One of the benefits to being a wingnut is that there's a low-cost, high-payoff emotional reward system.  A handful of smart people---Karl Rove, Frank Luntz---come up with the dog whistles and empty talking points, and all you have to do is repeat them and collect your high fives from your fellow dittoheads, who will crow about how you showed those lie-brals with their stupid facts they got from the lamestream media.  (Indeed, the quickest way to tell that a wingnut has lost an argument is he and his buddies start declaring victory.)  The one danger in this, of course, is that by mindlessly parroting conservative cliches, you occasionally will say something so incredibly wrong-headed and inappropriate that even you the shameless wingnut will be embarrassed, once you see what you did there. 

One of these cliches that you hear over and over is to claim that American feminists are wrong for caring about (fill in a cultural concern in American society) when some brown-skinned people in a non-Christian nation are tolerating some horrible abuse of women's rights.  This delightful cliche hangs in because it allows the wingnut both to paint American feminists as nothing but bubble-headed bimbos while making the racist assertion that only people not like them are sexist while also allowing themselves to pretend they actually give a shit.  It's a wingnut trifecta.  It is, of course, utterly meaningless, as it presumes, incorrectly, that women who care about body image issues here can't care about FGM there, and also it presumes, incorrectly, that the mere act of caring about women in foreign nations somehow magically changes their circumstances.  But setting that aside, this particular cliche also creates a giant trap and Melissa Clouthier (of course) stepped right into it:

Meanwhile gendericide in India. RT @billscher: Don't miss @JessicaValenti on Morning Joe defending "Slutwalks" http://on.msnbc.com/l8F9Rw

Jesse sent this tweet to me, because he actually has the stomach to follow some of these right wing bloggers, and I don't.  But I was immediately amused, because Melissa hadn't realized what she had just said there, and how it would sound to people not high-fiving her.  Let's recap:

1) SlutWalks are an anti-rape action that has proven to be really popular. 

2) Regardless of how effective you think a SlutWalk is, one must agree that someone defending it is opposed to rape and takes fighting it very seriously. 

3) Melissa plugged this into the usual formulation, and basically ended up arguing that Jessica is wrong to fight rape in America when there's "gendercide" in India. 

To be clear, I think Melissa actually meant this.  It's common enough for conservatives to argue that feminists are making too much out of rape, and that having some frat daddy corner a college girl at a party and rape her doesn't really count as much more than just good times, and it was probably her fault anyway.  Heather McDonald was trotting out an unvarnished example of this argument when I went up against her on World Have Your Say, and she even suggested that because many rape victims are able to function well enough, in the months and years after a rape, to attend classes and otherwise not fall completely apart means that it isn't real rape. This argument, of course, why SlutWalk exists.  So I responded to Melissa with this assumption in mind:

@MelissaTweets Wow, you're really going to put your money on arguing that rape isn't a real issue. Well-played.

I figured she'd ignore me, but having this mirror held up to her face created a giant reaction, which is understandable.  I find her attitude repulsive, and can only imagine what it must feel like to see with someone else's eyes what an asshole you are.  But her initial response was to double down:

.@AmandaMarcotte I'm saying Feminists undermine themselves by such stupidly misplaced priorities.

At this point, I reminded her that she was saying, in public, that considering rape a problem is a "misplaced priority". Which I think is when the penny dropped and she realized that perhaps saying that American feminists shouldn't take rape seriously may not be the brightest idea in the world.  Now that it's been discovered that arty film directors, leftist warriors, and the French can be rapists, the official conservative party line is that rape is a serious crime and they're totallly not disputing that, even if it's still the victim's fault in most cases.  (Melissa veered off on this for a bit, blathering about how I don't understand how men think, which is presumably that they have to rape anyone whose skirt shows X amount of thigh.  It's true; I don't think men are uncontrollable animals.)  Caught looking like an unreconstructed rape apologist, Melissa then tried to change the subject:

.@AmandaMarcotte Amanda, you're really going to argue that Slutwalks prevent rape?

Of course, that was not actually my argument.  I might make that in another context, but my argument here was against Melissa's assertion that as long as India is struggling with a cultural bias against having daughters, American women should not protest the rapes of themselves.  This was the assertion, and I carefully reminded her of this over and over while she dodged and weaved and complained about SlutWalk because she didn't think it was effective or appropriate.  I tried to explain that there's a difference between priorities and tactics, and that her first two tweets were priority-based---she denounced Jessica for supporting anti-rape protests while there were presumably worse horrors in the world than rape.  I'm completely disinterested in the opinion of wingnuts on the topic of whether or not SlutWalks work; in terms of what SlutWalks are trying to accomplish, getting the good opinion of professional misogynists isn't on the list.  That a resentment-based pea brain like Melissa Clouthier disapproves of women having fun while speaking out is about as shocking or interesting as the fact that I don't care for the music of Justin Bieber.  What I was interested in was her contention that Jessica's interest in fighting rape was wrong when there are sexism-based problems in India.  

She wouldn't get off tactics, of course, and ended up flouncing, which caused a sea of wingnuts tweeting that she had "won" the argument.  (See the first paragraph.)  I wish I could say this represents some sort of end to the use of the wingnut cliche that American feminists shouldn't care about X because brown-skinned people in non-Christian nations are doing Y, but alas, there is no such thing as a right wing shibboleth that is so stupid that it can be put to bed.  I, personally, am looking forward to the day that Nicholas Kristof is accused of not caring about Real Issues with women who are Really Oppressed.  Actually, I'm sure that's happened.

My point, besides the joy of sharing this encounter with the Pandagon audience, is twofold: 1) A reminder that a lot of wingnut truisms really are just empty blather, and this is doubly true when it comes to their stereotypes of feminists and 2) that feminist activism has actually done a lot already to change the dialogue around rape.  Even a couple of years ago, I imagine that Melissa would have just clung to the "rape isn't a real issue, unlike gender disparities in India" line until the bitter end, but now it's becoming toxic for even female anti-feminists, who often are empowered to be even more belligerently misogyny by virtue of their gender, to wave off rape like it's not big deal.  Good work, feminists!  We still have a long way to go, but that I was able to shame Melissa Clouthier about her knee-jerk minimizing of rape is a pretty big win.  Bit by bit, we're winning the argument against rape apologists.

Of course, I asked her repeatedly to admit that Jessica Valenti is in the right to declare rape a serious social problem, and I did get crickets on that.  But hey, I was just driving the knife in, so I get why she might feel humiliated by actually going on the record agreeing that feminists are right with our "rape is really bad" beliefs. 

