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Only Men Benefit When Even Feminists Don’t Know What Rape Is
Language is important. I’m not going to do a history of language or do a deep analysis of how language, in the hands of men, has affected and continues to affect women. There are excellent blogs (one in my side bar) devoted to the study of patriarchy and language, and while I teach language and love to learn about meaning, evolution of meaning and word origins, I am in no way an expert nor can I do a better analysis than said experts.
But I want to talk about the word rape and how it is defined. I am not going to provide a deep history of the word or a legal history of the meaning. There are actually some excellent articles out there that do this very thing, which are highly findable through a Google search. I’ll give a brief background, and then plunge into my intended topic, which is current and relevant now, and I’ll tie it in to some unexpected results of my quickie quiz on feminism dilution, which you can still participate in if you wish.
The purpose of language is to communicate. Maybe you’re saying ‘duh’ to yourself, but given that I teach university ESL (speaking, writing, research communication) in China, I’ve noticed that after 10+ years of English study, most of my students can’t communicate to save their lives. (The Chinese government isn’t focused on communication, but obscure-grammar-test-taking.) So, I don’t consider my statement to be all that elementary or obvious. Language exists to allow us to communicate. To communicate problems, needs, wants, states of being, observations, discoveries. You name it.
It’s a tool. And like all tools that exist in our international patriarchy, it is controlled by men. What is the purpose of controlling language? Well, simply, the class that controls language, also controls who gets to express problems, needs, wants, states of being, observations, discoveries, etc. So, as men are in control of language, they are the ones who get to express themselves openly. They are the ones who have legitimate problems, needs, wants, states of being, observations, discoveries, etc. Women? Not so much.
Language forms the bedrock upon which the educational, political, legal, medical, and all other systems are built. So if you control language, you control these systems. And they work for you, the controllers.
The legal system uses male-defined language to protect men from each other and from women and their silly-willy accusations. Women are not protected by the law because the language does not allow them to define their problems/crimes against them.
So we get to rape. The word ‘rape’ has a long history, and men have been fucking around with its definition for centuries. Since the early 13th century, it has been used to mean all sorts of things from speed/hurry, a kind of food, plundering, theft, seduction of men, kidnapping women, and sexually violating women.
In more modern times, most of the various definitions have fallen away, and it has come to vaguely mean ‘sexually violating a woman’. But even that is problematic as it doesn’t address by whom, how, and under what circumstances. And that was the intention. By controlling the meaning of the word, men essentially controlled the crime and its prevalence. If a woman can’t fit the constantly shifting definition of the crime, then no crime has been committed against her. Sweet! For men.
Now there are many other issues and problems with how rape is seen and prosecuted, but I won’t be addressing those here as many, many other worthy people have devoted their expertise to its discussion and analysis. My concern is with language; specifically, defining rape, and by whom and to whom is it done.
At some point in the not too distant past, women started speaking up for male victims of sexual assault (male prisoners, Catholic school boys, DV abuse victims, etc), and the movement took on a life of its own. Once a problem experienced by males has been identified, it takes on immediate importance and seriousness on all levels of society, and almost always, if it is similar to a very widespread problem experienced by females, the latter is brushed under the carpet in order to devote time and resources to men and boys.
This has happened with rape. At some point, it was decided that men and boys could be raped. I suspect, like with backlash to all progress women make in having their oppression acknowledged, this male rape victim business followed women making headway in having rape taken seriously. All of a sudden, we heard: “Men can be raped, tooooo!!!” And everyone got on board. With that movement came the mantra that rape wasn’t a sex-motivated crime but one of violence, which I think is incorrect, despite what experts say. If rape were a crime solely of violence/domination, straight men would be ‘raping’ men right, left and centre. They don’t. And at the same time, straight men would just beat up or kill women like they do men and leave the vaginal penetration out of it. I believe rape is a sexual and violent/dominance/power-motivated crime. And the adamant nature of the ‘it’s not sexual’ argument smacks of a patriarchal system cleverly trying to weasel its way out of naming sex-based oppression and male-domination as real problems, which would then have to be dealt with. Men would be held responsible for once, in other words.
