He chained her up and raped her during every weekend.

A week before the court case the woman went back to the house (she had been staying with their two children in a ’safe house’ after the incident where she escaped - he found out where she was, broke in, and raped her again while she was there). Anyway - she went back to the ‘family home’ and gassed herself.

The ‘husband’ was convicted and got 7 years. He would have seen 4 of those inside a cell, at most.

Two young kids ended up with a rapist dad in prison, and a mother dead from suicide (or murder, if you ask me).

That this Phyllis Schlafly would say spousal rape is somehow ‘less criminal’ than strange rape……. it astounds me.

I wonder what kind of sheltered and ignorant world this woman must have existed in her whole life to think this way. It makes me sick.

RAPE IS RAPE IS RAPE.

There is NEVER an excuse.

Richard, that is a gross misreading of Sheelzebub’s words.

You are right. I was frustrated and it got the better of me. Sheelzebub, I apologize.

And Richard Jeffrey Newman responded:
If the purpose of this thread has been for women to express their outrage and frustration at men and the rape culture that we have created and continue to perpetuate…

Richard, that is a gross misreading of Sheelzebub’s words. Look at it again. Do you see the difference between “focused on the rape of women” and “for women to express their outrage & frustration”? I see a whopping HUGE difference. This is precisely what you have rightly been taken to task for, lo these many days. QGrrl uses a rhetorical analogy that makes perfect sense in the context of the discussion to that point and you use it to discuss it as if it was not rhetorical at all & you use it to make the thread about men’s feelings about castration. All your lengthy comments that utterly ignore the topic of this thread, that utterly ignore what Sheelzebub is clearly communicating and that continually (and, I believe, willfully) distort what has been said to you just make me want to scream, “SHUT UP!” Have you actually added anything to this discussion other than yet another example of how to derail a thread about the rape of women?

If the purpose of this thread has been for women to express their outrage and frustration at men and the rape culture that we have created and continue to perpetuate–and I mean that without irony–and/or if it was supposed to be a conversation only among women, then I suppose you are right; I should not have opened my mouth at all and I apologize. But that did not seem to me to be the purpose or the purview of this thread, either in the way Amp framed it or in the discussion that followed, and so I have a couple of more things to say in response to you and then I am done:

I am not outraged; I have not been talking about how Q Grrl’s rhetorical device makes me feel. I have been talking about whether I think it is an effective rhetorical device for moving the conversation about rape forward, and since she inserted the device into the conversation twice, the second time to underline the fact that it was not merely a reaction to what someone said, but a position she (rhetorically) fully supported, then it seems to me that taking her rhetoric seriously is a way of taking her feelings seriously.

More to the point: Her first point about castration was that trying to parse out the violence of rape was like trying to parse out the violence in various methods of castration, a very good point. Her second use of the castration rhetoric, however, was to put forward the notion of universal preventive castration, a very different idea, with very different implications and consequences; specifically, it is not making a point about degrees of violence, it is suggesting that doing violence to men’s bodies is, rhetorically, a reasonable response to the violence that men do to women’s. Now, I am not going to say again everyting I have said until now, but if you do not see the difference between these two uses of castration in this conversation and how the second one invites a discussion of whether or not it is a reasonable response, rhetorical or otherwise, to rape, then I guess there is nothing more to say, but it is because I have been responding to the invitation that is implicit in her second use of castration and people have been complaining as if I were responding to the first that I say that you and others have been taking me out of context. As well, the fact that I do not support her second use of the castration rhetoric does not mean I was trying to turn this into a conversation about men and men’s feelings.

Rhetoric has consequences and implications, and the people who use rhetoric are responsible and accountable for those consequences and implications. I asked questions about the consequences and implications of Q Grrl’s second use of the castration rhetoric (and I want to point out that I did not attack her at all or in any way say that she was being unreasonable or that she shouldn’t have said what she said or that she hated men or anything like that); she did not respond by saying that she was simply trying to make a limited rhetorical point. Rather, she defended her position as if she meant it in its full implications, and she attacked my position pretty aggressively. The conversation that exchange could have begun, it seems to me, is one worth having, as I said before, precisely because ending rape is men’s problem and because any serious discussion of ending rape involves, by definition, a discussion of men’s bodies.

But, as I said above, if the point of this thread was that it should be a place for women to express outrage and frustration and to engage in the kind of rhetoric Q Grrl engaged in for the sake of that anger and frustration–and I am not trying to be patronizing or ironic; that is a perfectly legitimate function for a thread like this to serve–then it was not the place to have the discussion I wanted to have.