As noted earlier, there's a rally in Manhattan today to protest the acquittal of the two NYPD police officers who were accused of rape.  While I'm sure the rape apologists are out in full force---again, I have never seen a rape case so cut and dry that tons of folks won't defend in all the years I've been writing about this issue, and that's not because they weren't cut and dry---the ugly reality is that there was a ton of solid evidence to corrobrate the victim's testimony (and yes, women's eyewitness testimony is still considered evidence, even in rape cases, which many people seem to forget).  There's the video footage that indicates the cops kept going back to her place, and only an idiot would think that they would have any other purpose but rape.  There's the rape kit that showed that she'd been penetrated in the position she recalls being raped in.  There's the taped admission from the cop that he used a condom (which explains the lack of DNA evidence). And there's the fact that the jurors feel so guilty about letting rapists off, but, by their own admission, they just can't really see the victim as a victim because she was drunk.  A telling quote:

“She was drunk. I don’t believe she would have gotten into this situation if she wasn’t . . . She was blasted. She was a mess.”

So the question now is, what are we protesting?  What needs to change so that raping women is considered legal if the victim behaves in an unladylike fashion?

This is where things get really depressing, because there's no quick fix.  There's no authority to appeal to on this anymore.  In many ways, feminists have done a really great job of getting authorities to take rape seriously.  Not that there's not more to do, but we should take a moment to be grateful that the police pursued this case, the city prosecuted it, and even that the jurors tried to make excuses for their loathsome willingness to let a couple of cops off for raping someone because they thought the victim brought it on herself.  These are, historically speaking, huge steps forward.  The NYPD immediately fired the cops as soon as the trial was over.  I'm sure there were areas where the authorities could have done more.  Prosecutors especially are often too timid about addressing head on the prejudice against victims of rape.  But at the end of the day, the ultimate responsibility for this injustice lies with the jury who just couldn't bring themselves to believe that even if a woman does something stupid like drinks too much, she should not be punished with rape. 

Seriously, a hangover is enough, assholes.

This case demonstrates that, above all other things, what needs to happen to stop rape is a change in our culture's attitudes about sex and women.  Getting it through people's thick skulls that no one deserves to be raped is a start.  But the toxic attitudes that allow people to excuse rapists go much deeper than that. 

At its core, the rape culture is built around the belief that women do not deserve to have a subjective sexuality.  Sex is constructed as something women have and men have to extract from them.  And women who "give it up" are seen as weak idiots and sluts.  It's been said before but it's worth saying again, this time from David at Man Boobz:

We grow up, after all, in a society that treats sexuality as a commodity that women possess, and that men try to “get” from women – by charming them into “giving it up,” by buying it directly or indirectly (by going to a prostitute or paying for dinner), or simply taking by force.

This has to end.  This attitude makes it all about the victim and how she didn't adequately protect "the goods", instead of about the rapist, who uses sex as a weapon to violently assault people.  If someone gets too drunk and they pass out, and a gang of dudes decides that they're going to use that person as a pinata to see who can land the biggest punch, would we say to the drunk person, "Well, you should have known that's what dudes do."  I would hope not.  I would hope you'd be so horrified that anyone would think that beating the shit out of someone for shits and giggles was a fucked up thing to do. 

Well, that's what rape is.  It's a violent assault that uses sex as a weapon instead of fisticuffs. But the general gist is the same.  But we get all confused, because we as a culture don't think of sex as something that men and women do together for fun, but as something men extract from women.  If we were clearer on this, why rape isn't sex wouldn't be so damn hard to understand.  And we wouldn't tolerate rapists wandering amongst us, free to rape.

This is cultural change.  It works one argument at a time, one clear-headed presentation, one Slutwalk, one rock song, one blog post, on explanation of why you or your friend or loved one did not deserve to get raped.  This is a long-haul battle.  But it's one we must fight.

I'm angry but not surprised to hear that the jury acquitted the NYPD police accused of rape and burglary.  Not surprised, because the belief that some women are fair game has not only not disappeared from our society, but it's probably only grown stronger in recent years as the tabloid media increasingly makes it money by showing pictures of sexually active and/or drunk women, and holds them up to be the greatest villains who ever lived.  (Hitler had nothing on Lindsay Lohan---when is she getting the death penalty for being a drunk?!)  Lindsay and Jill lay out for you why this isn't so much a genuine "not guilty" verdict, but closer to a jury nullification of laws that make it illegal to rape drunk women. If you have any doubts about that, consider that the cops were also acquitted for burglary, even though there's video evidence that should put that beyond any reasonable doubt.  

I also wish I could say I'm surprised that the rape even happened.  By and large, I don't trust police officers. It's a profession that is notorious for attracting men with massive masculinity issues, you know basically thugs.  Much of the time, "serve and protect" is deemed contingent on people's gender, race, ethnicity or perceived compliance with social norms.  Unfortunately, much of the public not only doesn't mind this but seems to romanticize it.  Which is why they support the cops when they rape and beat and otherwise act outside the law.  Just to demonstrate this, when I put out a request on Twitter for songs protesting the police or sexual assault, some no-doubt-wingnut acted all butthurt: "Why would you be publicizing anti-police songs?"  Those are the people eager to write a hall pass to police to rape women perceived as insufficiently chaste.

So, instead of the usual Friday Genius Ten, here's a mix of songs protesting sexual abuse and protesting the police.  Use this mix to energize yourself for protests.  If you're in New York City, please come out to the rally today at the Manhattan Criminal Court Building from 5-7. Details here.

Leave your suggestions in comments!

If you want to read the most wrong-headed if well-meaning thing you'll read all week, check out Penelope Trunk's response to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrest. In it, Trunk actually argues that women with powerful and well-paid jobs are going to be facing more sexual harassment than women with low-status jobs.  Her rationale is that pretty much all women who actually fight back against sexual harassment face retribution and losing their jobs (she's right on this point), but waitresses and hotel maids and secretaries have a secret card that executives don't:

But, what about women who don't care if they get fired? Those women hold a lot of power in this equation.

It used to be that women with low-level jobs did not have the socioeconomic backing to stand up for themselves in the face of harassment. Today, women feel more empowered—even women in a low pay-grade. And women across the economic spectrum can identify what crosses the line.

These women have nothing to lose when they report men who cross the line sexually. So the maid reported. And then, it turns out, all sorts of women in higher up positions spoke up against Strauss-Kahn. The women wouldn't report the harassment on their own. They don't want to suffer retribution. But now there will be no retribution, so it's safe to come forward.

This is why men are going to focus harassment at the higher ranks of the corporate ladder. These are the women who have to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep climbing the ladder.

But God help the guy who harasses a women with nothing to lose.

If you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you that is very nice indeed, and the paperwork will be here any minute.

Her argument rests on a presumption that I think is easy enough to see through: That the lower you are on the economic ladder, the less you have to lose.  This is, of course, complete bullshit and is as stupid an assertion as it ever was.  Women who have solid resumes and references and savings accounts are in a much better position to leave a job than women who live paycheck to paycheck. I'm unclear how that's changed.  If anything, the recession has made it worse. These women could lose their homes if they fall short a paycheck in many cases.  That puts them more into the "everything" left to lose category more than the "nothing" left to lose.

