Also, there are more and more cases where it is proved that an allegation of rape is false. Surely you aren’t saying that these cases are so rare as to be insignificant?

Why do I believe in this tendency? Because even though I’m a critically-thinking, dyed-in-the-wool feminist, I notice an inexplicable propensity in myself to doubt rape accusations. I catch myself parsing the details of rapes for hints of internal inconsistencies, unlikely occurrences, “impossibilities,” outright lies, or “mistakes” committed by the victim. I rarely if ever do this with accounts of murder, kidnapping, hijacking, assault or other crimes in the news. Yet I consistently, unconsciously do it with rape.

I believe it’s important to acknowledge this tendency, in the same way it’s important for white people to acknowledge their internalised racism, and proceed from there to root out our prejudices and address the ways they bear on specific situations.

One more point. Regarding:

I happen to know the account her friends spread to the world was blatantly wrong because I was in the room and witnessed the event.

I just want to say that our culture raises men and women so differently that what azbballfan thought he saw could be quite different from what was happening from the woman’s’ perspective. Our prejudices distort what we see. A black man reaching into his coat pocket for a wallet can be perceived by a nervous policeman to be reaching for a gun, with devastating consequences. Likewise, as a previous commenter said, a woman freezing with panic can be perceived by her assailants to be consenting.

On the other hand, the law does require definitions and standards. It gets trickier in assault, murder, rape, etc. where people interact with each other as opposed to property–you have to talk about intent, aggravation, etc. I’d hate to see a rape standard in which a woman (or man) had to prove some sufficient level of traumatization in order for it to count as a rape.

Quickly, since I am running off to teach: Of course not, but the MacKinnon quote I posted…and/or the sentiment behind it…is, I think, often, and often wilfully, mistaken for “all heterosexual intercourse is rape,” etc. The reason I posted it was that I think MacKinnon’s focus on a woman’s sense of her own reality–”Did I feel violated?”–gets at part of what’s behind the insistence that women frequently lie about being raped: not simply the inability or unwillingness to trust women’s perceptions of their own experience, but the refusal to consider that, for women, their experience is (or should be) central to their perceptions…and so anything a woman has to say about how she feels about any particular act of intercourse in which she has engaged is automatically suspect, even if she says she enjoyed it thoroughly. (There is a much longer discussion behind this last statement of mine, but I don’t have the time to go into it here.)

Politically I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. I’m not talking about sending all you men to jail for that. I’m talking about attempting to change the nature of relations between women and men by having women ask ourselves, “Did I feel violated?”

Insisting that all hetero men are rapists

*Yawn*.

Azbballfan, cite either one person on this blog, or one feminist of note anywhere who has ever said anything which, taken in context implies that all hetero men are rapists or that all hetero sex is rape.

Marilyn French’s “All men are rapists” doesn’t count, because those were the words of a fictional character in a novel.

Dworkin/Mackinnon/whoever-it-is-today’s “All sex is rape” doesn’t count, because they have denied saying it, and there is no evidence that they ever did.

Mackinnon’s “All heterosexual intercourse is rape” doesn’t count because this is a misattribution. The phrase appears in the book “Professing Feminism…” by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, who are critics of Mackinnon. They claim that this is her view, but they don’t claim to be quoting her.

Also, I think all incoming college freshman and high school seniors should be forced to take a rape education class. Many of my friends don’t think getting a girl drunk to where she can’t say no or yes and then having sex with her is rape. Or that if a girl is passed out and they have sex with her it is rape. Somewhere along the line they weren’t taught what constitutes rape past holding someone down. Education would eliminate some of the rapes IMO but there still is a cultural problem. And changing the mindset of every potential rapist seems to be the only solution.

There’s a huge amount of cognitive dissonance about sexual violence, and the result is injustice as victims are either intimidated into silence, or not believed, and rapists walk free.

Your experience (however you label it) shows how sexual assault has a ripple effect. Your girlfriend learned how to be sexual from rapists and she used those rape skills on you.

The rape culture = paying it forward in a very harmful way.

Let me make that last point again in a slightly different way: Everything I write in response to you…anything anyone writes in response to you on this blog…is in response to your words; it is not, nor can it be, a personal judgment; and your words give the impression (at least to me) that you are more interested in splitting legal and argumentative hairs than you are in really understanding the nature of rape from either the rapist’s or his victim’s point of view, and the bottom-line result of that is, no matter how good your intentions may be, that you end up serving the interests of the rapist and the rape culture that produced him, along with the rest of us men who benefit from rape culture whether we want to or not, more than the interests of women who are raped and/or who have to live in fear of rape.

