Category: rape

On rape apologism apologism

Trigger warning: this post discusses rape apologism and cites examples.

Yesterday I blogged about what rape apologism looks like. Within minutes of tweeting it, rape apologists began crawling out of the woodwork, and soon the comments thread was riddled with rape apologists (and some absolutely brilliant commenters taking them down).

It was around then that I noticed a weird form of meta-rape apologism forming. Many of these rape apologists were vehemently defending their right to rape apologism: they were engaging in apologism for rape apologism (while, simultaneously, performing their own rape apologism). It is a curious higher level of the perpetuation of rape culture. This is what rape apologism apologism looks like.

Tone-policing

Apparently, I wasn’t very nice to the poor precious rape apologists in my original post. Take poor little @lewisskinner, who reckons I should be a lot nicer:

I didn’t say it was ok, & I don’t think it’s ok. But shouty indignation & name-calling is not a clever way to make your point.

He then continued with this:

Incidentally, “rape apologism” is a very loaded term don’t you think?

That’s right. Apparently “rape apologism” is a bit loaded, and therefore, presumably, might somehow damage our argument.

You know what’s worse than being called a rape apologist? Rape.

It did get me thinking, though. “Rape apologism” is a fairly benign term for the consequences of the action. Perhaps “rape facilitation” is more appropriate.

The “being nice” line crops up again and again as a silencing tactic against women calling out bullshit from an oppressive system. As this amazing post (which you should read through) points out, it is merely a way of shoving us back into our appropriate gender roles and ultimately preventing us from changing anything.

“You’re trying to shut down debate”

This red herring tends to rear its head whenever someone has lost an argument and the other party doesn’t really care to engage. It is hardly surprising that this one keeps appearing when people try to justify rape apologism. This one seems to be most popular with the conspiracy theorist-type rape apologists, like Assange fanboy JB_Scott:

Your article seems to have a big fuck off brush and quite of a lot of tar to paint everyone with who has an opinion on the particular case or the subject of “rape” itself. Oh & Assange??? PMSL That wasn’t serious was it???? You really don’t have a clue [smh]. And by disagreeing with your points, I’ll automatically be adjudged to be a quote “rape apologist”? LOL Get a grip…

Like Islamaphobia, your “rape apologsts” term is a complete nonsense and unhelpful, particularly in debating the issues.

Here, JB expresses a completely daft argument that there is somehow a “debate” about consent (hint: there isn’t, unless you’re a rapist), and that I’ll just try and silence his right to type poorly-punctuated comments by calling him a rape apologist. Well, JB, you’re a rape apologist. I put your comment up, and the internet thinks that not only are you a rape apologist, but you’re also an oozing ballsack.

See also dear old @lewisskinner, with whom I engaged and gave curt answers to his stupid questions:

not baiting,but debating. Well trying, but @stavvers will not engage. Refusing a platform to those you disagree with = #fascist?

Apparently, pointing out that rape apologism is A Bad Thing is akin to stomping around in jackboots oppressing women.

What function does rape apologism apologism serve?

Rape apologism itself is a vital component in maintaining a system wherein rape is possible. Many people benefit from this belief system existing. Many more have internalised this ideology, parroting it and desperately trying to believe the world is fair and right.

Defensiveness kicks in when it is pointed out to people that what they believe is not only untrue, but also actively harmful. They fight tooth and nail to maintain their self-image as a decent human being. They want to continue parroting rape culture, and rape apologism apologism never comes without rape apologism. @lewisskinner started frantically tweeting me single newspaper stories which he believed showed that women often falsely accuse men of rape. Commenter David Walsh gave this particular gem:

 So I hope I won’t be considered a “rape apologist” for suggesting that while all rapes are abhorrent, perhaps some are more abhorrent than others.

Ultimately, it’s a similar linguistic trick to “I’m not racist, but…”: the individual is attempting to separate from being part of an oppressive culture.

But they aren’t. They are part of the problem, and the more they deny it, the worse it will get.

Rape, the police and political point-scoring

Obnoxious reality TV star and Lib Dem Brian Paddick has done something interesting. Hot on the heels of his whistle-blowing about being asked by the Met to water down a report about rape, more revelations have emerged.

From years of experience in the Met, Paddick has identified certain problems–problems with which regular readers of this blog will certainly be familiar. Basically, the police don’t give a shit about rape. They often assume that the survivor is lying, they try to deny a crime happened for the good of their statistics, they subscribe to rape culture myths, and they just don’t get it. From his interview, Paddick seems to understand the seriousness of rape, and the set of attitudes in the police and broader society which allow rape to happen. It really is quite gratifying to see a public figure discussing these issues openly, and highlighting suggestions for how this can change.