As to your complaint that I’m reading you out of context because you’re a man–not true at all. I’m not reading you out of context. Consider my point–despite this being a thread that is supposed to be focused on the rape of women, we are now focusing solely on the feelings of men. There’s no going out of context there–the bulk of this thread has been around Qgrrl’s rhetorical device, the outrage it generated, and how it makes men feel.

With all due respect: go back and read my posts. In fact I am going at the end of this post to bother telling you which ones contain which content because I am tired of being read out of context and taken to task for taking Q Grrl to task in a way that I never did. I never told her she shouldn’t be angry; I never called her a “bad girl;” I never minimize rape or the reality of what it means to be a woman living in a rape culture; nor did I ever tell her she shouldn’t use castration as a rhetorical device. What I tried to do was take the rhetoric seriously and ask a question about whether it moves the discussion about rape forward in a useful way. In my opinion it does not.

You are, as is Q Grrl, in full possession of your own ideas and opinions. The fact that you don’t agree with me is fine, but it does not give you the right to keep taking me out of context just because I am a man saying these things–and, yes, I am beginning to think, in fact your post makes it pretty clear to me, that much of the reason I am being read out of context is that I am a man. On the one hand, I think, fair enough: women have put up with crap like that from men for centuries and I can accept that turnabout is, to a certain degree, fair play. One the other hand, though, that reversal is precisely what I am talking about: it perpetuates the same structure; all it changes is the roles; and I am not interested in that kind of structure anymore.

Now, if you are interested in actually reading what I wrote, here:

1. I didn’t comment on Q Grrl’s first use of castration, as I said in comment #70, because I thought she made a good point. I commented on her second mention of castration, and its use as a preventive measure against rape.

2. You might also read comment #52, where I explicitly made the point that any rape, all rape, is violent by definition and that to try to distinguish between violent and non-violent rape is to make the rape itself disappear.

3. You should also look at comment #58 in terms of what I have to say about focusing on men’s feelings rather than focusing on rape.

Finally, you don’t have to apologize to me for being uppity, ironically or otherwise. I don’t think you are; nor do I think you and the other women on this thread are “just bitches [who] don’t matter.” But I will point out that no one has yet addressed in any substantive way the question I asked when I first said something about Q Grrl’s use of castration, which was intended, she said, as rhetoric and not something she actually wanted to put into practice. (And I do not pretend that I have an answer either). What I wrote was this:

How do we arrive at justice, not only for the woman who survives the rape”“much less for the woman who does not”“but also for [the rapist]? Because to dehumanize him, to place him beyond justice, is in some sense to become like him. And that’s not something I think anybody wants.

Her original post merely paralleled the distinction someone made between rape and violence. As if there was a distinction. It wasn’t about retubutive justice, it was about showing him how one could apply the same philosophy to castration–but it was done chemically so it couldn’t be violent. Not like, say, doing it with a rusty blade. (Like how acquaintence rape isn’t ‘violent’ because she wasn’t hit, like the stranger popping out of the bushes and beating you. That’s ‘violent’ and we should split hairs about that and pooh-pooh what so many women who’ve been reading/posting on this thread have gone through.)

But you know what? Just forget about it. It is becoming clearer to me with each comment posted by yet another man that you all don’t want to get it. Better to go off on the Man! Hating! Comment! than actually look at the parallel it draws upon. Better to go off on Qgrrl than on the vile idea that some rapes aren’t as ‘bad’ because the woman wasn’t beaten, or she was ‘only’ drugged and raped, or whatever.

My deepest apologies for being uppity. When will I learn that we’re just bitches and we don’t matter? Carry on–do, let’s talk about the feelings of men in a thread about the rape of women.

3. There are some other differences between rape and pre-emptive castration that are worth considering: Women who have been raped can heal, physically, psychologically and emotionally. Men who have been pre-emptively castrated cannot, and so, again, the question of doing the permanent damage that castration would do to men who have not raped and who will not rape raises the issue of retributive justice.

So, in other words, the threat of rape to all women is a normative experience from which one need not heal or act pre-emptively. Nice.

Maybe my rhetorical device might make more impact if I dropped the pre-emptive business and talked about arming ninja-clad women with rusty garden shears — and gave them a few dark alleys and hedge rows to hide in. Or, to get back to Schlafly… we could present as a wedding gift a platinum plated surgical knife to all new wives, to use at their discretion, because their husbands’ bodies now belong to them.

