In which rape culture concept is a fabrication. It is false and dangerous, terribly damaging to males, and it selfishly diverts time and energy away from real crises.

In feminist theory, rape culture is a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality. The sociology of rape culture is studied academically by feminists. There is disagreement over what defines a rape culture and as to whether any given societies meet the criteria to be considered a rape culture.

“Rape culture” came up on Twitter again, and I said what I usually do, which is more or less something along the lines of “lol no rape culture is a myth.”

The tweets below happened, and I wanted to respond in long form, hence this very long post:

Well, for one: “guys think it’s okay” to trick girls into getting drunk enough to rape? Which guys? Since when? Where’s your evidence for this? Walk down the street, ask a hundred men, and they’ll say fuck no because their moms, sisters, wives, and daughters are women, and they’d beat the shit out of anybody who got any of those women drunk and assaulted them. The percentage who say otherwise are trolling, lying through their lips for the shock value and to prove their bravery to their young college comrades; the fewer guys who actually do otherwise are bastards and we, as a society, put them in jail.

And two: why don’t campus rapists get charged more?! Are you serious?! Unlike the campus rape crisis, which is fabricated, rape accusations are an epidemic these days, and our culture is so anti-rape that this new trend is ruining young men’s lives. Once you’ve been accused of rape, you’re a rapist for the rest of your life even if you’re exonerated. Enjoy your diminished (or absent) prospects for mates and jobs, now that some college girl ruined your reputation by accusing you of being a violent and deviant criminal!

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Women who have experienced actual assault and rape are victims. Women abducted by ISIL and the Taliban are victims. Women and girls (and boys and men) who are trafficked are victims.

Privileged American university women are not victims. Their lives are not statistically dangerous; their experiences with sex and sexuality and the opposite sex are the result of their own decisions and actions rather than those of outside agency; they are the single safest, richest, healthiest, longest-lived, and most educated class of human beings ever.

Rape culture is a fabrication. It is dangerous and misleading because equating mild social discomfort (“a man on the street complimented my looks and I felt pressure”) with actual suffering (“ESCAPEES FROM ISIS RECALL RAPE, SLAVERY“) is absurd. The two conditions are not similar and cannot be equated.

The very idea so muddies and confuses the conversation that real topics of human rights abuses can’t be discussed without also including the irrelevant and petty feelings of a highly privileged class, namely Western university girls and their feminist mentors.

~+~+~
Most feminist statistics are wrong. Wrong as in incorrect and untrue.

They say 1 in 5 women are assaulted; the CDC says it’s 1 in 50. They say women earn less than men for the same work; there is literally zero evidence of this (if it were true, businesses would replace male workers with female workers). Their stats on domestic violence, female land and business ownership, and slavery: all grossly wrong.

Any entity that is routinely wrong in its numbers is highly suspect in its motives.

~+~+~
I do not lack compassion for victims of rape and assault. I’m a “survivor” of sexual abuse myself (even though my life was never in danger, and I think the use of the word “survivor” in non-life threatening conditions is ridiculous hyperbole and inappropriately used).

If you’ve been raped or assaulted, my sister (or brother), I’m sorry. Very sorry.

But if you’re a member of a privileged class merely incapable of taking responsibility for your own actions, well, I have little sympathy for your problems.

~+~+~
YES, as a species we still have slavery and sex-trafficking. YES, rape and violent assault exist, and YES they’re terrible and it is our bounden duty to address these issues to the best of our capacity. But the fact that rape jokes exist doesn’t indicate we live in a “rape culture.” There are women driver jokes too, but I still have a license.

Listen, if you’re a man who believes America is a “rape culture,” then ipso facto you consider yourself a potential rapist. All men who support the misandrist idea that all men are literally just one situation away from committing rape are disturbing to me. Grow a pair, for fuck sake. (That’s what women really want, no matter what they — we — say. Don’t coddle us when we’re being ignorant; require us to be our best. Just as you require yourself to rise above your feelings and not commit rape.)