Paddick’s suggestions are very sensible, involving a radical rethink in the way police and other parts of the system treat survivors. He also has ideas for poster campaigns targeted at dispelling rape myths, and offers support to advocacy groups. All in all, it looks bloody good, and it feels like a tiny little victory for feminism to see these issues being put onto the public agenda.

There’s always a but, though. There’s always a sneaky little catch, the barely perceptible string which rather spoils the whole thing.

Brian Paddick is running for Mayor of London. All of what he is saying forms part of his campaign. The criticism of the police only comes now Paddick is safely out of the institution, and control of it lies in the hands of a rival political party. His speaking out serves to discredit his opposition while bidding to win the votes of rape survivors and those who fear it one day happening to them. His suggestions–ideas put forward by feminists and advocacy groups for years–are not framed as things that should be done as a matter of utmost importance, but, rather, as campaign promises.

Paddick probably believes everything that he is saying to be right, and that’s because he is talking sense here. It is just that the stench of politicking rather sullies the whole thing. It becomes a matter of a better approach to rape being useful rather than being the right thing to do. Rape is a deeply traumatic yet horrifyingly commonplace event, and it should be fought against because it is a travesty that this happens, rather than because it might gain Brian Paddick a few more votes.

It is a form of blackmail, to use this as an election promise, particularly when it comes from a member of a party who are not exactly famed for holding to their election promises. All that he has proposed is things that should be happening anyway, not only as a component in a campaign. We don’t need to put a cross in a box in the vain hope that some bloke will possibly try to tweak the system a little bit. With his connections and platform, Paddick can serve as a useful ally, but ultimately the battle is ours.

It is we who need to fight rape culture where we see it. It is we who need to decide whether the state can ever be an adequate source of support for survivors and whether it can ever truly help right the wrongs that have been done. It is we who need to work towards building a safer world.

Rape is not a party political issue.

Rape and “no crimes”: this is a fucking travesty

Trigger warning for discussion of rape

A while back, I wrote about how for many women, not reporting a rape to the police can seem like the best possible option. Information which has arisen in the last week has changed nothing in this thesis: if anything, it is worse than I had previously thought.

A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorates of the Constabulary and the Crown Prosecution Service on rape investigations has found some pretty worrying facts, but also some good news. More survivors feel able to report rapes to the police, and the police response has improved. On the other hand, police are failing to identify patterns of repeat offences and were using intelligence poorly.

Most worrying of all, though, is the incidence of “no crimes”. According to guidelines, a no crime should be:

Where following the report of an incident, which has subsequently been recorded as a crime, additional verifiable information is available which determines that no notifiable crime has been committed.

The two crucial constructs here are that the evidence the crime did not happen can be proven, and that whatever happened was not a crime. In rape cases, this sounds like it might be pretty difficult to prove, yet the report found that 12% of reported rapes were consigned to the no crime pile. These statistics often involve women withdrawing their complaint, which can be seen in this FOI request to South Yorkshire Police. There are obvious problems with this approach, and these are so apparent that even the police have noticed this:

In reality a rape that has been reported and then recorded as a crime, should only be “no crimed” if for example, the victim states that the crime did not occur. Even in these circumstances it should be anticipated that there would be further verifiable information available to support this, because our experience shows that victims may withdraw allegations because they cannot face the criminal justice process. In other words if there is any doubt the crime remains recorded. There is a key difference between a victim who retracts their allegation and one who withdraws from the investigative process.

Given the high prevalence of no crimes, it seems that the verification that no crime occurred is not being followed through adequately. In some forces, it was found that only 40% of the no crime decisions were actually correct.

This is a fucking travesty. Thousands of people who have shown the courage to enter the agonising process of rape reporting are being let down, and their complaints dismissed away to nothing. When even the police think it is a problem, it is a serious problem indeed. This has very serious implications. For the survivor, this must be a thoroughly horrific experience: he or she will be unable to access the support provided by the system, and will experience doubt and guilt over what has happened. More broadly, it will make it harder to identify repeat rapists if a crime is not investigated or recorded.

It gets worse. Former police officer, politician and rather irritating public figure Brian Paddick recently testified at the Leveson enquiry regarding his time in the Met. He said that he had been asked to “tone down the criticisms and water-down the recommendations” in a previous report on rape reporting and investigation. In the light of this, what has been identified in the recent report may well be downplaying the problem rather than reporting it accurately.