As Matt Y. noted, sexual abuse and assault continues to be a major problem for hotel maids.  What Trunk is failing to understand in her attempts to be too clever is that sexual abuse is always about power and rank.  Men are asserting their rank over women.  It's true that women high up on the totem pole get harassed, too, but that doesn't change this equation.  Men who harass powerful women often outrank them at work, and generally they feel they outrank all women everywhere because they're men and women are beneath them.

I don't what Trunk's game is here, but the reality is that we're all in this together.  Turning woman against woman on this issue doesn't help anyone.  We should all support each other and all accept that everyone else is in the same boat as we are.  No matter how much or little you get paid, society doesn't like it when women make everyone uncomfortable by complaining about sexist treatment.  Society wants all women to shut up and put up with it and be good little girls who don't make demands for fair treatment.  Women really would be wise to show some solidarity in pushing back against this.  It's really great to see high-paid IMF employees aligning themselves with this hotel maid and saying we're all Spartacus, as it were.  And I resent folks like Penelope Trunk fucking it up with Oppression Olympics nonsense.

One of the best, most life-affirming parts of being a female writer is that some dudes will never ever allow that you might know what you're talking about, no matter how much experience or education you have with a subject.  This is doubly true when the subject is Lady Stuff like abortion rights or rape---the vagina creates a magical force field around the brain where no amount of time spent covering a subject will allow any information to penetrate that could make an opinion the vagina-holder has worth considering.  This expectation that women don't know what they're talking about is one of those joyous things that gets me out of bed in the morning with a song in a heart and a skip in my step.  That, or maybe it's the daily treat of freshly ground coffee I allow myself.  Your choice.

Today's fun example is the thread at my post on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case at Double X. I think it's a pretty good post, especially since we're in the early stages of this case, where there's not much to opine on.  I went with discussing the police work, which is looking pretty solid right now.  But I also noted---because I have extensive experience going back many years on this---that it's just a matter of time before the victim-blaming and other ridiculousness kicks in.  Quoting myself:

Right now, I have a sensation of the quiet before the storm.  The arrest happened over the weekend, out of the usual news cycle, and so the nearly inevitable firestorm hasn't yet begun of victim-blaming, accusations against the victim for moral degeneracy and lying, feminists angrily denouncing victim-blaming, and calls for a much higher presumption of innocence than is offered for any other crime in the media.

I even allowed an out, on the very slim chance that rape apologists give this one a pass, by saying that all this may not happen.  No matter---it was time for questioning my intelligence, experience, and mental health in comments. I point this out not to pity myself, since I truly don't care what said dudes think about me, but because I think it's interesting to note in real time how rape apologism and sexist treatment of women when they dare speak out works.  So, I got this comment:

People want sexual assault accusations subject to " a much higher presumption of innocence than is offered for any other crime in the media?"  
 
Are you mad? 

It's possible that the only reason to suspect that people use "presumption of innocence" as a weapon to argue that accused rapists shouldn't be treated like any other person accused a crime would be that I suffer from a mental condition that gives me delusions and hallucinations.  That's why I'm asking you, the readers, to tell me if this link works and whether or not the quote that is contained therein is a hallucination cooked up by my crazy lady-brain, or if it's actually there.

The chief of Sarkozy's conservative party, Jean-Francois Cope, said he told the president that he asked fellow party members to "proceed with caution and restraint" in their comments, and Sarkozy supported the idea.

"I was, like all Frenchmen, very disturbed by the news, very disturbed by the images that I saw," including of Strauss-Kahn handcuffed in New York.

"There is the principle of presumed innocent," he said.

As far as I can tell, this is a demand much higher standard of presumed innocence than you would have in any other criminal case.  I was unaware that accused rapists should be allowed to go about without handcuffs, unlike the accused in any other crime.

I was also held up as a paragon of hysterical overreaction for predicting, with a caveat, that a wealthy Frenchman would probably have his defenders, no matter how good the evidence or tawdry the accusations.  The commenter:

Now Ms Marcotte has gotten so shrill and alarmist on the subject that she is going after, "the nearly inevitable firestorm hasn't yet begun of victim-blaming, accusations against the victim for moral degeneracy and lying," before it even exists. 

Truly, only a "shrill" and hysterical alarmist with some kind of crazy agenda could possibly think that excuses will be made for the accused, and the alleged victim will be accused, sans evidence, of all sorts of crazy stuff.  Sane manly men can see that the chance of rape apologism on the behalf of Strauss-Kahn is only something that could be dreamed up by alarmist feminists, and not something that could be predicted from extensive past experience.  Which is why I surely hallucinated veiled accusations that the alleged victim is just being a hysteric and a prude, who probably made it all up anyway:

To tell the truth, everybody knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine; what distinguishes him from plenty of others is his propensity not to hide it. In Puritan American, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism, they tolerate infinitely better the sins of money than the pleasures of the flesh. It would be easy to trap a personality so unresistant to feminine attractions as D.S.K.

See more stuff I just hallucinated with my shrill lady brain here.

The important thing is that, at the end of the day, we remember that we can't assume that a feminist has a clue what she's talking about when it comes to rape and culture, no matter how many years she's put in reseraching and commenting on one case after another that have all fit into exactly the same pattern.  I'm sure we can get this guy to explain that it's because women's brains evolved so that we can't make out patterns or learn from experience.  There's no room in our brains for memories, since our cells are all taken up with wanting to look pretty and have babies.

Usually, I tend to laugh at kooky, go-nowhere bills offered by super-wingnutty state legislators.  But lately, the winking at domestic terrorists and the feeding of paranoia that leads to violence makes it not funny anymore.  This item from Think Progress, for instance.  Texas Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, Republican of course, introduced a bill reading:

A law enforcement agency that has custody of an illegal immigrant to whom this article applies may:
(1) release or discharge the illegal immigrant at the office of a United States senator or United States representative during that office ’s normal business hours; and
(2) request an agent or employee of the United States senator or United States representative to sign a document acknowledging the release or discharge of the illegal immigrant at the senator ’s or representative ’s office.

The idea is clearly to harass federal legislators until they just get rid of all the undocumented immigrants, and sadly I don’t think Kolkhorst and folks like her care very much what it would take.  They just don’t, as I’ve said before, want to hear anyone speaking Spanish at the grocery store ever again.  Never mind that many legal immigrants and native-born Americans also speak Spanish, so really, even if Kolkhorst got her way, she still wouldn’t get her way. 

