How to Talk to Anyone (Junior Talker #4), DeYtH Banger [ebook reader screen .txt] 📗

on the woman and penetrated her with his fingers while she sat on the ledge of a bank window).Both the video and eyewitness testimony showed that, while both students were inebriated, the woman was fully conscious and willing, at one point apparently encouraging the man to continue when he asked if she wanted to stop they were drawing a crowd of onlookers. She also walked away with the man, unassisted, after the act. In view of these facts, the grand jury brought no indictment.

 

 Nonetheless, letters to the campus newspaper cited the incident as evidence of “rape culture,” “glamorization of sexual violence,” “survivor-blaming,” and “refusal to take rape accusations seriously.”

 

 

Rape culture is when people say, “she was asking for it.”

Maxwell does not offer a single example of anyone in recent memory saying such a thing about a rape victim.

Rape culture is when we teach women how to not get raped, instead of teaching men not to rape.

This is a bizarre argument. We also encourage people to avoid pickpockets and to install burglar alarms instead of teaching thieves and burglars not to steal or break into homes. There is a general assumption that crimes are committed by bad people who are not receptive to society’s messages that they should not steal, rob, burgle, or rape — messages that are conveyed, among other things, by penalties for these crimes.

Rape culture is when the lyrics of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” mirror the words of actual rapists and is still the number one song in the country.

This claim comes from a popular blogpost on the Pacific Standard website comparing the lyrics of the controversial song to words reportedly used by rapists — such as “I know you want it.” But by that standard, “I love you” and “Give me a kiss” can also be considered hallmarks of a rape song: one woman’s account mentions her rapist saying both, and a 2014 post on the website XOJane was titled “My Rapist Said ‘I Love You.’”As National Public Radio critic Ann Powers has pointed out, Thicke’s offending line is no different from lyrics used by a number of female pop stars, including feminist icon Beyoncé Knowles.

 

And some of the other comparisons in the post are dubious at best: thus, “The way you grab me,/Must wanna get nasty” is equated with, “It wasn’t rape. You were being such a tease.”

 

Rape culture is when the mainstream media mourns the end of the convicted Steubenville rapists’ football careers and does not mention the young girl who was victimized.

 

 

This is an egregious, and widespread, misrepresentation of a CNN segment on the sentencing of the Steubenville perpetrators in March 2013. The segment sparked a storm of social media outrage because correspondent Poppy Harlow, host Candy Crowley, and legal expert Paul Callan were seen as too sympathetic to the offenders in discussing their reaction to the sentence and the effects of the conviction on their lives.The backlash included widely repeated claims that there was “not one word about the victim” from any of the participants — an assertion that also found its way into a petition demanding an apology from CNN.

But in fact, a look at the transcript shows that the segment had extensive references to the victim.  After describing one of the young men’s emotional reaction to the sentence, Harlow said, “Very serious crime here. Both found guilty of raping this 16-year-old girl at a series of parties back in August, alcohol-fueled parties.” Crowley then pointed out how young both the perpetrators and the victim were. After Callan discussed the impact on the offenders, Crowley turned back to Harlow with a reminder about “the 16-year-old victim, her life, never the same again.” Harlow agreed and added, “The last thing she wanted to do was sit on that stand and testify. She didn’t want to bring these charges. She said it was up to her parents.” The segment ended with Harlow relaying her conversation with the girl’s mother who said that she felt “pity” for the two young men.

 

 

In her effort to prove that rape culture is real, Maxwell also invokes dire statistics: “Is 1 in 5 American women surviving rape or attempted rape a cultural norm?” But that figure is based on a Centers for Disease Control survey loaded with leading questions so shoddily worded that they are very likely to elicit responses based on consensual drunk sex. Ironically, based on the same questions, men report being “forced to penetrate” a woman during the past twelve months as frequently as women report being raped by a man. Either the CDC numbers considerably overstate sexual violence, or “rape culture” is a two-way street.

The issue of male victims highlights another problem with rape-culture theory. Early feminist polemics against “rape culture” tended to argue that child sexual abuse was another form of patriarchal violence targeting female victims. Thus, in the introduction to the 1982 collection, “Voices in the Night: Women Speaking About Incest,” editors Toni McNaron and Yarrow Morgan asserted that “approximately one out of three girl children experiences sexual abuse in her family” and that “approximately 97% of all victims of sexual abuse are girls and not boys,” which they concluded must “place incest within the context of a sexist culture.”Such a claim cannot be sustained today when sexual victimization of boys has been studied far more extensively. Maxwell states that one in six boys are sexually abused before the age of 18. But if such abuse is also part of “the rape culture,” this raises confusing questions about the feminist analysis: why would a misogynistic and homophobic patriarchy condone the sexual abuse of male children, mostly by other males?

 

 

While the existence of a “rape culture” in modern liberal democracies is a myth sustained by misinformation, this myth has real and dangerous consequences.