Certainly, in my reading of the report, it was difficult to find some crucial data. For example, the statistic that some police forces have very low levels of correctly no criming rape allegations was fairly well-hidden and no attention was drawn to it. The problem of burying bad news remains in a desperate attempt to maintain a good reputation.

This PR exercise has major ramifications and can ultimately only make things worse, rather than better. Rather than frantically flapping around to cover their arses, the police need to admit honestly to their failings to create real solutions. Trust in the police is low. Most rape survivors do not report their rapes to an institution that should, theoretically, be on their side and help amend what has happened to them. This is not happening: it is merely an illusion of aid.

People are being failed due to severe problems which may be worse than imagined. Lives may be destroyed. This needs to change.

Dear Unilad: An open letter to @Uniladmag (because their enquiries email mysteriously stopped working)

Dear Unilad,

What the fuck is wrong with you? Seriously, I wanted to start of this open letter eloquently, but all I can do is wonder what is so wrong with you that you repeatedly promote rape.

You appeared on my radar last week when you posted an article advocating rape. I suspect the author of the piece thought he was being ever so funny by suggesting that the number of unreported rapes could play to a man’s advantage. Obviously you probably experienced quite a degree of backlash to this, because you quietly took it down. It’s still screencapped though, Unilad. People know what you did.

Then there’s this T-shirt, which manages to simultaneously advocate rape while implying that the wearer of the T-shirt suffers from premature ejaculation. Again, you quietly took it down, but forgot to remove it from your Facebook page. So we know what you did.

Your attitude to being called out on your behaviour is appalling. Tweeter @sazza_jay pointed out that what you were doing is wrong, and received misogynistic and homophobic abuse. Following your characteristic pattern, you then quietly took down the tweet, but we all saw it. It’s screencapped, Unilad. These days, nothing just disappears.

Your reaction to the controversy suggests that deep down you have some semblance of a clue that what you are doing is wrong, and here’s why: what you are doing is reinforcing a culture which facilitates rape. Your professed “banter” is dangerous: you are repeating rape myths which are often subscribed to by rapists. On university campuses, the area your laughable attempt at a “magazine” attempts to cater to, as many as one in four women will be raped.

Do you find this funny? Is it somehow amusing that up to a quarter of the women you might encounter (admittedly, most women will run a mile from any dickhead wearing your T-shirts) could be victims of a horrific crime?

If you don’t, it’s time to own up to your mistakes and apologise. Not some mealy-mouthed “sorry you got offended”, but a proper owning of your mistakes. You owe your followers an explanation, and help in participating in building a world without rape.

You are at a crossroads right now. Will you continue to be part of the problem, part of the culture which allows women to be raped while dribbling fools belch stale lager laughter over violations? Or will you apologise?

Here’s hoping you choose the right path.

Update: Unilad have issued an apology, but it fails on several fronts: (1) It has a “sorry you were offended” tone. (2) It’s only posted on Twitpic, not their main site. (3) It fails to show any understanding of why their behaviour is wrong. As I said, Unilad need to explain what is so wrong about rape jokes and work to challenging rape culture, not reinforcing it.

Update 2: A second semi-apology from Unilad, over on their Facebook page. They still haven’t explained why what they did was wrong. There are also an awful lot of vile, triggering comments making light of rape and threatening violence against those who got offended. While Unilad have apologised for those comments from their “fans”, such comments will continue to happen. This is exactly why rape culture needs challenging and why a site like Unilad needs to explain to its readers exactly why it will no longer be participating in a climate of violence: Unilad is trying to absolve itself of responsibility, when it is in fact responsible for these views. I screencapped the apology (and the first four ghastly comments) because I’m now wise to Unilad’s habit of taking things down…

Update 3: Unilad’s website is now down, with the same semi-apology as on the Facebook group. Honestly. Wouldn’t it have just been easier to own their mistakes? A cynic might think they’re trying to cover their tracks and remove all traces of what they have done. When they relaunch, I’ll be watching…

People I won’t have sex with, ever.

The stereotype of the sex-hating feminist fails to hold up to a cursory glance, let alone any degree of scrutiny. There are, however, some people I will never have sex with, ever…

Askmen.com

The festering frothing anuses at askmen have been at it again. Last spotted providing pick-up lines to demonstrate dickhead status, this time they think they have happened upon some feminist demands women secretly want to be ignored.

