"Teaching men not to rape"

[Opshinz]

I been noticing more and more people spitting rhetoric like this. I love freedom of speech and surely they should be allowed to say this, but.. rather then describe my feelings perhaps I can give an example.

Imagine I was giving a lecture and said "We really need to teach women to stop killing children", or "We really need to teach black people not to eat so much fried chicken".

Anyone have any thoughts?

[vesuvia]

NeoFaust wrote - "Male attitudes to rape and consent certainly need clarifying, not least because the discourse on the subject has been exclusively from a feminist (and, lets face it, grossly misandric) viewpoint."

I think you seem to be ignoring all those occasions when non-feminists have given their views (often very anti-feminist and very misogynistic views) about male attitudes to rape and consent. They have expressed these views through millions of words spoken and written over many years. Unfortunately, much of the non-feminist discussion of male attitudes to rape and consent is dominated by patriarchal anti-feminist and misogynistic attitudes. For example:

• she's lying
  
• she didn't say "no"
  
• "no" is just code for "try harder"
  
• she was "asking for it"
  
• she led me on
  
• husbands have a right to sex
  
• he's rich/famous/powerful so he wouldn't have to rape
  
• it's not "real" rape
  
• rape victims can't get pregnant because their bodies "automatically reject" the sperm
  

Many non-feminists have also repeatedly expressed their views, about male attitudes to rape and consent, through their actions. These have included:

• the Steubenville High School rape victim blaming scandal
  
• the imprisonment or execution of rape victims for "adultery"
  

If there is going to be more non-feminist discussion about male attitudes to rape and consent, I hope to hear and read more about condemnation of anti-rape-victim attitudes such as those I've listed above.

I hope any non-feminist discussion will be centred around concern for rape victims and the urgently needed stigmatisation of rapists, and not centred on how offended some men are about alleged "misandry".

[samandi]

So essentially, men are urgently striving, as a class, to ensure that being a rapist is seen as anathema to any acceptable concept of male-ness.

They do it where you will be very unlikely to see - amongst themselves ... there's just the whispers, the quiet words and the turning of backs.

Do men usually "urgently strive" by whispering and speakly quietly? How very interesting. Perhaps speaking a little louder might be more effective though.

[JacqueslePeacock]

And this, I feel in my experience, is reserved for the stranger rapist trope. If you point out to a group of men (which actually I would never dare to do, because I would fear the consequences) that most rapes are committed by men that their victims are supposed to be able to trust, they become at best very uncomfortable and at worst violently offended.

^^ this. The kind of rape scenario which makes men threaten rapists with violence is stranger rape. Men do not, in my experience want to cut the throats of husbands who rape their wives, or men who rape women on a date. You are talking about a very narrow set of rape crimes which men (mostly) will not tolerate, not the very broad range of sexual violence which happens to women daily.

[CailinDana]

Do you accept Neo that out of all the men you know at least one of them has sexually assaulted or raped someone?

[ArtetasSwollenAnkle]

We live in a rape culture, in the same way we live in a war culture, a class culture, a mugging culture, an alcohol-abuse culture, a drug culture....the list goes on and on.

Rape culture reference is a way that feminism can separate men from women in order to create a them-and-us mindset. Rape is a crime that only men can commit (at least by UK legal definition), and the majority of rapes are carried out against women (rather than man-on-man), at least as far as I am aware. The other stuff - murder, drugs, alcohol etc., affects both sexes.

And if feminists want to concentrate on crimes that specifically affect women - well, so what? That is what feminism is about - by women, for women.

As I see it, feminism isn't about pandering to men or worrying about their feelings. It's about sorting out issues that affect women.

[Keepithidden]

Nothing wrong with "teaching men not to rape", it should probably be expanded to "teaching men not to perpetuate rape culture" as well.

I've read a lot of Rad Fem stuff on the range of opinions of rape and some of it is extreme, but there's also IMHO a lot of truth in it and to be honest I do struggle with the concept as a whole. The whole "Stranger down an Alley" thing is pretty clear cut, but when it comes to marital rape (or even LTR I suppose) the fact that it wasn't criminalised until 1991 suggests there is something very distasteful about the whole institution. There must be thousands, if not millions of wives who are having sex, despite not wanting to, because they feel obliged to by marriage, society or whatever. That's an awful lot of rape victims, an awful lot of rapists and I'm not sure that many of them realise it.