But what worries me greatly about this bill is not that it’ll pass, but the implications of it.  Kolkhorst is basically saying that she thinks immigrants—-or immigrants from Mexico, since I highly doubt she’s thinking of Europeans that are living here without documents—-are icky, and that if you’re exposed to them, too, you will also see that they’re icky and will come around to her point of view.  And that point of view is frighteningly dehumanizing, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

The issue here is that a lot of white people hate Mexican immigrants and people of Mexican descent.  They often hate with a burning, obsessive passion.  And bills like this, even if they don’t pass, send the signal that their bigotry is shared by people in authority, and some of them will feel emboldened by this to do really awful and violent things.  Like I noted yesterday at Double X:

But domestic terrorists are different.  Many of them believe that they do have community support behind them, and that most of the community is just cowed by political correctness from speaking out.

That quote was in reference to Shawna Forde, who murdered a man and his daughter, and wounded his wife (American citizens, not that it should matter, but just adds another level of understanding of what happened) just because they were Hispanic, and she hated Hispanic people.  People like Forde are emboldened when they see people in power signaling support for their virulent hatred.  Remember that Scott Roeder decided to murder Dr. Tiller after he sat in on a trial where Phill Kline used his powers as a government official to witch hunt Dr. Tiller.  For domestic terrorists, getting signals of support from people in government matters to them. 

David Neiwert wrote movingly about the results of this kind of bigotry and the violence it breeds:

The people who broke into her home late at night while she was sleeping with her new puppy on the living-room couch and cold-bloodedly shot her in the face while she pleaded for her life were people who did not see her, or her father or mother, as human beings. They were people who had become so accustomed to dehumanizing Latinos that they didn’t care about the devastation they brought to Arivaca and the lives of this family. They were so consumed by hate that they had no humanity left themselves.

The dehumanizing language of scapegoating and eliminationism—the naming and targeting of other humans for the supposed social ills they incur, followed as always by words urging their excision from society, if not the world—is endemic on the American Right. And among right-wing extremists, it intensifies, grows and metastasizes into something lethal and monstrous.

This bill is built on eliminationist ideas, especially the assumption that the mere presence of an undocumented worker in the sight line of federal level politicians will upset them so much they decide to take action, action which is also eliminationist, in that it’s focused on “scrubbing” out a subsection of the American population with deportation.  (Or, in a lot of cases, long jail sentences.)  This sort of thing sends a signal to the Shawna Fordes of the world that their hatred is justified, and so are the things they do in the name of it, which in her case involved shooting a little girl in the head. 

So, no, as wacky as this bill is, I don’t think it’s very funny at all.

Rape is a political act, in the purest sense that second wave feminists meant when they said “the personal is political”.  What they meant by that was not that one isn’t allowed to make choices to survive in a patriarchy, and that we should therefore turn feminism into a purity contest.  What they meant was that many things women had been encouraged to see as merely personal matters, including violence against them, were better understood in a political lens.  Men rape not because they’re animals and you tempted them and that’s that.  The feminist view is rape is political, an act of dominance, a reassertion of the patriarchy.

That’s why I’m not surprised anymore when gang rapes happen.  There is no more “pure” rape than men getting together and encouraging each other to prove this perverse, patriarchal definition of manhood by hurting and dominating a woman.  And that’s why rapes escalate in times of conflict, because in the frenzy of men trying to get power over each other, women are objects to act out those power games.

Ironically, this political understanding puts the rape of Lara Logan in context. It says nothing about Egypt but that they’re a patriarchy that this happened.  It says nothing about the claims of the protesters otherwise, and it may not say anything about the future of women.  It definitely says nothing about whether or not this people or that people can self-govern.  It simply says that when we raise men from the cradle to think of women as the gender that serves and is dominated, rape will become an expression of power and dominance.  Gang rapes happen here.  They happen pretty much everywhere, because patriarchy is a worldwide injustice.  Rapes are about this oldest injustice, and this ugly spot on the stain of all humanity.  Crowds of men, struggles over power, women as objects.  It’s a formula that leads to this.  The leg to kick out from under that to prevent this is not struggles for government control, which are part and parcel of being human. Or people hitting the streets, demanding their rights.  The leg to kick out is the worldwide belief that women are second class.  Then and only then will rape stop. 

Condolences to Lara Logan and her family, and to the nameless victims the world wide who suffer rapes like hers, sadly every day.

Anti-choicers are really on the march lately, but even I was shocked by this latest news: South Dakota legislators are trying to amend some changes to the “justifiable homicide” definition to include killing someone to prevent the killing of a fetus.  This proposed change is one of the best exposures of the beliefs about gender that are lurking underneath the maudlin fetus stuff, because the bill doesn’t allow anyone to play a white knight killing an abortion provider…..just a family member of the woman getting the abortion.  And, it seems that it might include allowing the killing of the woman, too, though it’s tough to say.  If a woman tells her husband she’s getting an abortion whether he likes it or not, and he kills her to stop it, he also kills the fetus, but he did act in accordance with the law in the sense of motivation.  Lawyers in the house?

You can smell the rationalization built in to say this isn’t about terrorism, because most people who have successfully killed abortion providers didn’t actually know any patients of theirs.  But obviously, it’s an invitation to kill abortion providers, especially in light of how much the larger anti-choice movement is trying to encourage men who are bitter because an abortion allowed a girlfriend to leave them. In other words, men who are angry because they couldn’t trap a woman with pregnancy.  Let’s be clear that any man who thinks it’s appropriate to trap a woman with pregnancy is a man who deserves to lose his relationship, full stop, but anti-choicers tend to romanticize and celebrate controlling, abusive men. I’ve seen anti-choice websites encourage men who’ve impregnated women to stomp into abortion clinics and try to remove her forcibly (though this is often portrayed in romantic terms, because hey, you’re showing her that you want to keep her around, and any woman should be slobberingly grateful that a man will have her). And of course, there’s the oldie-but-a-goodie of Jill Stanek applauding men beating women to punish them for thinking they can say no to incubating the manly seed. After describing the scene in “Godfather II” where Michael Corleone—-a cold-blooded murdering gangster—-slaps his wife after she admits an abortion, Stanek said (man, this never gets old):

That spontaneous slap was the reaction of a real man who a woman had just told she aborted his baby. Compare that to the modern day cowardly male response, “It’s your choice. Whatever you decide, I’ll support you.”

Straight from the “pro-life” mouth: Real men use violence to control women.  Cowards believe women own themselves.

In the real world, it’s not unknown for abortion clinics to have to go to great lengths to keep domestic abusers from harming their partners or the health professionals in a clinic trying to provide abortions.  Many abortion clinics just don’t let male partners past the waiting room, even though that means that women who want support from loving male partners often have to go it alone.  It’s just a safety precaution, though.  Unfortunately, domestic abusers are just the sorts to wait until the procedure is about to start to start throwing shit and breaking things, in order to get the maximum impact on the victim.  That’s kind of how these things work, and clinics have to work around that. 