Askmen rather like the feminist struggle, they claim, because it means that there is finally the prospect of the holy grail of relationships: “the non-clingy girlfriend”. I’m assuming these dripping bellends would be lucky to have any girlfriend, clingy or otherwise, given that their attitude towards spending time with women is a grating display of tedious benevolent sexism.

Apparently, women secretly want men to carry their bags for them, pay for meals out, make decisions for them and get married, no matter how feminist they proclaim to be. Also, Askmen reckon that we women love to be objectified. Thank you for speaking for we little fragile women, Askmen.

Now, Askmen seem to have a little bit of a hang-up about what they call “chivalry”, but is more accurately termed benevolent sexism, with a plethora of articles with tips for demonstrating “gentlemanliness” and defending chivalry against those big nasty feminists. They seem to believe it’s the way into a woman’s knickers. It isn’t.

I have been on dates with “chivalrous” men, and it has rarely ended up in the bedroom, as it is irksome to be treated like a cross between a sickly pensioner and a small child. I have a cunt. That isn’t a disability. I am also, unsurprisingly, hugely turned off by people propping up oppressive systems. When called out on their behaviour, the chivalrous types invariably mansplain (they are always men) to me why it is all right, and mansplaining is about as sexy as mankinis.

I have, a few times, had sex with the bag-carrying, door-opening dinner buyers. Every time, the sex has been rubbish, as I’m not entirely sure they view women as people, but rather projects with a strict protocol.

So, for this outstanding contribution to furthering the cause of infuriating behaviour, Askmen, I am never going to have sex with you.

Unilad

Anyone clicking this next link requires a trigger warning. This little shitbag advocates rape. The writer  seems to believe he has written a humourous piece on “sexual mathematics“. He “mathematically” suggests that it is worth trying it on with a woman after a date, as 75% of women are likely to put out on the first date. He concludes with what will inevitably be defended as a “joke”, pointing out that 85% of rapes go unreported, implying that these are worthwhile odds to take.

This is yet another tired example of rape culture, albeit even closer to an outright suggestion of rape than usual. As an aside, it is also terribly written and thoroughly unreferenced, which leads me to question how this seeping bellend managed to get to university in the first place.

Remember that rapists are more likely to subscribe to rape myths, and the contribution to rape culture is a dangerous, dangerous thing. Having sex with those who trivialise and laugh at rape is ultimately never a good idea: to such individuals, consent is optional. For Unilad and his ilk, the chances of sex should be no more than zero.

The Activists

Touched upon in yesterday’s post on consensual power, BDSM and anarchism, tedious fuckwits The Activists think that sex is a waste of time.

Fuck that shit.

Brendan O’Neill

I think I may have mentioned this before, but Brendan O’Neill is a weeping syphilitic chode, a misogynist and all-round awful human being. He is the tiny infected penile avatar of rape culture, reeking of stale beer and a longing for the 90s. He hasn’t even done anything to specifically piss me off today, but it bears repeating and reminding every day.

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Brendan O’Neill is a weeping syphilitic chode.

Christmas songs that can fuck off.

It has come to the time of year wherein we cannot leave the house without an aural assault of jingle-riddled festive musical tedium. While most are equally intolerable, some merit special mention for the implicit horrors they conceal. These are the Christmas songs that can fuck right off.

Rampant consumerism ahoy!

Capitalism has done a fine job of co-opting Christmas, turning it into a festival of panic-buying and receiving things you don’t really want. It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the most-covered traditional Christmas songs is The Twelve Days of Christmas. In this song, a person is given a series of increasingly ludicrous Christmas presents from a lover, presented through the medium of mind-numbing repetition. The nameless narrator of the song tells us nothing about their lover except that they buy a lot of presents. By the end of the song, the narrator has received 12 drummers drumming, 22 pipers piping, 30 lords a-leaping, 36 ladies dancing, 40 maids a-milking, 46 swans a-swimming, 42 geese a-laying, 35 gold rings, 32 calling birds, 30 French hens, 24 turtle doves and 12 partridges in pear trees. Implicit in this is that there must also be 40 cows to be milked, 46 small lakes for the swans to live in and at least 42 baby geese to soon be hatched. Quite where the narrator is going to keep all of the birds is not explored. Neither is it ever discussed that perhaps sending people as gifts might be slavery, or at the very least prostitution.

It’s immoral, it’s impractical, and it’s a vision of the future the capitalists would like to see. Its bastard lovechild is clearly visible in this godawful Littlewoods advert wherein a choir of children sing about how brilliant their mum is because she bought everyone presents.