The moral of the story: dismissing violence against women is rational and okay. But drawing an analogy with castration of men to make a point is completely unforgiveable, and should be taken as a threat to all men with all energy in the thread about the RAPE OF WOMEN to focus on the FEELINGS OF MEN.

But don’t you see that this is the problem with retributive justice, even when it is only rhetorical. In order to talk about castration as a way of trying to bring home to men certain points about rape, you have to come up with a reason–i.e., it would end rape–to justify the castration you are talking about. And if you decide that you’re going to use that justification, of course you are going to turn the conversation to men and how preventive castration would make men feel. And so you get caught in this paradox: on the one hand, you want the castration analogy to make men feel a certain way; you want it to get men at least to sympathize, if not empathize and identify with certain aspects of how women feel about rape, and yet when men respond quite reasonably to a call for universal preventive castration by insisting that it is not an approriate response to rape and by talking about how talking about rape in this way makes them feel, you get upset that the focus is on men’s feelings and not the rape of women. (I also should say that I recognize that women also took positions critical of Q Grrl’s analogy, but I am interested here in talking about men.)

If you’re a man in this discussion, there is no way to win unless you change the terms of the conversation. So here’s the thing; I would like to propose to you that using castration as an analogy doesn’t work not simply because it makes most men too uncomfortable to think it through to the logical conclusion you want them to arrive at, but also because it doesn’t work, even on the most basic level, as a useful analogy. Here’s why:

As I said above, to introduct preventive castration into the conversation, you need to justify it. Rape, on the other hand, does not need a reason; it is system, endemic; it inheres in even the seemingly most innocent aspects of our culture and even those that, on the surface, seem to be in opposition to rape. (See the discussion on men walking women to their cars that Amp referred to in his most recent link farm. If you really want to find a way to get men, especially young men, to think about what it means for a woman to walk around with the fear of rape and what it means that rape is the violent physical occupation of one person’s body by another, then you need to find an aspect of men’s lives in which analogous “meanings” are as systemic and endemic in their lives, and the only one that I can think of is the degree to which men, especially young men, are defined as cannon fodder. It is not precisely the same thing, if only because it is not sexualized in the way that rape is, but this is supposed to be an analogy, not an equation.

Draft registration was reinstituted the year I turned 18, and I can still remember the horror that came over me when I realized what registering meant: not only that I might be taken at any time the government decided it was necessary and trained to kill, to think of killing as my job, but that, in the event I became a soldier, it would be, by definition, someone else’s job somewhere to kill me–and this would be true even if there were not actual war to fight. It made me look at my body very differently; it made me look at what it meant for me to walk around my neighborhood very differently. And it was one of the things, when I started to think seriously about feminism and rape and male privilege and so on, that made it possible for me to think myself analogously into women’s shoes, so to speak.

Now, please, I am not suggesting that these are precise parallels; I am merely trying to point out that there is a systemic way of seeing men’s bodies as objects of violence, and I am suggesting that getting men really to understand what that means might be one way of getting men to understand a little bit about the violence of rape. James Gilligan wrote a very good book called Violence that does a really interesting job of comparing, from a feminist perspectice, the ways in which patriarchy objectifies women sexually and men in terms of violence.

After a post on the exceptionally smart collaborative, feminist profeminist site, Alas, A Blog on the ineluctably anti-feminist nutjob, Phyllis Schafly, I went off again on that topic with which I cannot help but be engaged: what it means to

To advocate curtailed movement/freedom for women because men supposedly can’t control their urges is an odd way of attempting to allieviate rape in our society. Imagine a young woman being raped and dealing with the aftermath. She may ask why it was okay for someone to force her to have sex and put her at risk of pregnancy and STD, traumatize her, and completely destroy her trust in men. She may ask why what happened to her wasn’t considered ‘violent’ if her partner raped her, if she wasn’t beaten, or if she was ‘just’ drugged and raped. She is told that she is already a bad person (a slut, hysterical, and/or careless with her personal safety) and that she must undergo further degradation in the courts and in the court of public opinion as a way to protect people from evil women who are sluts and who probably lie about rape. Besides, if mothers all raised their sons not to rape, there would be no problem, since we all know that women have done abseloutely nothing to stop rape. I can argue that her anger at men as a result of her brutal treatment is far more dangerous. This was my result from the thought experiment.

