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I got a great email the other day from someone who, I’ve just got confirmation, would prefer to remain anonymous.

You’ve probably blogged about this before, but I couldn’t read your whole blog to find out. Consumption of alcohol makes a woman more culpable, and a man less culpable. Rape? Mr. Drunk Man can’t be blamed, he was drunk. Woman, however, was asking for it, she was drunk.

No attribution by original author’s preference.

I don’t know if I’ve blogged about it, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never made that point. But it’s a good one.

Inside the dominant paradigm not only are women are declared to be innately, angelically disinterested “no-sex” class, men are defined as perpetually, bestially, desperately, and indiscriminately eager for it. And so for that reason I think my contributor’s point about alcohol is particularly excellent point. In the majority of cases of sexual assault and rape the perpetrator is even more likely than the victim to be under the influence. In which case the social permission for men to be sexually, um, initiating translates easily into internal permission for a man to impose himself criminally.

Aided and abetted by the even more overt social assumption that the victim must always, somehow, some way, have been “asking for it.”

Summary: Comments to my earlier post, Time for MRAs and other Men’s Movement Activists to Speak Out on Catholic and Other Institutional Sexual Abuses of Boys, have been cool enough, and thought-provoking enough to warrant a separate post about why sexual abuse of boys should be a specific MRA/Men’s-Movement issue.

I’m not at all suggesting in that post or anywhere else that there is or was no abuse of girls. And goodness knows there’s not just covert abuse of minor girls in other denominations but active encouragement to enter marriage (or its, um, equivalents) early. Sometimes (FLDS, Branch Davidians) egregiously early!

There are instead three other reasons I’m focusing on the currently-visible issue of sexual assault on boys.

1) Possibly because of avoidance due to bogus Rule of Desire #2, or perhaps just because boys don’t have hymens and/or hymen-related “resale” value in marriage, or maybe just from the sheer inertia of tradition the emphasis of the impact has been on anger and sense of betrayal at the perpetrators rather than consideration of the impact of sexual assault on boys. In other words the emphasis is that it’s been priests, who really shouldn’t have been committing these crimes, not on the minors who shouldn’t have been victims regardless of who the perpetrators are or were.

2) When rape of children has been addressed at all it’s tended to be addressed in a sort of dog-leg version of traditional gender divisions: children are women’s work, plus children are lumped in with women as traditional dependents of men, and so dealing with sexual assault on children has fallen to women in general, and feminists in particular. That’s actually fine in a way — women, children, and men have received blanket protection thanks to the heartfelt, sometimes aggressive, and often unwelcome-by-antifeminist efforts of feminism. The end result, however, has been to leave men off the hook — not only for taking action against predation on children but also, and very importantly in my estimation, off the hook for being out about their own current and prior roles as victims.

3) And finally the MRA issue: Over the years a number of so-called “hard core” feminists ranging from Mary Daly to Twisty Faster have expressed, um, dissatisfaction with men’s efforts to include rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment of men in feminist anti-rape discourse. (I can’t find the quote at the moment but I remember Twisty saying approximately that if men wanted to so something about male victims they should, but the issue was otherwise of no interest to her.) Beyond the asshole-ishness of the sentiment it’s a legitimate point: When one is serious about challenging gender stereotypes and destygmatizing one’s own sex you’re not really going to make it very far by focusing only on whatever wrongs, even legitimate ones, perpetrated by one’s opposite sex. The issue of (by definition, convention, and as of 1995 Papally-approved infallability) all-male Priests abusing male children, matched with the issue of male children being identified as systematic victims over decades and perhaps centuries, is just about as tailor-made an issue for anything even remotely identifiable as a men’s movement to involve itself in.

For those three reasons, even though I’m pretty sure comparable institutional abuse of girls will eventually come to light, I think it’s a good idea to draw attention to the issue as an issue by and about, men because it is therefore for men to affirmatively rather than passively address.

And, incidentally, I also happen to strongly suspect that just as boys and men have gained protection from feminist activism against rape, girls and women will similarly benefit from from men’s activism to prevent abuse of men and boys.

Matthew Yglesias has a serious, legitimate beef with an NPR piece on campus rape researcher David Lisak. Yglesias says the piece (which I haven’t heard) first covers men who admit having sex with women against their will and then… maybe out of some perverse j-school “to be sure” reflex… brought up another professor, Stetson University law professor Peter Lake, who says naah, a lot of college students just drink too much, engage in risky behavior, and then regret it later.

The two concepts are not a good combination in a single piece. Says Matt, emphasis his:

It’s seems incredibly pernicious to me to be running these things together. Lisak’s question specifically posits that the victim “did not want to” have sex, but was “too intoxicated … to resist.” What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets. Obviously, that does happen. But it’s quite a different situation from an encounter where even the perpetrator acknowledges that the victim was unwilling.

He said it here.