Merry Christmas. Buy things. Debt is love.

A woman is left in a horrible, horrible relationship

Fairy Tale Of New York is the Christmas song it’s cool to say you like, because it’s kind of ironic, has a catchy Irish folky riff and Kirsty McColl died tragically early. It features bitter lyrics of a life of hardship and alcoholism, but ultimately, in some sort of Christmas miracle they arguing couple in the song realise that they love each other very much, right? Actually, not quite. Listen to the resolution of the song, at around 2.48. The woman laments that the man “took her dreams”. He replies that he kept them with him, made them his own and can’t possibly live life on his own.

Now, this would be all well and good if he wasn’t consistently portrayed as a complete and utter failure with verbally abusive tendencies. So that woman’s dream-eggs are stuck in a basket of piss, vinegar and toothless uselessness simply because the man won’t let her go. She never gets the chance to point this out, as it immediately becomes a matter of utmost urgency to report on the song choice of the New York Police Department and a bulletin on bell status. After this, we can only assume she overdoses on cocaine as white as Christmas snow, hollow-eyed on the tinsel-strewn rotting corpse of her lover.

Happy holidays!

Let me sing my privilege to the noble savages

Bono is an unmitigated cunt, and when people talk of “the good things he did”, often they refer to his charity work. Bono’s charity work includes the single Do They Know It’s Christmas, and therefore his unmitigated cunt status remains intact. This is a song in which a crowd of mostly white pop stars patronise an entire continent with startling factual inaccuracies.

Africa, as portrayed by the song, is a uniform desert populated entirely by starving people who need Middle England to ride in with their wallets and fix everything. There’s no snow in Africa, not even on top of mountains. There’s no rain, not even in the rich rainforests. There’s no rivers, not even the sodding Nile, the biggest bastard river in the world. The dear little noble savage Africans apparently don’t know it’s Christmas because Africa is such an insufferable shithole, not because many Africans probably couldn’t give two hoots about Christmas what with being Muslims.

It’s a terrible song, with a hefty dollop of misinformation. It may have been done with the best of intentions, but it’s pretty fucking racist, and it seems to have pissed off a few people. Nothing says traditional Christmas spirit like a bit of casual racism with a sing-al0ng chorus.

The date rape song

Baby It’s Cold Outside is another song which can be categorised under “Christmas romance” and tells a tale even more chilling than that recounted in Fairy Tale Of New York.

It’s about rape. Straight-up, it is a song about rape.

A woman tries to leave a man’s house. He gives her a drink. It has some drugs in it. While still compos mentis enough to argue, the woman argues that she cannot stay, says “no” several times, lists people she knows who might be worried about her and again mentions that she cannot leave. We leave her having finally been forced to into sex with coercive tactics and drugs. We’re supposed to find this rape cute because it’s all Christmassy, and who wouldn’t want to be raped by charming crooner Dean Martin? Listen to the lyrics of the song and tell me it is not about that.

As it’s Christmas, I shall conjure up the happiest possible ending for the story. The next morning, the woman goes home. Her family enquire as to why she appears to be shaken and upset. She explains what happened, and her mother, sister and vicious maiden aunt are appalled. These women call round at Dean Martin’s house, just as he is about to pounce upon another trusting, drugged woman and intervene. They then chop off Dean Martin’s raping penis and use it as a Christmas tree ornament. Everyone is very lucky in getting away with this cathartically criminal act, as the police are currently occupied with singing Galway Bay over the frozen husks of a pair of addicts. With support, Dean Martin’s victims find themselves able to move forward from the incident and engage in community activism to try to build a world without rape.

That’s the happiest possible ending, and we still have at least one rape in it. Fills the heart with Christmas cheer, that does.

The song that is surprisingly awesome

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus is a song which is intensely, intensely irritating. In all honesty, I would be happy if I never heard it ever again. The thing is, it has a surprisingly positive poly message hidden deep inside all of the twee faux-childish awe: the kid doesn’t give a shit that Mommy is necking with Father Christmas. In fact, the kid expresses dismay that Daddy can’t see the happy occasion.

Of course, Santa is Daddy, but the kid doesn’t know this. The kid is completely cool with Mommy playing with other people, and seems to think Daddy would be too. It is a glimpse at a non-conventional family set up which, for a twelfth of the year, gets played on loop. May the message one day sink in so we never have to hear that godawful song again.

Those are some of the worst, but let’s be straight here: all Christmas songs can fuck off.

Minicab rapes and victim blaming

TRIGGER WARNING: This post discusses rape, and links to some possibly-triggering content surrounding rape.