But actually, if you had read Qgrrl’s comment in context, you’d see that it was in reaction to the vile idea that some rape just isn’t violent. But why do that when we can twist what she said around out of context? I notice that you and some of the other folks who are going off on how barbaric Qrrl is, how terrible women are for not doing enough to stop rape (utter fucking bullshit btw–and yeah, naturnal, I’m talking to you here. Talk about being patronizing. Get a fucking clue already.).

Oddly enough, when she took the “some rapes aren’t violent” post and drew a parallel with castration (chemical vs. blade vs. rusty knife), all hell broke loose. Yet there was nary a peep before from these self-same righteous posters when rape itself was dismissed as a mere trifling thing if the woman in question wasn’t beaten to a pulp. The moral of the story: dismissing violence against women is rational and okay. But drawing an analogy with castration of men to make a point is completely unforgiveable, and should be taken as a threat to all men with all energy in the thread about the RAPE OF WOMEN to focus on the FEELINGS OF MEN.

Deja vu and all that. . . .

Of course such women use examples just like these - women who are oppressive, abusive, etc. - in furtherance of their anti-feminist agendas. Witness Rene Denfeld who, in her bizarrely titled book “Kill the Body, The Head Will Fall: A Closer Look at Women, Violence, and Aggression,” used ‘lesbian battering’ anecdotally in an effort to demonstrate that domestic violence has little to do with gender, per se. Never mind that women who batter women (like extreme right wing and overtly fascist women) act largely from internalized oppression (which, I should add, doesn’t begin to excuse such behavior - to say the least). It’s friggin’ infuriating.

Last month I had to go to court in a matter concerning the care of my grandmother, a lifelong, diehard Republican (I’ll be nice here and refrain from attributing her political beliefs to her decades-long battle with schizophrenia, which is now all the worse for her age-related dementia). I sat next to her old friend, also a diehard Republican, and we got along fine - talking about my grandmother’s specific medical needs and such - and then, a domestic violence case came up before the judge. A woman in a wheelchair had to testify in open court - in front of her husband - about his having attempted to kill her. And my grandmother’s friend clucked and tisk-tisked all the way through the hearing, pontificating about what the woman must have done to provoke the man into such behavior. I had to bite my tongue to the point of nearly causing myself to bleed.

Finally, the judge made his decision: a 12 month sentence. Suspended. The man who battered his wheelchair-bound wife walked out of there a free man. With the nice little Republican white lady - no doubt a big fan of Mrs. Schafly - practically cheering him all the way.

BTW: Sorry to make my first comment here such a ridiculously long rant… #1, I just stumbled onto this wonderful, highly erudite and provocative blog - which I immediately added to my blogroll, and #2, it’s such an important subject. If feminists can’t get to the root of what drives anti-feminism in women, then our movement is doomed - along with any number of related progressive causes!

Best regards - V.

No, my distinction is based on ability to solve the problem at hand. To advocate universal castration only because women have suffered for so long is an odd way of attempting to alleviate the problem of rape in our society. Imagine a young boy going in for the surgery mandated by society. He asks why he has to endure anesthesia, the knife, and the pain. He is told either that he is already a bad person (and women must be protected from his future actions) or that he must undergo it due to other men’s sins toward women. He grows up. I can argue that his potential anger at women or society at large is far more dangerous. This was my result from the thought experiment.

Bean -

Women are part of this culture. Society can be understood as a vague, abstract concept. However, I also see it in terms of a collection of men, women, and children. We all have a stake in changing the culture, even if it is one person at a time.

Surely, women can also speak out to men when they hear ideas or see actions that can lead to rape, and men can raise their sons not to rape. Personally, I try to change the things I don’t like in this society by molding young people and speaking out when injustices occur. These activities are not exclusive to gender. My statement was not to solely apply responsibility for children to women but to give one example of something men can do and something women can do.

It is not a matter of one person changing how another adult thinks. I was offering up the possibility that the lack of societal restraints helps keep the rape culture alive. Every person is but one small part of society that can either condone rape or not. Am I responsible for changing other people think? No. However, I am responsible for speaking out against misogynist views or actions. Discourse with people who may hold some of these views may not change them outright, but they may rethink their position if enough people speak up.

I am trying to offer a solution to the rape culture. I don’t feel comfortable throwing up my hands and saying that is it bad but that there is nothing I can do about it. I can affect those around me. Consider me an optimist. I hope it can get better, and I will continue to try to change it.