If this bill passes into law, a wife beater whose wife is trying to abort for the entirely sensible reason that you don’t want babies with a batterer could walk into a clinic, shoot the doctor to prevent the abortion, and plead justifiable homicide, with the blessing of the South Dakota legislature and presumably the anti-choice movement that lobbied them.

Anyone who uses the term “pro-life” really has no excuse.  It’s honestly one of the best examples of doublespeak in our current parlance, and it needs to end.

HR3, misleadingly named the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, is a perfect storm of everything that’s nasty about the modern, hyper-conservative Republican party.  It’s dishonest, since women who have federal health insurance are already banned from using that money for abortion care.  This bill is actually an attempt to shut down abortion coverage through all private insurance, including employer-provided insurance, which means that it’s beyond even the dreadful Stupak-Pitts amendment/executive order.  Some “small government”.  As Rachel Maddow documented, this bill is just the most egregious example of how the GOP basically hoodwinked the voters.  They ran on “creating jobs”, which they clearly have no intention of doing, since they’re going to be too busy looking for ways to put the screws to everyone they hate, a long list that includes poor people, people who read a lot, gays, and basically all women, but especially the most vulnerable in our society.

Which is why they rushed out this bill, which I’d call the “Economic Crisis Is A Good Time To Rain Hell On American Women In Need Act”.  In fact, John Boehner called this bill a “top priority”.  We have 10% unemployment, but making sure that abortions are only a privilege for those who can pay out of pocket on a moment’s notice is the GOP’s top priority.

Sadly, the mainstream media (outside of a handful of awesome fighters, like Rachel Maddow, Nicholas Kristof, and Bob Herbert) has gotten inured to relentless attacks on women from conservatives, and subsequently fail to properly understand that a bill like this is pure misogyny, with a giant side dose of class warfare.  They’ve failed to cover the nefarious workings of Rep. Chris Smith from New Jersey, who competes regularly in the heavy competition in Congress for the title Biggest Misogynist, and who has made a special pet project out of trying to shut down any foreign aid that would include contraception, and who has accused Secretary Clinton of being a friend to child rapists because she believes child rape victims should get medical care.  But as you’ll see, Chris Smith is actually the worst enemy in Congress a minor victim of rape could have, starting with the fact that he seems to believe they’re lying sluts who need to be punished. 

Smith’s egregious misogyny is why this bill, HR3, has a strong chance of getting more media attention and political pushback than we initially thought it would.  See, on top of the usual routine of denying abortion services to the most vulnerable, exploiting a terrible economic situation to make people’s lives even worse, and straight up lying, Smith also decided to wedge one more pet project into this bill, which is rape apologism.  And that is what finally broke everyone’s capacity to put up with this shit anymore.

See, HR3 has—-like the Hyde Amendment—-a provision in it that carves out an exception for rape, incest, and the health/life of the mother. But because anti-choicers like Smith are such ruthless misogynists, they tend to believe the misogynist stereotype that all women, especially those who claim to be ill or victims of crimes, are lying whores until proven otherwise.  Or just lying whores, regardless of the evidence they produce.  And so, to make sure those lying whores don’t get their hands on those delicious, orgasm-inducing uterine scrapings, the bill has language in it that, in essence, assumes that 70% of rape victims weren’t really raped.  The exception is only for “forcible rape”, which is vaguely defined, but in practice tends to mean that anything short of getting your ass beat down means you weren’t “really” raped.  Even if you’re a 13-year-old who was impregnated by a 30-year-old.  Also, if you happen to get pregnant by your abusive, rape-y father on your 18th birthday, you will get no funding to make sure you don’t give birth to your own brother.  Consent is implied if you’re female under these guidelines, and consent to sex with your male relatives is implied the second you turn 18. 

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This weekend, there was a minor kerfuffle over yet another poorly sourced assertion that people evolved in just such a way as to uphold the meanest, ugliest, most essentialist gender roles the patriarchy ever produced. This time, it was over the shoddy theory that men and women evolved to constantly be in a violent struggle over the vagina, with men trying to force sex on women and women trying mostly to avoid getting pregnant by rapists (though, bafflingly, being more cool with rape when they’re not ovulating). The article reinforced tired, disproven ideas about rape, the most disturbing being that it’s an act of horniness instead of violence, when the more established research shows the opposite.  Emile Yoffe and I addressed the flaws in this article, so I’m not going to rehash the science issues here.

What I do want to talk about is the emotional reasoning for why something “feels” true.  Often, the evidence for the truth of a reactionary claim like, “Men are programmed to rape,” is that the very discomfort it provokes makes it true, or at least makes the objections to it false.  Jesse Bering, the writer of the original piece, plays this card:

Thornhill and Palmer, Malamuth, and the many other investigators studying rape through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that “adaptive” does not mean “justifiable,” but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a misogyny in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Michigan psychologist William McKibbin and his colleagues write in a 2008 piece for the Review of General Psychology, “No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating rape from an evolutionary perspective justifies or legitimizes rape.”

This is a facetious analogy, because it doesn’t acknowledge the truth, which is that not everyone is as anti-rape as they are anti-cancer.  Or, should I say, as anti-rape culture.  A lot of rape apologists aren’t so much pro-rape as they are supportive of a culture that makes rape common, which is an important distinction.  (See: Wolf, Naomi.)  The fact that the topic makes some people uncomfortable isn’t proof that the objections to it are somehow more emotional or ideological than the support of it.  On the contrary, I would say that the supporters are the ones whose emotional investment in this being true is clouding their judgment. 

Think about the perceived benefits to many if rape is programmed into men, and a function of horniness and biology and not of violence and misogyny.  Just right off the bat, it means that they can throw up their hands in the air, treating rape like it’s an inevitable problem and there’s nothing they can do about it.  But more importantly, they get an excuse to support the main benefit they perceive in rape culture, which is that it puts all responsibility for rape in the hands of the victims, and therefore used to shame and control female sexuality.  After all, the argument here is that men are naturally disposed to rape and women are naturally disposed to protect themselves.  Therefore, the responsibility is shifted towards women, the only gender who has been given any control.  This, in turn, can be used as an excuse to restrict women’s movements and choices, and to, a la Naomi Wolf, say they had it coming if they engage in casual sex.  It also gives men cover to do a lot of abusive things that fall short of rape, saying they can’t help themselves, a freedom a lot of men would like to reserve for themselves.  (Such as, say, cheating while reserving the right not to be cheated on.)  Of course, a lot of men aren’t willing to be portrayed as out-of-control beasts, but clearly some figure that’s a reasonable price to pay to get these benefits.

And so I have to ask, who are the ones telling uncomfortable truths, that we must accept even if they make us uncomfortable?  I say it’s the feminists.  The fact that our truth, that rape is not inevitable, makes a lot of people uncomfortable doesn’t make it more true.  But it doesn’t make it less true, and more importantly, it doesn’t mean that we’re the only ones with an emotional investment in the outcome.  Our rape apologist opponents are invested as well, often more so.