This morning, I received an email informing me that if I didn’t do as TFL told me, I’d get raped.

Dear Stavvers,

I am writing to remind you that unbooked minicabs picked up off the street are dangerous and put you at risk of sexual assault. The safest way to get a minicab home is to:

  • Book it – by phone, email or in a minicab office to guarantee your trip is carried out by a licensed, insured driver and vehicle
  • Check it’s yours – ask the driver to confirm your name and destination before you get in the car, and check the driver’s photo ID
  • Sit in the back – and carry your mobile in case of an emergency

It looks like it’s that time of year again. The tinsel comes out, and women are blamed for getting themselves in trouble. The opening sentence of that email has the tone of a legal disclaimer, pointing out that I have been warned and that TFL will be in no way liable for any sexual assaults on me during the festive period.

In such a short missive, there is a lot to unpack.

The advice given is fairly decent personal safety advice for anyone getting in a car with a stranger. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the email was only sent to women and focused solely on sexual assaults: what of muggings, rip-offs, your common-or-garden non-sexual assaults? This advice benefits everyone, yet it was only sent to women. As @Cillygrrl14 points out, it provides a compelling reason to do away with ticking a mandatory gender box when filling in a form.

Of course, the reason it focuses on women and sexual assault boils down to the way society views rape: that it only affects women, is perpetrated by strangers, and women are in some way wholly responsible for preventing their own rapes.

The victim blaming in minicab rapes is hardly new. A high-profile ad campaign to “reduce the number of minicab rapes” ended up as little more than an exercise in laying responsibility for the rape solely in the hands of the survivor. The posters sternly declare that you are “putting yourself in danger”, prominently featuring a picture of a distressed, crying woman and an all-caps message which sounds like a sarcastic impression of someone being raped. I won’t even link the videos. They’re triggering and horrible. The message is clear: it’s your fault for getting in that cab, you silly cow.

The focus on unlicensed minicabs is also something of a red herring. As far as I am aware, doing The Knowledge does not entail a mandatory training course about enthusiastic consent. In fact, rapes perpetrated by licenced drivers can and do happen, such as the high profile “black cab rapist” case. The major difference between licensed and unlicensed cab driver rapists is that the former are easier to catch, though that smacks of stable doors and bolting horses. It also buys into the stranger-rape narrative wholesale. A woman, on leaving a Christmas party is far more likely to be raped by the charming friend-of-a-friend who offers to ‘see her home safely’ than some predator in a roving rape-wagon. Yet we don’t talk about this; there is no national campaign to point out that the majority of rapists are known to their victims. I use the term ‘victim’ here, as this campaign has made it quite clear I’m a victim just waiting to happen unless I take full responsibility for my own actions.

Ending rape is not the responsibility of each individual woman preventing her own rape. It cannot work that way: it is everyone’s responsibility. It is the responsibility of unlicensed minicab drivers not to rape, of the authorities to adequately work on preventing rapists from being able to rape, of every single person to look out for one another. It is all of our responsibility to thoroughly dismantle a victim-blaming, individualistic culture which allows rape to happen. Somehow, I doubt TFL will send me an email to that effect. It’s easier for them to absolve responsibility altogether.

Stopping rape is never going to be easy. The beliefs are entrenched, the behaviours entrenched, the excuses entrenched. Yet preventing rape is not about not getting in a dodgy-looking cab and keeping your phone in your hand. It’s about overhauling the whole shitty system. I think that’s a fight worth fighting.

Safe spaces in the #occupy movement: My piece for The Occupied Times

Last week, I was privileged enough to be asked to write a piece for @OccupiedTimes, the newspaper for the London Occupy camps. I wrote about the need for safe spaces for women and how to build these. I’ve cross-posted the article here for anyone who can’t get down to the camp to pick up a copy of this brilliant paper. 

What are we doing here? Are we building a new society, or are we merely the latest incarnation of a wave of indignant protest? I hope we are the former: the beginning of something special.

If that is so, we are currently building our new society in the image of its predecessor, albeit with more tents and banners. In our camps, we see the same kinds of oppression as we do in the unoccupied old world.

In the outside, a beast called patriarchy rules the social domain. In our camps, the situation is little better. Many women do not feel safe camping overnight. Perhaps it is not safe for us to stay.