I was, for example, initially sympathetic to your use of the story…and I am assuming that your understanding of the story is accurate because I don’t yet have any reason to assume otherwise…about the woman who accused a man she’d had sex with of rape after the fact because of pressure from her friends. No matter how real date rape might be, the rhetoric of date rape is a rhetoric and, as such, can take on a life of its own and be used in all sorts of ways that divorce it from the reality of rape. I have some personal experience with this, and though it is a very different experience from your friend’s.

I stopped being sympathetic to your use of the story when it became clear that you were using it not to understand the underlying social, cultural and political dynamics of rape and rape culture (because I don’t think anyone would disagree that, if the woman really did accuse the man of rape after the fact for the precise reasons you give, he was innocent and that she did something wrong), but rather to focus on the unfair difficulties men face when confronted with date-rape rhetoric. That focus, and whether you like it or no your words place the focus there, puts you on the side if not of individual rapists, then certainly on the side of rape culture. (And I should add that I believe you when you say you have great concern for individual women who have been raped, but that concern does not, in and of itself, constitute real opposition to a rape culture.)

Richard, your post completely ignores the context and intent of mine. Your insistence of a universal polarized view of the world is mind numbing. The only question I have is, in this world, who is the “Decider?” Let me know so I can sleep at night.

What context can justify your view?

In a case of rape there are two sides, the victim(s) and the perpetrator(s). That’s pretty black and white. In a court case there might be a third side - the accused, who might, or might not, be the perpetrator(s), but when we are talking the actual rape, there is only two sides.

If you start defending the one side, the perpetrator’s, then you are by definition against the other side. If your default stance is to believe the perpetrator, then your default stance is to dis-believe the victim. If your default stance is to find excuses for the perpetrator, then your default stance is to find reasons for the rape to have happened.

Note, I am not talking about defeding people who are accused of rape, but of people who have commited rape.
Excuses like “she shouldn’t have been together with strange men”, “she shouldn’t be so drunk”, “she shouldn’t be walking alone at night”, “she had sex with someone else that night” are defenses of the perpetrator of the rape. The man who actually did the sexual assault. The man who choose to do what he did.
No matter what the woman did, there is no excuse for that.
She could walk drunk and naked down the street in a dangerous neighbourhood, with several strangers, at night, and it still wouldn’t make one bit of difference - it’s rape, and someone committed it.

If you try to defend the rape in any way, you are a rapist apologist.

If your default stance is to believe that there is more to the story, or that the woman is making up a story, you are a rapist apologist.

If you opinion is that a rape victim is in any way to blame for being raped, you are a rapist apologist.

I can find no excuse for rape, and never will be able to find any excuse for rape.

I understand the need to rush to the aid of a victim and give them your complete and unfettered support.

I don’t think you do understand this at all since you seem to equate support of victims with the demonization of men.

Abyss2hope - the link to the guest blogger intro isn’t working.

I’ve fixed the broken link.

Richard, your post completely ignores the context and intent of mine. Your insistence of a universal polarized view of the world is mind numbing. The only question I have is, in this world, who is the “Decider?” Let me know so I can sleep at night.

Abyss,

You misinterpreted the phrase you pulled out of my post and used it out of context. The intentially vague language was used right after giving two very different examples of victims in rape cases. One where a sexual assault occured and another where a very personal assualt occured in a false claim of rape.

I understand the need to rush to the aid of a victim and give them your complete and unfettered support. However there is evidence here that there are people who feel the same urge to rush to judgment of my own text without considering the context of how they are written. I wonder if similar treatment is given to those who are accused.

Abyss2hope - the link to the guest blogger intro isn’t working.

B - good points to which I will add that men aren’t the only one’s who nag for sex. My ex nagged all the time, but I won’t so far as to call her a rapist (her lawyer, maybe).

many people, male and female, avoid abusive sexual habits and thought patterns without giving it a second thought and without a clue that others aren’t doing the same.

Sometimes, women avoid those situations through sheer dumb luck as well. But nobody should have to rely on luck to be safe. :/