"Get over it"

"It's not like I was raped, and it was an isolated event with a neat ending, and that was that. I was stalked. My best friend was attacked. I was left with scars and with PTSD. The enforced denial in my family resulted in profound fractures.

My experience is not terribly unique. Rape reverberates.

"Get over it" elides a reality that sexual violence is usually not a contained incident, but a starting point on a divergent path along which lie pebbles, stones, emotional landmines that one otherwise might not have encountered.

Rape did not turn me into a survivor's advocate; I was a survivor long before I was an advocate. But even if it had, I don't know why on earth I would want to "get over" that. I am not keen to abandon my position that rape is vile, nor silence my voice from speaking that truth."

http://www.shakesville.com/2012/07/on-getting-over-it.html?m=1

Rape Culture 101

http://www.shakesville.com/2009/10/rape-culture-101.html?m=1

Walking While Female: A Story of Sexual Assault in Broad Daylight

http://jezebel.com/5925786/walking-while-female-a-story-of-sexual-assault-in-broad-daylight

Top 10 Lines for Rape Apologists

http://lucy-loveless.tumblr.com/post/26982817010/top-10-lines-for-rape-apologists

"Men are not unmindful of the rape problem. To the contrary, their paternalistic laws reserve the harshest penalties for a violation of their property (women). They approach rape as an illegal enroachment by an unlicensed intruder, a stranger come into their midst, the advice they gave (and still try to give) was all of one piece: a set of rules and regulations designed to keep their property penned in, much as a sheepherder might try to keep his flock protected from an outlaw rustler by taking precautions against their straying too far from the fold. By seeing the rapist always as a stranger, never as one of their own, and by viewing the female as a careless creature with an unfortunate tendency to stray, they exhorted, admonished and warned the female to hide herself from male eyes as much as possible.

In short, they told her not to claim the privileges they reserved for themselves. Such advice - well intentioned, solicitous and genuinely concerned - succeeded only in further aggravating the problem, for the message they gave was to live a life of fear, and to it they appended the dire warning that the woman who did not follow the rules must be held responsible for her own violation.

What the rules tell us implicitly and explicitly is:

1) A woman alone probably won't be able to defend herself. Another woman who might possibly come to her aid will of no use whatsoever.

2) Despite the fact that it is men who are the rapists, a woman's ultimate security lies in being accompanied by men at all times.

3) A woman who claims to value her sexual integrity cannot expect the same amount of freedom and independence that men routinely enjoy. Even a small pleasure like taking a spin in an automobile with the windows open is dangerous, reckless behavior.

4) In the exercise of rational caution, a woman should engage in an amazing amount of pretense. She should function on a sustained level of suspicion that approaches a clinical definition of paranoia.

A woman who follows this sort of special cautionary advice and thinks she is acting in society's interest - or even in her own personal interest - is deluding herself rather sadly. This does not diminish the number of potential rapists on the loose, and the ultimate effect of rape upon the woman's mental and emotional health has been accomplished even without the act.

To accept a special burden of self-protection is to reinforce the concept that women must live and move about in fear and can never expect to achieve the personal freedom, independence, and self-assurance of men.

That's what rape is all about, isn't it? A possible deep-down reason why even the best of our concerned, well-meaning men run to stereotypic warnings when they seek to grapple with the problem of rape deterrence is that they prefer to see rape as woman's problem, rather than as a societal problem resulting from a distorted masculine philosophy of aggression."

-Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

"Once we accept as basic truth that rape is not a crime of irrational, impulsive, uncontrollable lust, but is a deliberate, hostile, violent act of degradation of possession on the part of a would-be conqueror, designed to intimidate and inspire fear, we must look toward those elements in our culture that promote and propagandize these attitudes, which offer men, and in particular, impressionable, adolescent males, who form the potential raping population, the ideology and psychological encouragement to commit their acts of aggression without awareness, for the most part, that they have committed a punishable crime, let alone a moral wrong.

The myth of the heroic rapist that permeates false notions of masculinity, from the successful seduced to the man who "takes what he wants when he wants it," is inculcated in young boys from the time they first become aware that being male means access to certain rites and privileges."

-Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

"The most bitter irony of rape, I think, has been the historic masculine fear of false accusation, a fear that has found expression in male folklore since the Biblical days, which has formed the crux of the legal defense against a rape charge, aided and abetted by that special set of evidentiary standards (consent, resistance, chastity, corroboration) designed with one collective purpose in mind: to protect the male against a scheming, lying, vindictive woman.

Fear of false accusation is not entirely without merit in any criminal case, as is the problem of misidentification, an honest mistake, but the irony, of course, is that while men successfully convinced each other and us that women cry rape with ease and glee, the reality of rape is that victimized women have always been reluctant to report the crime and seek legal justice - because of the shame of public exposure, because of that complex double standard that makes a female feel culpable, even responsible, for any act of sexual aggression committed against her, because of possible retribution from the assailant (once a woman has been raped, the threat of a return engagement understandably looms large), and because women have been presented with sufficient evidence to come to the realistic conclusion that their accounts are received with a harsh cynicism that forms the first line of male defense.

FBI's Uniform Crime Reports noted that 15% of all rape reports were determined by investigation to be untrue. A 15% figure for false accusations is undeniable high, yet when New Your City instituted a special sex crimes analysis squad and put policewomen (instead of men) in charge of interviewing complainants, the number of false charges dropped dramatically to 2%, a figure that corresponded exactly to the rate of false reports for other violent crimes.

The lesson in the mystery of the vanishing statistic is obvious. Women believe the word of other women. Men do not."

-Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

"Handing over money at knife point, or dipping into one's wallet to assuage a weaponless but menacing figure on a dark, deserted street, may be financially painful or emotionally distressing, but it hardly compares to the massive insult to one's self-determination that is sustained during a sexual assault.

In a sexual assault, physical harm is much more than a threat; it is a reality because violence is an integral part of the act. Yet, the nature of the crime as it is practiced does bear robbery a close resemblance, because the sexual goal for the rapist resembles the monetary goal of the robber.

Under the rules of law, victims of robbery and assault are not required to prove they resisted, or that they didn't consent, or that the act was accomplished with sufficient force, or sufficient threat of force, to overcome their will, because the law presumes it highly unlikely that a person willingly gives away money, except to a charity or to a favorite cause, and the law presumes that no person willingly submits to a brutal beating and the infliction of bodily harm and permanent damage. But victims of rape and other forms of sexual assault do need to prove these evidentiary requirements - that they resisted, that they didn't consent, that their will was overcome by overwhelming force and fear - because the law has never been able to satisfactorily distinguish an act of mutually desired sexual union from an act of forced, criminal sexual aggression.

The real reason for the law's everlasting confusion as to what constitutes an act of rape and what constitutes an act of mutual intercourse is the underlying cultural assumption that it is the natural masculine role to proceed aggressively toward the stated goal, while the natural feminine role is to "resist" or "submit." And so to protect male interests, the law seeks to gauge the victim's behavior during the offending act in the belief that force or the threat of force is not conclusive in and of itself.

Since terror is a psychological reaction and not an objective standard that can be read on a behavior meter six months later in court, current employed standards of resistance or threat of force have neve been able to accurately gauge a victim's terror. For this reason, feminists have argued that the burden of proof that devolves on a rape victim, that she resisted "within reason," that her eventual compliance was no indication of tacit "consent," is unfair, since such standards are not applied in court to the behavior of victims in other kinds of violent crime.

A jury should be permitted to weigh the word of a victimized complainant at face value, no more or less a right that is granted to other victims under the law."

-Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

Rape Culture

In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes.

Rape is Linked to Power

‎"1 out of 2 Deaf women are survivors. 1 out of 6 Deaf men are survivors (most likely underreported). Most of their perpetrators are male. It is clearly linked to power. Ultimately, it is up to us to unite and create a safe community for everyone."-Stacy Gainok

rape is linked to power. who has the power in our society? men. if we want to look at individual situations, the perpetrator could be anyone. but when we look at the bigger picture, the perpetrator is overwhelmingly male. the reason is society gives them *permission* to rape by putting the blame on the survivor and giving rape such a stigma that no one wants to talk about it. when a survivor speaks out, s/he is often bashed and analyzed and blamed. that teaches everyone to stay silent and blame ourselves. rapists go on raping without consequence. some rapists don't even realize they are rapists because the behavior is so accepted by their peers and the media.