Conservatives are deep into denying that environment could play a role in pushing someone suffering from mental illness towards violence (except, of course, if they’re suggesting that someone mentally ill might be just really angry about health care reform), at least insofar as they need to in order to deny that someone with a mental illness who has an obsessive hatred of a politician could be egged on by living in a community where harassment and violent speech towards that politician had become commonplace.  (I can’t stop marveling at the fact that preserving that steady stream of harassment, lies, and violent speech is the hill they’re willing to die on.)  So, I thought it would be useful to look at issues that fall somewhat out of the usual partisan brackets and ask if Loughner really lived in a bubble that had no relationship to the real world, or was he influenced by it?

The knee-jerk wingnut defensiveness at this point is such that there was knee-jerk anger at my suggestion that misogyny might play a role in the choice of a young man to shoot a powerful woman in the head after nursing a grudge because she was unimpressed with what he thought were brilliant ramblings.  I’m not sure what causes the knee-jerk reaction, since it seems that either you feel a defensiveness towards a man who killed six people, or a defensiveness of misogyny.  I’m going to give said jerker of the knee the benefit of the doubt and assume that it’s just a defensiveness of misogyny, and a desire to protect misogyny from accusations that it might play a role in violence against women. 

Sadly, I fear that this hope that Loughner would not turn out to sully the name of woman-haters everywhere by being a woman-hater has been dashed. On the contrary, one of the things his internet postings make clear is he was burning up with a lot of resentment towards women, which is the least surprising news quite possibly of all time (unless you just have a knee-jerk unwillingness to take seriously any feminist suggestion that misogyny is real).  Most disturbingly, Loughner wrote a forum item justifying rape, and in language that isn’t all that indistinguishable from what you see on many of your finer anti-feminist forums.

The same day, he titled another post “Why Rape.” According to the Journal, it said women in college enjoyed being raped. “There are Rape victims that are under the influence of a substance. The drinking is leading them to rape. The loneliness will bring you to depression. Being alone for a very long time will inevitably lead you to rape.”

Now, you could try—-I’m sure some will—-to say such things have no relationship to messages in the world outside of Loughner’s head. If you do, you are so full of shit that you probably won’t be able to believe yourself long enough to get the words out.  And this isn’t a partisan issue, since rape apologism is engaged in by people on the left.  After all, we recently had a situation where people on both sides of the aisle, with regards to the Assange rape, basically said there are situations where men get to rape.  (Though the argument is more that we shouldn’t call forcing sex on women “rape” in some circumstances—-which is to say, we shouldn’t call rape “rape” in cases where we think the guy had a right, or the woman had it coming.)  What I’m seeing here is that Loughner, mental illness or no, completely absorbed society’s teachings about male entitlement and female sinfulness, that men have a right to have needs filled at women’s expense, and that women give up their rights to bodily autonomy if they do things deemed unladylike, like have sex or drink alcohol.  The influence of his likely mental illness is in that he was so blunt about it.

The other thing I want to point out about the guy that conservatives would have you believe is a bubble boy is that he was really well-versed in firearms.  Again, this is a somewhat non-partisan issue, because the NRA has both parties by the balls right now.  It’s not surprising that a young man from Arizona would be intimately familiar with gun culture, since it’s one of the gun-heaviest states in the union.  Loughner clearly absorbed a lot of gun knowledge, since he not only knew well enough how to upgrade from the standard magazine that comes with a Glock to one that has twice the capacity, but it sounds like he was, tragically, a really good shot.  I do believe his magazine had 30 bullets in it and he hit 20 people.  This isn’t the behavior of some savant with weaponry, but someone who, as a friend of his told the NY Times, was skilled with a gun.

This all should be obvious, but with everyone bickering over whether something on a map looks like crosshairs or surveyor’s marks, or whatever other distraction is being offered up by wingnuts today, but just because someone has a mental illness rarely means that he’s completely unaware of the world around him.  Loughner’s ability with a gun or his thoughts on rape didn’t spring fully formed from his brain, but are the product of an individual interacting with a specific environment.  His paranoia about the federal government, like his skill with a gun, puts him pretty squarely into the culture of Arizona that he came from. It’s always possible that he was completely unaware of the over-the-top hostility that has been tossed by many in the community at Giffords for the past couple of years.  Still, I find it hard to believe that someone who, like Loughner, had an obsession with his target for over three years would be completely ignorant of messages being sent in the community that others shared his beliefs about Giffords.  I suppose we’ll see, but I wouldn’t really be so sure that someone who obsesses with hatred for a politician wouldn’t notice the gun imagery in the campaign against her, nor that someone who is paranoid about the federal government wouldn’t hear the paranoid rhetoric about health care reform being federal overreach, rhetoric that was tied back to Giffords. It’s possible he was completely oblivious.  It’s not a horse I would bet on.

Holding the right responsible for their paranoid, incendiary, violent rhetoric reminds me strongly of trying to put a cat in its carrier.  You know it has to be done, but you really don’t want to do it.  The cat is going to lash out.  She’s going to hide under the bed.  She’s going to hiss and scream.  She’s going to grab the sides of the carrier as you push her in, in a pathetic final bid not to go the carrier.  But you have the fight anyway, because you can’t just renege on your responsibilities the second they become a problem.

Of course, the analogy doesn’t hold in all ways, mostly because holding right wingers responsible for cultivating a rhetoric of paranoia and violence that creates the environment where the Loughners of the world (and Joe Stacks and Jim Adkissons and Richard Poplawskis and Joshua Cartwrigths and Scott Roeders…..) is even more frustrating that putting a belligerent cat in a carrier ever could be.  That’s because you can forgive the cat for not knowing that it has to go to the vet, but right wingers know good and well what they should be doing (toning it down), but they don’t have the decency to do it. And when you’re stuffing your angry cat in the carrier, you rarely have to deal with a family member or friend standing over you saying, “Now, come on.  The cat has a point.  Have you proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that she absolutely needs to get a rabies shot?” 

I get it. I get the emotional urge to let it go.  No one likes stuffing a cat in a carrier.  I get why the siren call to shove off this hard discussion about right wing rhetoric has its appeal.  I’ve seen one wingnut go so far in her attempts to deflect as to try to make this about her resentments of me for seeming to have more fun than she thinks I should get to have.  (Taking potshots about someone’s harmless lifestyle choices while the bodies aren’t yet cold. Classy!)  Right wingers are endlessly maddening and childish, and like cats, willing to do whatever it takes to make this hard.  But it still needs to be done.