And so, ‘rape’ is no longer a sex-based crime committed by men and boys against women and girls as a deliberate act of terrorism designed to uphold a millennia-long system of male dominance. And when you subscribe to that, you erase the existence of misogyny and hate crimes against women. You give equal importance to the occasional ‘rape’ of one man here and there as you do to the international crisis of the rape of women and girls. They essentially become the same, and thus women no longer have a unique problem.
Now, let’s get to my little quiz. On the whole, the respondents were on board with radical feminist theory. There was a small contingent confused by which factors influenced economic outcome most (15% of respondents didn’t see sex as being the number one factor harming economic success, and instead erroneously chose race or sexual orientation).
But the most surprising outcome was that this mostly feminist group of respondents didn’t have a feminist working definition of rape. It surprised me because they well understood why allowing men to define sex, as we are seeing with the whole trans (MtT) movement, is a problem for women. Specifically, when men can magically become women, and when sex and gender are equated, it erases sex. It erases misogyny and sex-based oppression. Women suddenly become ‘oppressors’ of newly transformed/realized ‘women’, instead of the largest and longest-standing oppressed group in the history of the world. So respondents saw this and understood this issue with men controlling language, and specifically the language of oppression as it related to the trans movement.
But what most respondents didn’t get was how allowing men to define the specific term ‘rape’ to be a crime against men and women where perps could possibly be either men or women, erases the seriousness of a crime of sexual terrorism against women. Rape has lost its unique and important meaning, in other words, and even feminists have bought in. I’m worried about that.
One of the three options to the question was about a male-on-female act (which was the feminist answer). The other two options allowed for male AND female victims with variation in wording of details.
Specifically and sadly, only 26% of respondents correctly defined rape as ‘forced, coerced, or unwanted PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex that is done by males to females.
Now, this quiz is not nuanced enough, as I stated in the original post. As the designer, I’m the first one to admit inadequacy. There is more to explore here. I didn’t look at the sex of perps, specifically, but focused on victims. And you certainly can’t draw big conclusions based on an untested test with one inadequate, related question. So, I honestly don’t know what respondents are thinking. I mean something is going on. Possibly people were thinking that in the case of lesbians, women can rape women. Possibly some people believed that rape could involve the penetration of an anus or a mouth. But what was clear was that most respondents believed that men could be raped. And that is a big problem.
But regardless of what is going on, one thing can be said for sure. We need better, woman-defined language concerning different kinds of sexual assault. I would like to see rape better defined to return to a male-on-female crime (as it was for so long) that is both sex-based and sexual in nature as well as power or violence-motivated. I am not sure why ‘forced sodomy’ isn’t enough to describe the assault of men’s (or women’s) anuses. Prison ‘rape’, speaks to me of male guards and psychologists and doctors (and MtTs) sexually assaulting the vaginas of FEMALE prisoners – not of male prisoners/guards assaulting male prisoners. And I think we need to stop calling it that in order to ensure that assault of women and girls actually means something. We need language to address crime between lesbians. We need language to define the occasional assault of a man by a woman. We need clear language about specific acts. We really don’t have that. There is better definition of acts in porn…
As it is, rape is now a word that can apply to anyone and everyone for all sorts of different acts of sexual violence, which isn’t really sexual, but ‘violent’. Whatever.
[Note: Since this post was published, I created a rape survey, and provided a post-survey discussion.]
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A Young Chinese Woman’s Exposure to the World
As a university instructor in China, I take great delight in mentoring young women who venture outside the traditional ‘women are property’ box. Planting seeds of personal rebellion is my specialty, as is providing validation for the stirrings of feminist thinking that normally get stamped out by controlling parents and concerned friends.
One of my young protégés, a lively English major who took my writing class last semester, had an exciting summer. We had lunch last week and I heard all about it. She had joined up with a volunteer organization that brings young people from different countries together to teach children. I’m not quite clear on what they teach. I thought it was English, but most of the people who came to China to teach were not native speakers of English. Maybe culture? There were young men and women from Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia, Egypt, Tanzania, and the US, in addition to the local Chinese.
But I was less interested in the teaching experience and more curious about my former student’s exposure to people from around the world. On the whole, I think it was a good thing. But there were several alarming elements.
