The most sexist thing I've encountered lately is this weird campaign telling me that since I'm a man I'm supposed to teach other men not to rape, because apparently men naturally go around raping people if we aren't taught not to.
I agree with that. While they're at it, why not:
1. Tell murderers not to murder people
2. Tell arsonists not to start fires
3. Tell bank robbers not to rob banks
4. Tell drug traffickers to stop
And so on.
There, you've just ended all crime! Close down the prisons! They just had NO IDEA they weren't supposed to do those things, it was all a simple misunderstanding!
Here's the thing: murder, arson, etc.: these are all unequivocally condemned in our culture. When those crimes are committed, people generally don't swarm out of the woodwork to talk about what the victim did wrong, or imply that maybe no crime was committed at all.* With rape, though? Happens every time.
It's not that I don't see the point here both sides are making, but a couple things to point out:
I've certainly heard of people who were attacked or even murdered being blamed for it. "What were they doing, walking alone at night carrying a duffel bag full of money?" I've heard people blame individuals and businesses for not locking their doors or using other common security procedures when they get robbed. It's natural for people to look at these incidents and try to perform a pathology analysis on them.
I think a lot of this kind of talk goes to the idea of Dunbar's number. If this happened for example to your sister (God forbid), your first reaction certainly wouldn't be to pathologize, but when it's someone you don't know, the empathy is less immediate, and your mind goes to the facts and circumstances because what you're thinking is "How I can prevent that terrible thing from happening to me or individuals who fit into my Dunbar set?" I lack the moral authority and intelligence to dictate how sensitive people should be about saying things like that, but I doubt sincerely that the motivation behind statements like that is sinister.
So while I do think that's terribly boorish to treat a horrible tragedy in someone else's life as so incidental just because you personally don't feel the sting of it, I also think it's also important people at least are thinking about how to prevent these things from happening (whether their logic holds water or not is a different matter). Some people are going to be more sensitive to recognizing the victimhood of others, some people are going to be more resolved to preventing re-occurrence. What results is a conflict of values which can't be terribly objective, and while it's fine imho to fall into either camp, it's not fair for people who are biased more toward the sensitivity side to say the pragmatic side just doesn't care or doesn't recognize the victim's status, rather they are trying to find some meaning in it.
Stated differently, I am naive enough to believe the vast super majority of people would, if given the option, push a button that would end all rape forever. That doesn't mean just because they say something awkward or crass about a sensitive subject, even frequently, that most people don't care.
Also, consider that if people are going to talk about a rape, they're going to comment on whatever is the least awkward aspect of it for them. When you hear about an incident like that, your first feeling, regardless of whether you are male or female or whatever, is that feeling of helplessness that you personally can't do anything to make the situation better because it already happened. Rape is such a horrible, personal thing, a special kind of evil, it's just damn hard to talk about. Normal people don't like to talk about rape or murder or theft or assault or anything like that, of course they aren't good at discussing it. People snap to the first coherent thing they can put into words rather than wrestle with that conundrum.
Rape as a crime has a lot of issues surrounding it as well. There's a not inconsiderable number of documented cases of "rape" being called on men when the fake victim just wants something. It's hard to quantify how often this happens because the women who make false accusations are seldom if ever punished, but incidents like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa5kQbUl5_oAre not non-occurring. And bear in mind, the accusation alone usually destroys the accused man's life or severely damages it because the accused doesn't get the same anonymity as the accuser (which baffles me). For a less nuanced example, many divorce attorneys will tell female clients to say they are afraid of their soon to be ex husband sexually assaulting them, because the leverage this grants can be incredible and the penalty for saying it, even if it's false, is nothing.
This kind of thing is a serious problem because it clouds the issue so much, but it's not going away because quite frankly no one cares. And quite frankly no one cares because it's a men's issue, and even men don't care about men's issues. I'd rather we had a culture that looked at the issue of rape with a cold, clinical eye but wish in one hand and poop in the other and see which one fills up first.
But finally the thing I wanted to point out is that "Teach Men Not to Rape" is how dehumanizing, insulting and asinine it is. Let's say I buy this book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=eD0ttBXoMvQCAnd flip through it and find out that Polynesians commit theft more often than any other group. If I started going around lambasting "Teach Polynesians Not to Steal", I would accurately be compared to Hitler.
What I find interesting about this is that some men's group in Canada got so tired of the "Teach Men Not to Rape" stuff, they started a "Don't Make False Rape Accusations" campaign for women and they were labeled a hate group for it. Absolutely incredible.
Again this is why it's good to let out a little steam here and there about these gendered issues but I prefer to focus more on things I can change personally, this shit gets so depressing if you think about it too long. There are no winners here.