Which is why we shouldn’t let the allure of “crazy” wash over us.  Oh, I know it’s so tempting.  Just write Loughner off as “crazy”, and no having to ask hard questions about the mainstreaming of right wing extremism, or the heavy amount of violent rhetoric expressed towards Giffords in the community that Loughner, crazy or not, lived in and was privy to. We can say, “He was crazy,” and punt this hard discussion down the road to the next angry white man who tries to kill a bunch of people after being hopped up on some level of the extremist right wing rhetoric that is being mainstreamed more and more all the time, and therefore blessed with more and more legitimacy.  And next time, maybe the right will offer another tantalizing way to weasel out of shoving the cat in the carrier.  Maybe next time we’ll be faced with a different excuse to put off this discussion.  Maybe the next guy won’t seem as insane—-Timothy McVeigh, for instance, was pretty lucid right until the end—-but we’ll grab onto one of the other gambits offered every time.  Maybe next time we’ll procrastinate by accepting the “he read a liberal book once, thus this isn’t political!” gambit.  Or we’ll accept the “left wingers were out of control in the 60s, therefore the right can fan the flames of violence to win elections until the end of time!” 

I don’t think “crazy” is irrelevant exactly—-I wrote about how Loughner appears to have fallen through the cracks for RH Reality Check.  But “crazy” is only the beginning of the discussion.  It’s not the end.  I think Jill put it best:

Certainly, some people with mental illnesses do commit crimes — but that shouldn’t really surprise us, since people with mental illnesses are people, and some people commit crimes. I’m worried, though, that “he’s crazy” will end up being the easy card to pull in the particular case of the Arizona shooting, without recognizing that, mentally ill or not, Jared Loughner participated in the same society as the rest of us, and was undoubtedly influenced by the culture in which he lived — mental illness does not typically put one on an island all their own, totally unswayed and oblivious to everything around. We need to take a good look at the culture and sub-cultures we’ve built in the United States; “he’s crazy” is a cop-out, and it’s irresponsible, and it doesn’t alleviate us of our responsibilities.

If Loughner does turn out to be psychotic, then the person whose moral culpability is reduced in that case is his.  It doesn’t reduce the moral culpability of people who pour out a steady stream of paranoid, violent rhetoric when they know full well some people out there are, for whatever reason, unhinged or unconnected enough to act on it.  This is why I come down on 9/11 Truthers and anti-vaccination nutters so hard, even though they’re often on the left “team”, because I believe in my heart of hearts that spreading irrationality and paranoia incites violence, along with other inexcusable social ills.  If a 9/11 Truther does something violent, those of us on the left who indulged them are morally culpable.  That isn’t less true if that person has a mental disorder.  If anything, it’s more true, because we knew all along that mentally ill people have diminished capacities to tell the difference between indulgent fantasies and alarming truths they have to act on. 

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One aspect of this whole discussion about violent language that’s going under-discussed is the role that anxious masculinity plays it.  Finally, Jessica Valenti broke out and talked about it.  I think part of the reason people are afraid to say it out loud is because people on the left, especially men, are nearly as afraid of being called a girl as anyone else.  I have no idea why there’s so much castration anxiety in America, but no other factor fuels the ridiculous aspects of our political culture more.  As I’ve said before, the three biggest base-moving issues on the right all have to do with anxious masculinity: squelching reproductive rights and the female control over female bodies they represent, squelching gay rights because they subvert the tradition of sex and marriage being acts of male dominance over women, and gun nuttery, which can be summed up as wingnut fears that Democrats (feminized in their minds) are coming to take away their phallic symbols.

Unfortunately, it also means that violence is promoted, because it’s soothingly masculine. (See Tim Pawlenty’s attempts to win base voters over by taking passive aggressive potshots at his wife and claiming he loves to relax by enjoying violence.) Of course, it creates a self-defeating loop, because right wing masculinity antics—-resenting women for having sexual allure, bragging about how much you’d totally beat someone up, squealing about the gross dudes having butt secks—-are things grown-ups leave in middle school.  Acting childish is unmanly, but the only way they can think of to “man up” is to redouble the violent posturing, homophobia, and misogyny.  Vicious cycle.  It’s actually sad seeing people—-and believe me, women do it too, and then think they’re going to taunt me with it in Twitter—-act like such morons when there’s a calmer, more grown-up path of letting this obsession with cowboy masculinity go. 

Gender is an issue with this specific shooting.  Just as you can’t claim that shooting a congressperson and a judge at a political event is a non-political event, you can’t really just pretend there aren’t gender implications to a young man shooting one of the sadly too few women in Congress.  Barring straight up schizophrenia (and since the word salad of the videos came from a right wing nut that Loughner appears to have followed, this may not have been a factor), I figured that gender would end up playing a role in why Loughner chose the victim he did. 

Sady nabbed a detail from the WSJ that chilled me to my bones, simply because this kind of story is a mundane part of my existence and probably the existence of pretty much every woman reading this who puts forth an intelligent, opinionated persona.  Maybe at least young woman?  I don’t know if this gets better as you age.  Some background: there are many kinds of mansplaining, and all are irritating.  But by far, my least favorite mansplaining is the “How do you know what you know?” mansplaining.

In my experience, this is usually how the interaction with this stripe of mansplainer goes.  Woman says something pointed, intelligent, and for whatever reason, threatening to the mansplainer. But he fashions himself too cool and worldly a gentleman to merely lash out at her.  And he doesn’t want to give her insignificant thoughts the courtesy of direct engagement.  So, he decides to treat the woman—-who is inevitably better-read, more thoughtful, and often actually has a sense of humor, unlike the mansplainer—-to a faux Socratic question that he thinks sounds really profound and philosophical and will totally boggle her wee girl brain and shut her up, but actually sounds like half-baked wankery that would embarrass even stoned college C students having a pseudo-philosophical bullshit session at 3 in the morning.  I’ve been asked, “How do you know what you think you know?”  And, “Aren’t politics just a bunch of noise that doesn’t really matter/couldn’t be influenced by your voice?” There’s about a dozen variations, but all of them basically boil down to, “I think I have the perfect way to question the assumption that you have every right to speak your mind/hold power, and I think it’s going to blow your mind and shut your bitch mouth up permanently, though I’ll swear to the end of time that I’m all for women’s equality.”  Since it’s inevitably a silly, half-baked pseudo-question, it’s almost always easy to put down swiftly, and this generally annoys the mansplainer, wanker division.  This breed fails to understand a) smart women get this all the time and b) women have to go through a lot of internalized sexism that’s probably more solid than your bullshit to get the confidence they have, so you aren’t going to take them down that easily.  It’s generally a failure to understand they’re batting out of their league, and the reason they don’t understand that they’ve internalized the cultural lie that women are stupid and men are smart.  Often, they may not even realize they’re operating with that assumption, but their behavior belies this.

Which is why my blood ran cold when I read about how Loughner may have gotten obsessed with Gabrielle Giffords.

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I’m still in travel mode for at least today and tomorrow—-hopefully, the blizzard will let us get home on time.  I may be lucky enough to post more later today, but right now, I have no time.  But I did work all the way until early evening on Christmas Eve!  I taped this Bloggingheads with Moe Tkacik about rape and Wikileaks, as a response to her post here.