First, it becomes quite clear how sheltered and naive the Chinese are. All of the foreigners, save the Vietnamese and the Indonesian, spent time teaching my young friend English slurs and general swearing. And most of it was woman-hating, of course. She learned how to say cunt, bitch, fuck you, retard, etc. And she also got some odd, inaccurate advice from the non-native English speakers. Apparently, “Screw you!” is a very polite form of “Fuck you!” Huh? I worry about a) ESLers, and b) 19-year-olds, teaching the intricacies of language to the impressionable. So, we had an in-depth discussion of nasty words and who they hurt (usually women, and other oppressed groups), and by the end, I think she was much less enthusiastic about hurling insults at people. But swearing is the number one thing most people want to learn when they are first exposed to a new language. I just give a different perspective on it – I do, after all, swear a lot, and put a lot of thought into why and who gets harmed by it.
Second, the poor thing ‘fell in love with’ the young Egyptian dude in the group. She thought he was awesome. Luckily, he was crushing on the properly diminutive and dainty Vietnamese girl and wasn’t interested in my more outgoing Chinese friend. I got to watch a few videos she took featuring him posturing in his macho way, and I wasn’t quite so taken with him as she was. Personally, I don’t find Egyptian men or Egyptian culture all that progressive. The country is, after all, in full support of female genital mutilation – over 90% of the current female population has lost their clits and/or had their fuck holes sewn up in the name of ‘respecting women’. I personally have had way too much experience with the rapeyness and violence of Muslim men (both strangers and a man I had the misfortune of dating) in a few different countries, and I worry about non-Muslim women who get involved or find themselves trapped with men of that persuasion. Men are scary enough on their own, but when they are religious, there is a whole nuther layer of justification for woman-hatred present.
Third, my young friend got an instructional dose of the ‘female dichotomy according to men’ care of the young Tanzanian man. The viewpoint certainly isn’t limited to Tanzania or to black men – it’s universal. But the dude laid the viewpoint out quite clearly and matter-of-factly. And my friend, being young, female, Chinese and naive, didn’t see anything wrong with it. The viewpoint goes something like this:
There are two kinds of girls: the ones you have fun with and the ones you can take home to your parents and marry.
What my friend didn’t understand, because Chinese girls are not educated about sex, was that ‘the ones you have fun with’ translates into: bad girls, the ones you can fuck, but don’t have to ‘respect’. She didn’t see that men have this thing called privilege where they can place value on women. You fuck the trash and then throw it away when you’re done, but you marry the pure. And both types of women are objects. You are a whore one way or the other – either a public whore (the bad girl/slut – girlfriend material) or a private whore (the pure, wifey-wifey material that you can only rape after marriage).
I made sure to explain all of this.
Do I do young women a favour by telling them how the world really is? How men will always enslave us? I don’t know. As a Chinese woman, she doesn’t have options. She must get married. Her parents definitely don’t want her marrying a foreigner – that is just racist, Chinese culture talking. But marrying a Chinese isn’t going to be any better than marrying a foreigner – they are all men, and marriage is the slavery of women. So is it better to go into female slavery naively than going into it with wide open eyes? I don’t know. I’d like to think that being prepared is better than being bitterly disappointed that the fairy tale that girls are force fed from birth isn’t true.
I was much less naive when I was 20 and a budding feminist to boot, but I do so wish I’d had an older woman in my life to open my eyes to reality. It would have saved me a lot (not all) of the grief I went through in navigating a world of woman-hate.
~~~
Addendum written after leaving China. That young woman never spoke to me again after that lunch. Not an isolated incident, in my experience. Most women don’t want reality. The rape-coloured glasses fit way too well and make life shiny and fun, at least if you don’t pay attention to detail. Some women will tell people like me that we are too ‘negative’. Presenting facts is ‘negative’, logic is negative, and we just can’t have negativity around us, right? I call it realistic, but ya know… Most women are just weak. They know what I say is true, but they also know there is immense punishment involved in holding men responsible for what they do. For example, she (and 99.9% of women in the world) socially punish me and women like me for speaking out through isolation. As well, this woman will get married and be financially better off than me – that is the financial punishment a woman like me experiences. And there is so much more.
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