It's a horrible thought.

[CailinDana]

My rapist would argue he isn't a rapist. He has said things to suggest he sees how what he did might be construed as rape but just sees it as a "mistake." Because of course he's a good guy and only strangers in alleyways rape.

Men can't see how different life is for women. I don't blame them for that. But I do object to them trying to tell women "how it is" as though women can't understand their own lives and experiences. My rapist considering what he did not to be rape doesn't change anything for me.

[CaptChaos]

For every transgressive joke you've heard laughed at, there's the quiet moment where one guy round the pub table mutters 'rapists should get their throats cut' and you can hear the low animal growl of assent and feel the animalistic surge of rage.

Possibly, not my experience, but then maybe the all male situations I've lived are different from yours, but pretty much exclusively the vile jokes outweighed the soul searching, plus, as Buffy pointed out, it's not soul searching really, it's just more male violence.

The reason for newspapers bemoaning the damage to a young mans life from an erroneous/false accusation is that he is now an object of intense hatred and distrust from all of society, but in particular other men - whose hands twitch when they see him pass, who will speak but never communicate. Nobody has sympathy for one they honestly consider a rapist.

No, sorry, the main reason for the newspapers to bemoan the damage from the vanishingly small number of false accusations is so that they can show that 'all women' lie, because only women have to represent 'all women'. That newspaper owners hold this view is entirely obvious, every time a 'false accusation' story runs. They constantly reiterate that this man has raped, but all men aren't rapists, this woman has lied, therefore every single woman lies about rape.

The main reason men get twitchy hands when rapists walk down the road is because they might touch 'their property', 'their female', that's why they don't sympathise with 'real' rapists, stranger rapists, because there is a fighting chance that they might encroach on their ownership. However, they don't get all hand twitchy when a man rapes his wife or girlfriend, because, to men, that's lesser. Not 'real' rape.

[scallopsrgreat]

How about we stop men lying about raping us and then we'd be believed? Or even better how about men stop raping us and then there'd be no need for accusations at all?

It isn't the teeny weeny percentage of false accusations that mean women aren't believed. It is the overwhelming lying by rapists that is believed.

[AnyFucker]

dreamin is all over the site just now, adding his "wisdom" to help the laydeez

[TheOriginalSteamingNit]

Perhaps all these growling furious animalistic men who want to cut the throats of rapists might one day be brave enough not to wait until 'the quiet moment' in the pub before they emit their low roaring?

I am struggling to believe in this silent prowling growling movement by 'men as a class', especially with the bizarre animalistic descriptions. Perhaps they are still hibernating?

[CaptChaos]

Here's an idea- why don't we teach men not to rape women?

If zero men raped, then there would be zero rapes.

Fixed that for you dreamin

HTH

[TeWiSavesTheDay]

An awful lot of women don't really know what rape is, and it's something that disproportionately affects them, so why some men expect to 'know' all about it (despite zero research) is a bit gobsmacking to me.

Targeted this is what rape is, don't do it, and believe your friends if they say it's happened to them, makes absolute sense to me. It's absolute what I'll be doing with my kids, both male and female.

[ArtetasSwollenAnkle]

Do you accept Neo that out of all the men you know at least one of them has sexually assaulted or raped someone?

How do you know that? How could anybody know that about a stranger on the internet?

[ArtetasSwollenAnkle]

No, sorry Buffy. As a scientific/academic person, I would hope you could see the difference between a statement of certainty and a statistical possibility. For each instance of sexual assault or rape, has the perpetrator committed only one crime or multiple? If each perpetrator commits ten, or one hundred, or a thousand crimes, all of a sudden the likelihood of any one of us knowing someone guilty is reduced by a factor of between ten and a thousand.

So, in fact, all a comment like the one quoted achieves is to spread the blame further across the male population. And I can see only one reason to do that.

[TheFabulousIdiot]

"Here's an idea- why don't we teach women not to make false rape accusations?"

How about you read this

DPP says study shows false allegations of rape and domestic violence are rarer than many believe