For one, the rape culture myth is highly damaging to the basic principles of fairness to the accused, since these principles themselves — such as according the accused the presumption of innocence instead of “believing the survivor,” or using the accuser’s conduct to assess her credibility or her consent — are viewed as a part of “rape culture.” According to Maxwell, “We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says.” On a similar note, writer and Humanist Society activist Ashley Jordan writes that in order to end rape culture, we must “stop wondering if a victim is telling the truth or not.” (“Victim,” of course, is anyone claiming to have been raped.)

The National Organization for Women, America’s premier feminist group, seems willing to extend the benefit of the doubt even to a proven liar such as “Jackie,” the young woman whose story of a brutal fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia was exposed as a hoax shortly after being published in Rolling Stone magazine in 2014. In early 2016, the organization publicly deplored the fact that UVA dean Nicole Eramo, who had sued Rolling Stone for defamation over her portrayal as a callous bureaucrat, wanted Jackie to turn over her communications with the magazine and with others related to her claim of rape. In an open letter to UVA president Teresa Sullivan, NOW wrote, “It is exactly this kind of victim blaming and shaming that fosters rape culture, re-victimizes those brave enough to have come forward, and silences countless other victims.”

While there no rape suspects in the UVA case, the same mentality can certainly affect cases in which specific men are accused.

In 2013, Columbia University student Paul Nungesser was accused by fellow student Emma Sulkowicz of brutally attacking her in the midst of an encounter that had begun as consensual; Sulkowicz claimed that Nungesser hit her in the face, choked her, and anally penetrated her against her will. Nungesser was cleared by a college hearing despite procedural rules heavily favoring the complainant. Sulkowicz then went public, taking her grievance to the media, and eventually garnered notoriety by carrying a mattress around campus as a symbol of her victimization. Nungesser, named as a rapist in bathroom graffiti and increasingly ostracized on campus, eventually spoke to the press as well. An article by the present author revealed that Sulkowicz remained friendly with him for weeks after the alleged rape, as shown by Facebook messages in which she accepted his invitation to a party (even agreeing to bring other young women with her), invited him to “hang out” and have a “chill sesh,” and responded to his birthday wishes with, “I love you Paul!”

In the legal system, this would have been seen as extremely strong exculpatory evidence — almost certainly leading to an acquittal or, more likely, a dismissal of the charges without trial. (Interestingly, the campus panel that exonerated Nungesser did not see these messages, excluded from evidence under the rules of the disciplinary proceedings.) Yet feminists overwhelmingly rallied to Sulkowicz’s defense, arguing that her behavior should not be seen as evidence in Nungesser’s favor since women usually don’t act like “perfect victims” after a rape.

More recently, after pornographic film actor James Deen was accused of rape by a former girlfriend, a fellow adult performer known as Stoya, feminist comedian and activist Gaby Dunn told several people in private communications that were later leaked that she had strong reasons to think Stoya was lying. Yet she would not say so publicly, despite the fact that Deen was a friend. Dunn explained her motives thus:

I think women should be believed when they make accusations. I just happen to know this is the rare 1 percent of situations in which this is false. But more than that, I don’t want to contribute to a culture where people accuse women of lying about sexual assault. I understand why people believe Stoya and they should believe sex workers can be raped. They should believe women. It has a larger impact on all victims to say she is lying so I won’t do it publicly. The damage is done to him. But I don’t want there to be more damage to real victims by disparaging Stoya.[55]

Whether Dunn actually knows something that undercuts Stoya’s claim is impossible to tell. (Deen was later accused of sexual assault or misconduct by several other women; however, none of them filed a formal complaint, and a look at those claims reveals serious credibility problems for at least some accusers.)[56] But the mere fact that someone believes she has information that exonerates a person accused of a repugnant crime yet chooses to withhold that information for ideological reasons illustrates the dangerous zealotry of rape-culture feminism.

For now, this ideology has had limited impact on the judicial system, though it has strongly affected college disciplinary proceedings. But its potential cultural impact goes beyond that. Since films, songs, and other forms of art and entertainment are seen as perpetuating “rape culture,” this zealotry is a powerful call for ideological culture-policing. The backlash against “Blurred Lines,” banned from many college campuses, is one clear example of this.[57]Films such as Say Anything, American Pie, and The Notebook have been denounced as rape-culture vehicles because they show men romantically pursuing women after a rejection, or show a “nerdy” unattractive man winning the love of a gorgeous woman (which supposedly feeds a mentality of “male entitlement”), or portray men “drinking and finding a girl to hook up with.”[58]

Outside entertainment, too, the rape culture myth has a pernicious effect on freedom of speech — particularly on campus. One of the tenets of rape-culture ideology, after all, is that the denial of rape culture it itself contributes to rape culture. Thus, in the aftermath of the Ohio University “rape” in October 2013, a letter in the student newspaper from journalism major Tom Pernecker questioned the existence of a pervasive “culture of rape” and suggested that a drunken sexual encounter should not be equated with rape.[59] A response from another student promptly accused Pernecker himself of “perpetuating” rape culture in his letter.[60]

Around the same time, The Badger Herald, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, published a letter by junior David Hookstead titled, “‘Rape Culture’