Over the last week I have heard accounts of women who have been sexually harassed in the camps, usually by drunken men. There has been gendered name-calling and dismissal of the opinions of women. There have been rapes: one in Occupy Cleveland, the other in Occupy Glasgow. Women face the same kinds of oppression in occupied spaces as they do outside. While rape is an issue which can affect people of any gender, it is most commonly men raping women. The system which allows this to happen thrives upon silencing other kinds of sexual violence.

Meanwhile, Occupy Baltimore has included in its security statement on rape the promise to provide abusers with “counselling resources to deal with their issues”, as though a rapist is a victim too. In Anoynmous’s document providing guidance for living in a revolution, they suggest the solution to prevent rape is to “NEVER PROVOKE”, as though rape is the victim’s fault. At Occupy LSX, when we discussed banning alcohol, a topic that often came up was whether this would solve the problem of lagered-up harassment.

These solutions do not attack the root of the problem and some present somewhat dangerous thinking, tangled up in the language of the outside world. To build a new society, we must all work together to make our camps a safe space for women. First our occupied spaces, then the world. This is what we can do.

· DON’T RAPE PEOPLE. Rape is never the fault of the victim, always that of the rapist. To stop rape completely, don’t rape.

· LEARN ABOUT FEMINISM. We’re here to learn from each other. Feminism provides the solution to taking sexism out of life, and provides us with a language to discuss such issues. Read books, read blogs, talk to feminists.

· ADOPT A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY ON SEXISM. We say we have this. Let us show we have this. Do not let an instance of sexism—be it a gendered slur, a pat on the arse, or an “ironically” sexist joke—go unchallenged. Call it out. Something as seemingly harmless as a joke reflects and legitimises sexist beliefs in wider society.

· If a woman has a complaint, TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. It is a myth that a lot of rapes are falsely reported. Statistically, it’s very likely the allegation will be true. The same goes when a woman talks about experience of sexism or sexual harassment. She’s probably not overreacting.

· WOMEN-ONLY SPACES. Until we have stamped out all instances of sexism in our camps, women will need somewhere safe to be. Many women find it a lot easier to deal with problems without men present.

· If any of the above seems unreasonable, CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE. Perhaps you’ve been lucky enough not to experience sexism in your life and don’t see why you should have to do anything to help others as you’ve never experienced any of the problems yourself. This does not mean the problems don’t exist. Not having experienced these problems is what feminists call “privilege”. It doesn’t make you a bad person, but it means you need to learn more.

· Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, DON’T RAPE.

What are we doing here? Are we building a new society, together as a community? It will be hard work to overcome sexism yet to grow this movement and rebuild from the bottom up, it is a matter of urgency that we begin to create a safe space. Women are 50% of the 99% after all.


 

Liz Jones, spunk-heists and adult egocentrism

 

Oh dear. The professional trolling from the Daily Mail has today produced for us this eggy wet fart: “THE CRAVING FOR A BABY THAT DRIVES WOMEN TO THE ULTIMATE DECEPTION“, by Liz Jones. The link is clean; it won’t give the Mail any traffic that they desperately crave from printing such utter cock.

Liz Jones’s thesis is that women in their late 30s and early 40s are so desperate to have babies that most of them deceive men into getting them pregnant by stealing their sperm. Jones’s evidence for this assertion? She’s done it herself.

Because he wouldn’t give me what I wanted, I decided to steal it from him. I resolved to steal his sperm from him in the middle of the night. I thought it was my right, given that he was living with me and I had bought him many, many M&S ready meals.

The ‘theft’ itself was alarmingly easy to carry out. One night, after sex, I took the used condom and, in the privacy of the bathroom, I did what I had to do. Bingo.

Further evidence for Jones’s statement comes from anecdotes about friends, who may or may not exist, who apparently sneakily pretended to be on the Pill, and an unreferenced survey which suggested that 42% of women said they “would” do it*. Curiously, even the examples she cites of possibly imaginary friends conducting clandestine jizz-burglary seem to be more like examples of women longing for babies without nicking any semen. The survey cited also provides rather poor evidence for her claim: it says “would” do it, not “have done”. That’s quite a difference, there.

The only real evidence for the phenomenon provided by Jones is that she herself did it. Somehow, this is extrapolated into a dire warning that men should be careful when sleeping with women over the age of 37 as they’re probably only interested in his gametes. This argument has been used countless times by MRAs, but is perhaps the first documentation of it actually happening. In one instance. By Liz Jones.

Liz Jones is probably not a well woman. Steven Baxter writes eloquently of why she probably deserves our pity: this is not the first instance of Jones owning up to erratic behaviour. She has run herself into debt, and here she expresses a desperation for children so large that she resorts to downright immoral methods. It’s worrying and kind of tragic. She probably needs help rather than having her myriad psychological issues played out in a national newspaper.

