118931 […] 12. On rape culture. […]

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]]> By: Laci Green needs to STFU | Text Game For Men http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-48827 Thu, 03 Apr 2014 22:13:53 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-48827 […] men. The reason women are treated like objects is not a choice, it’s a symptom of human nature. This post puts it in a good […]

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]]> By: Zachary T http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-39889 Sat, 15 Feb 2014 08:27:02 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-39889 “Breast cancer gets a very disproportionate amount of funding compared to other, deadlier types of cancer.”
Do you think this might be, in part, due to the over-fetishization of female body parts? I suggest you read up on objectification theory.

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]]> By: Douglas Knight http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-36742 Fri, 07 Feb 2014 01:50:27 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-36742 Broken link should be sometimes off a cliff.

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]]> By: grendelkhan http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-36734 Fri, 07 Feb 2014 01:15:19 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-36734 Quite belatedly, here’s a review article on the topic, which notes (among other things) that cases classified as “unfounded” don’t necessarily reflect false reports of any kind, and, eventually, that the model of a false accusation with which we’re familiar, a woman declaring that actually-consensual sex with a particular man was not consensual, is a subset, possibly a small one, of the events reported as “false accusations”.

It’s a relatively short artlcle, and quite worth reading.

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]]> By: grendelkhan http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-36718 Thu, 06 Feb 2014 23:48:41 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-36718 Nick T: The history of rape accusations in particular is pretty extensive, but there are definitely instances of athletes’ other crimes being covered up. I don’t know exactly what to make of this data, but at least it’s some data.

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]]> By: Anonymous http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-36210 Tue, 04 Feb 2014 19:57:11 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-36210

I’ve never seen Silence of the Lambs (I HAVE NO EXPOSURE TO POPULAR CULTURE, SORRY), but I hear it’s about a really urbane and sophisticated cannibal who eats people’s brains and who became one of film’s most popular and respected characters.

Although the 1991 film is probably the characters most well known appearance, earning an Academy Award for Anthony Hopkins for his portrayal of the cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lector, Lector is in fact the centerpeice of a profitable multi-media franchise, which began with the 1981 novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, and continues to the present day in the form of the critically-acclaimed TV series Hannibal, the second season of which will air on NBC in a few weeks.

Here’s the kicker: whle NBC’s Hannibal is a a visually stunning show that prides itself on depicting death and violence in a gruesome, yet artistic manner, there’s one form of violence that the show’s producers have repeatedly claimed that they will never, ever depict. Three guesses as to which one it is.

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]]> By: Patrick http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-16039 Wed, 21 Aug 2013 13:05:51 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-16039 Scott, I think the trouble is definitions. Strictly speaking, ‘rape’ denotes “sex without consent”. But the word ‘rape’ evokes its most vivid prototypical example: a women (perhaps at knife or gunpoint) being forcibly penetrated.

“Rape-culture” then is not a culture of people who forcibly penetrate women and their apologists. Rather – “rape culture” refers to a culture that devalues consent. In other words, a culture which implicitly upholds the proposition that “you don’t need someone’s consent in order to have sex with them.”

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]]> By: Me neither. | Joshua's space http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/#comment-15661 Tue, 06 Aug 2013 02:58:25 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=447#comment-15661 […] I do not understand “rape culture” http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/ […]

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