Further proof we live in a Rape Culture>

[Tansy_Gold]

14. Equating all feminists with Andrea Dworkin

Is like equating all men with Ted Bundy.

Your post attempts, I believe, to ignore the message of the linked essay, which is that there are many good, non-rapist men out there who unintentionally support/encourage those who are rapists simply by laughing at the jokes and giving the impression that they agree with the premise. Whether it is that all women secretly want to be raped, or they really enjoy it, or they deserve it doesn't matter: the rapist has his own motivation and derives affirmation from the shared laughter.

I've told of this experience before, but I think it bears repeating again:

In the spring of 1999, I was taking a course AJS 305 -- Women, Law, and Justice at Arizona State University-West. The professor was Dr. Marie Griffin. http://ccj.asu.edu/about-us/bios/mgriffin
The class was a mix of approximately 3/5 male, 2/5 female. At least half the male students (and maybe more than half) were local law enforcement professionals, either police officers, probation officers, corrections officers, what have you, and most were over the age of 30. The course material covered women as perpetrators of crime, women as victims of crime, and women as participants in the justice system (police officers, judges, lawyers, prosecutors, etc.).

When we got to the subject of rape, there was a lot of heated discussion, specifically around the issue of "consent" on the part of the woman and "rights" on the part of the man. What was surprising and really quite shocking to me -- I was 50 years old at the time, so far from being either naive or inexperienced in the ways of the world -- was how strenuously some of these "men" argued in defense of rapists. Oh, not the dark alley stranger-with-a-knife-to-her-throat rapist, because everyone in the class agreed that's "real" rape and not defensible. But there were other "kinds" of rape that weren't really so bad, weren't really "real" rape, in the eyes of these police officers and probation officers, some of whom were hoping to go on to law school.

No matter how often Dr. Griffin and some of the students, including myself, argued that "No means no," some of the guys insisted that in some circumstances it didn't. Finally, one of the guys, who I believe was a Phoenix police officer, kind of leaned forward, grasping the edges of the desk in his vehemence, and said words to the effect (I can't remember exactly verbatim), "Look, you mean if I take some woman out to dinner and a show and maybe spend a couple hundred bucks on her, and then she says "no," I don't have a right to get something in return? What did she think I was spending all that money for?"

There was an audible gasp from about half of the rest of the class. There were others, however, who kind of, sort of, sheepishly and reluctantly agreed with him, even though they KNEW it was wrong. They were, in effect, protecting their right (as they saw it) to have sex with whoever they wanted to have sex with, even if she said no.

Dworkin was an extremist, but the guy in my ASJ 305 class wasn't. He was just another "normal" guy, who saw nothing wrong with what Susan Griffin had labeled "the All-American crime." He had PAID for his pleasure, he had a RIGHT to it, and his partner had no rights, no power, no voice, no ownership of her self. She belonged to him, body and soul. Or at least her body. She was a whore. She had accepted his payment, and now he had rights.

Is that an extreme point of view, or is it a common one? I suspect it's far more common than Andrea Dworkin's.

Dworkin isn't the only woman who sees all men as (potential) rapists, but she's very easy to find and cite. To counter her, however, there are prominent people like Ron Paul who think sexual harrassment is no big deal. Apparently Dr. Paul has never been a victim of workplace sexual harrassment, of threats from a supervisor to either put out or get out. Apparently Dr. Paul has never worked somewhere where the anti-woman jokes, the leers and pinches and jokes and innuendos are mortifying and humiliating and eventually terrifying. (I've been through that. Twice.)

It's easy to pick a couple of Dworkin's more extreme quotes off a googled website, but try reading more than a few quotes. Read Susan Estrich and Susan Griffin, Susan Brownmiller, Emilie Buchwald, Donald Dutton, David Finkelhor, Marilyn French, Patricia Francisco, Ida Johnson, Kathleen Jones, Sue Lees, Lee Madigan, Susan Faludi, and on and on and on. There's a voluminous library of research material, history, personal accounts, and so on regarding rape, and especially how it has been used politically. My personal library contains all the above listed authors and several dozen more, and I haven't even kept it current for 10 years.

I suspect, though of course I can't confirm, that many of the defenders of the rape culture including those on DU, or those who deny it exists, are guys who would never actually resort to "real" rape, but who maybe do feel they still have some inherent right to sex when they want it and might be capable of ignoring her "NO," and don't really want to think of themselves as "real" rapists. But they do feel just a little bit of kinship with the guy who gets his date so drunk she doesn't know what she was doing and he's still sober enough so he has sex with her. Or the guy who spends a couple hundred bucks on his date and then when she decides she doesn't really like him enough to have sex with him, he pressures her, maybe hints she owes it to him, makes her feel guilty or maybe even a little bit afraid that if she doesn't give in to him, doesn't "consent" to going to bed with him, he'll hurt her or tell lies about her. Because that's not really "real" rape.

At the end of that spring 1999 semester, we had to give presentations on our group projects. The group I was in had chosen date rape -- the Christy Brzonkala case was in the news then -- and after the other four or five students (one male, as I recall, the rest female) had made their brief presentations, I made mine. Although the incident in which the male student defended his right to demand sex from a date was many weeks in the past by then, I addressed my remarks pretty much directly to him. And I had printed copies of a hand-out which was distributed as part of the "group project." On bright blue paper, the following text was printed:




“ ‘No’ is a complete sentence.”

“What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?”

“ ‘No’ means ‘No.’ Period.”

If you have problems with those three lines, you may be a potential date rapist.

Is that a harsh statement? I don’t think so.
When a woman says no, it is up to you to accept her no and stop. At that moment. Unequivocally. If you do not, if you exercise your “right” to pressure her into having sex with you, whether that pressure is verbal, physical, sexual, or any other kind of pressure, you are stating very clearly that her wishes are ignorable. You state that you don’t believe her or that you don’t care if she’s telling the truth. If you persist in your “seduction,” you are saying that your desires are more important than her integrity, her personhood, her wishes, and that you, for whatever reason, have more of a right to have sex with her than she has the right to say no.
You may say that “when she says no, she really means not now,” and that the key to your success is maintaining the pressure until she gives in. That’s force. That’s coercion. That’s rape.
It is also a denial of her integrity as a person. You are saying that her words don’t mean what she says they do. You are also saying that you know her mind better than she does. Would you allow her the same liberties? Would you allow her to persist long after you had lost interest in her?
Many women have been so thoroughly conditioned and socialized by our society to think that they can be held responsible for someone else’s actions that they have lost the ability to say no. They have been taught that saying no doesn’t mean anything. They have been taught that their integrity doesn’t mean anything, because it can be overridden by your desires and you are more important than they are. So they don’t speak, they live in fear, even if it is not a palpable fear. And they allow you, by their frightened silence, to do things to them that they don’t want.
Nothing a woman has done with you in the past, even if she has had sex with you on a regular basis, even if she is your wife, nothing justifies your overriding her simple no. Nothing. You have no more right to continue talking her into something she doesn’t want to do that you have the right to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater. When your “right” infringes upon someone else’s right, you lose that right.
Does this mean you are going to have to give up some of your male privilege, your “right” to seduce and/or rape the women you desire? Yes. That you are going to have to learn that you are not more important than the women you date? Yes. That you have no right to pressure her, to coerce her, to force her? Yes.
“Yes,” in this case, is a complete sentence.
What part of “yes” don’t you understand?
Yes means yes.


Tansy Gold, who never apologizes for being a radical feminist