In her piece on spunk-heists, Jones displays a psychological effect called adult egocentrism. Egocentrism is a cognitive bias wherein we fail to differentiate our own thoughts from those of others, and we assume everyone else thinks the same way as us. In other words , it’s kind of the opposite of absorbing group norms: rather than internalising the opinions of others, we project our thoughts onto them. From a developmental perspective, usually we grow out of thinking egocentrically by adulthood.

Not everyone does, though, and certainly sometimes it persists into adulthood. For example, research by Kruger and colleagues found that people are hugely overconfident in expecting others to identify sarcasm in text-based communication, suggesting that this was due to them “hearing” their sarcastic tone as they wrote the message. For my undergraduate dissertation, I replicated this research, finding something similar with politeness. The major limitation in these studies was that the participants were college students, who tend to show similar levels of egocentrism to adolescents. Furthermore, it may be that this environment brings out egocentrism, rather than it being a pervasive trait.

The level of egocentrism shown in Jones’s piece goes far beyond assuming someone will guess you’re being polite in an email. If she isn’t just trolling us, Jones genuinely seems to believe that because she’s done something, every other woman in her demographic bracket will do the same. Now, I’m hardly one to armchair diagnose, but it’s worth saying that is a characteristic of Cluster B personality disorders, which includes antisocial personality disorder (“psychopathy”), borderline personality disorder (a dubious classification: it may be pathologising extreme femininity, and the label is often slapped on patients the doctors don’t like), histrionic personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. Essentially, high levels of adult egocentrism are thought to be somewhat pathological.

We must take Jones’s warning to all men about nasty women and their spunk-stealing ways with a whole mine of salt, then. She is projecting her own experience and behaviour onto everyone else, and it is neither healthy nor factually correct.

And of course, spunk-stealing behaviour is abhorrent. Deception takes away the capacity of the other person to consent to the sexual encounter, and in my mind verges into sexual assault. It is serious, it is thoroughly wrong, and I am glad that this is something that most women wouldn’t dream of doing.

Or perhaps I’m wrong here. Maybe we’re jizz-robbing harlots, and I’m too egocentric to notice.

 

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*A little bit of research leads me to discover that the results were published in the reputable scientific journal That’s Life! magazine.

 

 

For fuck’s sake: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the porno

Some news fails to raise the anger, and just causes a tired sigh of having one’s lowest expectations met. This story is one of them. The article is in French, so I will translate the important bits. Unfortunately, my French isn’t brilliant and I lack the fluency to spot implicit sexism and subtle rape apologism. That doesn’t really matter: it’s not like any of the crap in the story is subtle.

In short, they’re making a porn film about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and that time he sexually assaulted a woman who was cleaning his hotel room. A high-profile rape case is apparently deemed sexy enough to crack one out to these days: perhaps the Daily Mail articles didn’t go into sufficient detail to achieve maximum turgidity, so a porn film became necessary.

According to the synopsis, “David Sex King, owner of a large financial institution, cannot resist the charms of a chambermaid who comes to work. Oh dear! This is a great opportunity for her to emerge from anonymity and use all ways to make this horny old goat pay.” This scenario gives priority to the side of the venal Naffissatou Diallo and is likely to startle feminist associations.

Not so much a startle as a weary “for fucks’s sake” from over here. It is nothing but simple, blatant victim-blaming. Diallo is lascivious, Strauss-Kahn the lusty chaud lapin who is completely incapable of resisting Diallo’s sexy wiles. He couldn’t help himself, as they say.

It’s not even novel porn. As the article says,

Otherwise, “in the bathroom of the suite, to the hearing in court, to prison”, it sounds like a traditional porno.

The same old tedious porn tropes will be trotted out. A sexy French maid. A sexy judge (possibly with a sexy jury). A sexy (probably inexplicably heterosexual) prison. The only difference here is that it is pasted on top of a real-life event where real people were involved. I wonder, what would Diallo make of being portrayed as a bit of exotic porn-totty, the sexual assault nothing more than a set-up to a string of hackneyed porn clichés?

It’s more than tasteless. It’s insensitive, it’s unpleasant, it’s downright nasty. I am not in the least bit surprised that this exists.

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Big hat tip to @petitefeministe who found this story. Check out her blog; she’s one of my favourite feminists.

ETA: Futher awesomeness: Petite Feministe has translated the article here