That sounds right.

You wanna know something else about the mentality that brings us the bogus Two Rules of Desire? If you’re convinced it’s simultaneously intolerable and inconceivable for women to have sexual desire then of course you’re going to believe they’re going to claim rape ever time they have a drunken hookup.

In fact most people who have drunken hookups just say “oh well, that was dumb.” You know who tends to claim rape instead? People who were actually raped.

Just a thought.

Cool discussion related one of my earlier posts, On Learning to Recognize “Gray Area” Sexual Pressure Where You Least Expect It, going on over at Feministe

I’ve been posting a lot of comments over there. I may sort them out into a proper post here but for now here are some rough notes. The references of the form “Chava #181” are to other (numbered) comments in the thread.

—- #110 —-

What Natalie #93 said a couple of comments back!

If we didn’t tell ourselves that men always want sex and are always ready for it, and if he’s not it’s a judgment on his partner, then men would feel free to say no and women would be able hear no without feeling judged.

If we didn’t tell ourselves that women always want sex less often than male partners and that sex is always a bargaining chip to get something else then women wouldn’t feel humiliated for wanting sex at a time when a man doesn’t want it.

Yes! Those two scripts seriously distort the hows and even whethers of consent. Because in that construction a man “can’t be raped” because if he doesn’t want it all the time our transactional ideology of heterosexuality breaks down. Similarly straight-up sexual aggression is invisible in women because sexual expression is culturally defined as predicated on men’s initiative.

That’s what’s so cool about Pluralist and Rachel Hills posts, and why Jill and others are reposting them: they confront those assumptions from a direction the usual scripts aren’t at all prepared for. With the result that [rote] apologetics and absolutism sound reflexive rather than reflective.

When you dig a little deeper into the question of consent you stop looking at its nature (was it enthusiastic, grudging, resigned, gradually warmed-up-to) and reach the more fundamental question of whether the person making the decision is being respected. There’s clearly quite a bit of room for thoughtful people to debate whether Pluralist’s acquaintance’s overtures to her long-term partner were coercive. (I say yes she was, for instance even, though he eventually consented. But for their own nearly opposite reasons S.L. or Olo might credibly disagree.)

There’s no question, though, that she failed to respect his decision when, whatever her reasons, she decided to continue pressuring him.

Sexual consent is bogglingly important. But it’s also only a legally-definable and -determinable proxy for a much more complex human decision-making interactions. Recognizing this expands rather than refutes what we know about who can rape and be raped.

—- #137 —-

Chava and ThankGoddess [see #128.] I think a good way to resolve your current impasse would be to say that while everyone needs to be equally attentive we also need to be particularly wary of the gendered scripts our respective sexes are exposed to.

For instance because of scripting women are inclined to assume rejection implies personal inadequacy. (See for instance Marle’s assumption it must be ugliness in comment #1) with the result that something about them must be especially bad about them, if they fail. The alternative, which I think may have fueled Pluralist’s friend, is the assumption that if a woman is rejected there must be something wrong with the man. Obviously neither of these things need to be true.

Meanwhile men’s scripting assumes rejection is universal and therefore something has to be really special about them if they succeed. (The telling line there is men call it “getting lucky.”) Or else something has to be really wrong with the woman (“fallen,” “crazy,” or “wild.” Or else “easy,” as if that was a bad thing.) None of this needs to be true either.

The result for both men and women can be identical failures to respect a partner’s decision to decline that nevertheless come from very different social conditioning.

Point being that Chava’s right that straight men need to be particularly careful, but ThankGoddess is right that so does everyone else.

—

Quick note to ThankGoddess — I really, seriously admire your willingness to identify and rewrite scripting. I’m skeptical that they can be rewritten as easily as you make it sound in part because social scripts sort of by-definition can’t be changed unilaterally. One of the things I like about posts like this, though, is that the reconsideration of roles it forces creates openings for new, more realistic narratives about gender to emerge.

—- #176 —-

Butch Fatale #157

Many people who have non-standard rape experiences have difficulty identifying what happened to them as rape – including people whose experience was actually pretty common, because what we hear about how it has to happen to “count” is a pretty limited set of circumstances.

If you also add “any people who have non-standard rape experiences have difficulty identifying what they did as rape” then you’ve got the crux of this post — of why Pluralist, and Rachel Hills, and Jill, and I think this is such a crucial topic.

We’re all aware… some of us tragically so… that there are individuals who are conflicted about, or even oblivious to, rape because it wasn’t a “jump out of the bushes with a knife” scenario. There are people who think it didn’t happen to them, and people who think what they did couldn’t have been.

This might sound like a slight digression but earlier this year we had an incident of girls beating up another girl in a local Metro transit center. Just the other day I overheard, I think, Rachel Simmons on a local public radio show talking about assumptions what were made about what defines bullying. She made the point that “as usual” researchers initially focused only on bullying by socialized boys-to-boys, which tends towards direct physical violence, with the result that socialized girls-to-girls bullying, which tends towards emotional and social rather than physical violence was ignored or disregarded.