Oh, and listen, if you think you’re exempt, if your feminist sisters go on and on about repeatedly debunked “1 in 5” assault statistics [it’s 1 in 50, which is still too many, but certainly not 1 in 5] in front of you and you’re male, even if you’re gay, she’s calling YOU a rapist, to your very face, because that’s what “rape culture” means: that you’re a victim of your culture and unable to make your own decisions and will eventually rape somebody because that’s what men do.

It’s just that in your case, if you’re gay, you won’t be raping her, so she’s fine with it. It’s fine to rape men. We know this because feminism rarely mentions our brothers’ suffering, unless it’s to draw attention to their own agenda.

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Why does it hurt?

In most cases, ladies, you victimize you. And you need to grow up and acknowledge the fact that with freedom comes responsibility.

You have the freedom to vote, drive, work; you have the freedom to go anywhere you want, dressed how you want; you have the freedom to do and say what you want.

You have the freedom to get drunk and go to bed with a guy you don’t want to have slept with. If you went willingly and didn’t say no, it wasn’t rape, it was regrettable alcohol-induced bad judgement. (If you did say no, then he’s a bastard, and I’m sorry. But you probably didn’t.)

If you led him on so far that you were afraid he’d get mad if you backed out now, perhaps you should have considered that before you began. Actions have consequences. You offered, he accepted, and now you feel rightly nervous about reneging. You’d feel the same way in any other encounter, so why do you get a pass for being a contract-ignoring jerk simply because there’s a sexual component involved?

It is your responsibility when, after sexting, a male thinks he’s been given a green light and expects to engage in sexual activity. If you don’t intend to fulfill your part of the contract, it is your responsibility to clearly cause him to understand that, no, even though you sent him a photo of your vag, you’re not sexually available and you were, in fact, just using his responses to boost your own ego.

If this is hard to understand, imagine he came over to your place after sending you a pic of your favorite taco truck, and ate his meal in front of you without bringing you any. You’d be all, like, “Why the fuck did you send me a pic if you weren’t gonna give me some?” Same thing, in terms of expectations. (You get a pass if you’re a child, because you’re still learning human nature and shouldn’t be unsupervised in the first place. But if you’re in college, you know better.)

~+~+~
Now, before you freak out, I am not saying men can’t control themselves; you’re the ones saying that. I know perfectly well that men can control themselves and will stop immediately upon hearing any earnest request to do so.

What I am saying is that it’s a dick move to lead a guy on and on and on, and then, at the penultimate moment, refuse to provide what you were offering. And you know that, too, which is why you worry about making him mad: you know you put yourself where you put yourself, and you also know that that having bad sex isn’t the same as being axe murdered.

Having sex you weren’t necessarily that interested in is not the same as being raped. Go ask stable couples; they’ll tell you they occasionally put out when they don’t care themselves because they know their partner wants a little nookie.

~+~+~
When an unknown male says “hey, beautiful” to you on the street, which is a public space, you are not being harassed: you’re being annoyed. There’s a difference. You cannot reasonably expect privacy in a public space, and society does not owe you annoyance-free public experiences.

If you feel pressure when males speak with their mouths or look with their eyes, that’s really more your problem than theirs, because it indicates you’re incompletely socialized and incapable of telling the difference between normal social interaction and violent assault, and that you believe people with male sex organs do not deserve the same freedoms you yourself enjoy. (If you have the right to say, in a public space, that all men are idiots, well, they certainly have the right to greet you if they feel like it. Quid pro quo.)

If being merely spoken to is upsetting you, well, having to do the dishes is upsetting to me, but I muddle through somehow. The world has never once promised to make us all perfectly comfortable at all times, and your expectations are, when viewed through an equitable lens, selfish, entitled, and childish. Particularly when compared to populations of women with real problems. Oh, you “feel pressure” when men look at you? Imagine how you’d feel if you had real problems!