I was ready for a fight, but Moe’s stance on both Wikileaks and the rape case changed considerably after that post, which also strangely includes ruminations on “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, as if you can really extrapolate much about Swedish culture from a single exploitation series that has a sort of feminist message buried in a bunch of unsettling rape imagery. But the chat was amicable, and we agreed on most things, and I think it was really interesting.  If you go to the link, you’ll get it broken into smaller chunks if you just want samples.

Moe’s not talking about how Sweden is hysterical because they believe that you should have consent before you fuck someone, but guess who is! That’s right, Julian Assange, who is fully committed to the “bitches are crazy” defense, which doesn’t surprise me, as that’s the defense in 99% of rape cases where the defendant was actually dating the accuser. 

“Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism,” Julian Assange has said in a recent interview. “I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism.” And there’s something the Guardian left out of its report on the accusations against him.

The notion that full consent should be required for sex to happen is hardly my idea of “revolutionary feminism”, or a “hornet’s nest”.  Indeed, what I call the concept is “how people with empathy and a spirit of camaraderie about sex conduct themselves.”  Indeed, I was reading old Savage Love columns (no link, sorry—-maybe I can find it later—-but it was not through the internet) while waiting to get on the plane on Christmas, and Dan Savage, hardly a “revolutionary feminist”, suggested that slipping the condom off during sex without a woman’s consent is rape. 

Also reported at the Jezebel link:

According to the paper — presumably drawing on unpublished portions of the police report — when she woke up to find him penetrating her, she asked him if he was “wearing anything.” He allegedly replied, “I am wearing you.”

I was going to be lazy and not post anything today, but I was so moved by Sady’s post about the way she’s been stressing herself out with the #mooreandme campaign, that I had to say something in support. This isn’t, for me, about Michael Moore posting Julian Assange’s bail.  Or coming down affirmatively on the subject of Assange’s guilt.  I’ve maintained, in the face of great pressure to be stupid about this, that we can be intelligent people who can handle the thought that Interpol being ridiculous doesn’t mean that the accusers are lying.  (I’ve also often pointed that O.J. was framed, and he was guilty.  You can plant evidence on a guilty man, and often the police do because they get upset that someone guilty might go free.)  We can do it!  We can believe that Assange is being targeted for something other than the actual rape charges, and that it’s still wrong to engage in standard issue rape apologist crap aimed at the accusers.  And that, by the way, is the main problem with Michael Moore—-not that he posted bail. (Which is good, imo, because Assange was being badly treated in captivity, if for no other reason.)  He went full blown rape apologist, including dismissing the charges with “the condom broke”, which is not the charge and, contrary to what right wing British tabloids say, it’s not a crime to have a truly accidental contraception mishap in Sweden.

Anyway, obviously what’s happening with #mooreandme now is that it’s being flooded with rape apologists—-some only whipping it out for this occasion, but many who just automatically support accused rapists and denounce rape victims.  And I have no doubt that Michael Moore, along with Keith Olbermann, are waiting this out, letting the overt woman-haters and rape-supporters wear down the feminists keeping #mooreandme alive. So there’s another black mark against Olbermann and Moore—-they’re playing the patriarchal game of letting the overt misogynists do their work for them, so they can feel good about themselves while benefiting from sexism.  Ironically, this is basically the way rape works in the real world.  Few misogynist men are rapists, but those who aren’t rely on rapists as a threat to keep women in line, such as when RS McCain made it clear that he supports rapists as a vigilante force punishing women who are sexually liberated with men that aren’t RS McCain.

This situation has other parallels that Sady talks about eloquently and angrily:

That’s why Ben Roethlisberger walks free today. His accuser eventually refused to go forward, and her lawyer’s letter said that it wasn’t because the accuser hadn’t been raped, she still maintained that had actually happened to her and he had done it, it was because pursuing the case, no matter whether she got a conviction or not, would be so dangerous and so traumatic for her that it just wouldn’t be worth it.

Read the whole thing, but she makes a good case the shutting women up about the injustice of rape apologism is paralleled to the shutting of women up about actually being raped.  It’s all about using sexist stereotypes and lies against women to wear them down until they’re forced to decide between justice and self-preservation.

Ironically, this is how the powers that be are trying to shut Wikileaks down—-by making people involved choose between self-preservation and justice.

The people who try to force this choice often justify it to themselves by suggesting those clamoring for justice need to just get over it, as if the reason people clamor for justice is simple revenge or about creating karmic balance.  In reality, it’s much more pragmatic than that.  I had a relatively easy go of it when it came to pressing charges against the guy who assaulted me—-I had supportive family and a supportive boyfriend, the police and prosecutors believed me, there was an eyewitness—-and even then, pressing charges was at least half the reason the whole situation was so traumatic.  In the best of circumstances, a rape victim will be accused of lying and will lose friends, because people find it unpleasant to be around someone who is trying to rectify an injustice instead of just letting it go.  In worse circumstances, the victim will have no allies and be completely alone.  So why do people push forward?  Vengeful harpies, or is there a rational reason?

Since I start with the assumption that women are people, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that the vicious stereotype that women are vengeful harpies should be set aside, and that there is an entirely rational reason to seek legal recourse against a rapist. (Though I will point out that few would be upset with a man pressing charges against a friend who robbed his house because it’s so unpleasantly revenge-oriented.) It’s so he doesn’t rape again.  For me, the only thing that pushed me into picking up the phone and calling the cops was being reminded that rapists who aren’t stopped will rape again.  Because rapists rape because they enjoy the act of rape.  What made me pick up and keep going when I was feeling beat down was thinking about the next woman who was rape-available that crossed his path, and how she might not be as privileged as I was in terms of having support and safety. 

Rape apologists may not be rapists (though I have to point out that statistically, many pretty have to be), but they nonetheless are why rape happens.  By making the price of speaking out too high for the majority of victims, they make sure that no one holds rapists accountable.  Which is basically blanket permission to rape.  Which is why rape is so damn common.  Sady isn’t doing this because she’s got some overwrought sense of vengeance.  It’s because as long as every rape victim who speaks out knows she will meet a sea of rape apologists that will grind her down, then many won’t.  And if they don’t speak out, there are no consequences for raping.  And so the rapists who go unresisted will just rape more.  And while not resisting rape apologists doesn’t mean it’s your fault if they keep making the world safe for rapists, it doesn’t feel that way.  Just as I knew that if I kept silent about my own sexual assault, and then the guy who assaulted me went on to rape someone else, I would feel that this was, on some level, my fault.  And I couldn’t live with that.  So, at the end of the day, it’s self-preservation vs. another kind of self-preservation.  And with Sady, I think Michael Moore might have found someone who has quite a bit of the latter in her.