The point being that just as it was an error to make assumptions about bullying it’s almost certainly as large a mistake to assume that everyone will commit rape using the same methods stereotypically used by the most stereotypical perpetrators. Date- and domestic-partner rapists got away with that for generations.

With that in mind what’s important about Plurality’s friend’s action isn’t whether the degree of what she did was actionable — even though that seems to be the focus of a lot of the discussion here and elsewhere. Instead it’s interesting for indicating one corner a whole domain of coercion that has been overlooked because it didn’t conform to our (highly gendered!) assumptions about what rape, and rapists, and rape victims look like.

A corollary of that, by the way, which really shows up in Plurality’s story and which I saw as the point of Butch Fatale’s comment, is that we also have incomplete assumptions about what non-consent looks like, and therefore of what victims look like.

The man in Plurality’s story felt conflicted enough to have not gotten over what happened even months later. That’s a big clue that non-consent was involved. I’m reluctant to go further into that because this really has nothing to do with “what about the men.” Instead I’ll point out that the woman in Plurality’s story also felt conflicted enough about it to tell Plurality about it, instead of, say, to blow it off. That’s another big clue.

There’s a lot of 2nd- and 3rd-person conversation in this thread, for instance, along the lines of “well if this man…” or “well a cis-person might…” And there’s (probably for obvious reasons when you think about it) an awful lot of comments by people who are confident about having been victims. There have even been digressions into what constitutes privilege. All of which are of course perfectly relevant.

What Pluralist’s story suggests is that what we’re not hearing are whole classes of comments that would be even more relevant: the cis persons, the trans persons, the straight persons, the genderqueer persons… the women or men who like Pluralist’s friend can and may have been perpetrators — and who therefore might be able to contribute cautionary perspectives — are silent.

Though not, I ardently hope, silenced. Because this very large, very important bottle wouldn’t have been uncorked in the first place had Pluralist’s friend not disclosed her own conflicted feelings about her own assumptions that led to her own inability to respect her partner’s decision when he declined her overtures.

Bottom line is that addressing Butch Fatale’s broader point about identifying who can be victims and perpetrators undermines the two-sphere model of gender. Even if, as, say, Bond of Dear Diaspora argues, we should have tolerance for some degree of gender construction, the exclusivity of the two-sphere model, and the denial and lies needed to maintain it, leaves everyone vulnerable.

—- #196 —-

Following up on [my previous comment, #176] I really want to add that rather than absolving men with some kind of “but women do it too” shenanigans (as if two wrongs had ever made a right), breaking down gendered notions of what constitutes coercion and/or consent leaves less “gray area” for men to hide it. For instance no matter who you are it really is questionable at best do to one’s partner what Pluralist’s friend did to hers. Understanding that takes away cancels any form of “it must be ok because women do that too” defenses.

—

Richard Jeffrey Newman #178: I can’t speak at all to cultural Korean values so I can’t assess whether that’s really how couples in that situation are expected to save face. Instead I’ll just emphasize again that the critical distinction between role-playing and reality is recognition and respect for each player’s decision to participate or to decline.

Chava #181. Similar to #178 the measure is whether we recognize and respect each player’s decision. For better or worse, we probably can’t unilaterally make the assessment of our effect on others or how far over the line we’ve crossed. That’s not an indictment, by the way. It’s great that you stepped up. Grounding dialogue in how we have acted and how we act now makes dialogue about how we could act more practical and a lot more powerful.

Sailorman #184: I’ll keep stressing that the objective isn’t to create ever wider definitions of rape and assault. But neither is it to engage in further hairsplitting at the margins. In your “can I get you interested” scenario the question would be whether your partner was respecting your decision and, in particular, whether she was seeking to clarify it (ok, especially in a trusting relationship) or to disregard and override it (not at all ok.)

And for Natalie #175 and Faith #188: Yes, absolutely. I grew up believing women and girls couldn’t commit sexual assault. I believed it so thoroughly that I even said it to the director of a local Rape Relief program when I interviewed her for a college newspaper story. When she gently but with considerable authority corrected me I had an almost cinematic sense of perspective shift. It resolved a coercive sexual childhood experience when I was very young that I grew up thinking shouldn’t have bothered me, and that I’d thought I maybe even should have felt lucky for (one of the dads who was in on the rescue said something to another adult about me “getting an early start”) that had nevertheless affected me. Victimized? No, social scripting about male gender might have, for once, possibly unfairly, helped mitigate some of that. Traumatized? Any consequences were nothing compared to the consequences ruthless, sustained, but non-sexual bullying I experienced later. But just those few words from the shelter director were exactly what I’d needed to get resolution.