~+~+
As for revenge porn being an indicator of rape culture, well, there’s clearly a difference between being raped and having an image of yourself posted online. I’d go so far as to say that if you hadn’t sent him the pics in the first place, he wouldn’t have been able to post them after you broke up.

Consider this: if you’re too valuable to post online at any point in the arc of a relationship, then you’re too valuable to allow there to be pornographic images of yourself in the first place. If your skin is important enough to protect, then protect it.

Just my opinion. But you know why those pictures existed: you meant to titillate, to be the object of admiration and attention, to induce desire. It worked. Then there were consequences for you to bear, because you’re a modern female imbued with equality. You don’t get to operate under a separate set of rules when it suits you.

~+~+~
The quote titling this post is from a commentator in ‘Rape culture: menace or myth?,’ a video I found on YouTube. And I think it’s a really important point: men don’t commit rape because culture says it’s okay. They do it because they’re bastards. They know right from wrong. And the vast majority of them do not commit rapes.

To say otherwise is not only non-factual, it’s sexist as fuck.

~+~+~
It’s hard to talk about certain things without language that feels archaic at best or patriarchal at worst (like reading Christian blogs about divorce), but it begins to occur to me what this whole rape culture hysteria really is: feminism has so denied and reviled the male principle that it’s lonely. This is its method of replacing that subjective feeling of protection: it turns itself into a victim and goes to battle for itself. That the battle is false isn’t relevant to broken hearts.

Since safety, protection, even submission are no longer available in the personal lives of third wave feminists (because it’s really hard to find a man willing to make all the sacrifices required to protect you when you believe in your heart that he’s an idiot and a rapist-waiting-to-happen), maybe the root of this entire debacle is feminists playing the masculine role for themselves so they can feel valued, delicate, feminine, loved?

Eh. I don’t know. I know it’s sloppy, but it’s a theory. This rape culture thing is bizarre and irrational and must be springing from somewhere.

Bizarre and irrational behavior — from either sex — usually comes from hurt.

~+~+~
When I was much younger and more feminist, I was super fucking angry at men for all the heartbreak I’d suffered at their hands. I thought men were generally brutish and stupid.

But it was at my own hands, I realize now. My parents were progressive, told me I could be an astronaut if I wanted and put me on the pill at 16. They focused on my abilities rather than my looks (and rarely told me I was pretty, which led to my feeling ugly most of my life, because we’re all crazy in our own way). They raised me in the then-modern way, which means that as soon as I could manage, I went out and did what everyone else was doing: fucking around without commitment, without (social) consequence, and without guidance.

So, while I understand the impulse to blame men for my pains, it was my own fault. I went where I went, I did what I did. I was a free and autonomous person. You can hardly blame males for accepting sex freely offered without feeling immediately compelled to offer a proposal of marriage.

~+~+~
My grandmother tells me that when my grandfather was courting her in the 1940’s, he tried to get some, but she refused because she was what was then called a good girl.

Decades later, after marriage and five children, he told her that if she’d given in to his own demands, he wouldn’t have married her.

I don’t think the take-away here is that sex is evil. I think the take-away is that self-discipline is a desirable, respected trait in a partner. We have sayings like, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free” for a reason.

~+~+~
Humans are diverse and don’t care about norms or rules. We love breaking laws of nature, and some of us are even trying to free ourselves from the law of gravity. We’re clever little primates and we love to tinker with the status quo.

So, for every statement one can make about people, there will be a number of outliers. You can say, “Women aren’t strong enough to be firefighters,” and, in the main, the statement is true, but then there are some women firefighters who didn’t get the memo and get dropped into fire zones like the motherfucking heroic and badass monkeys they are.

You can say, “Men aren’t really interested in decorating,” and it’s true, for the most part, in most households. But then on the spectrum of maleness there are those who don’t care at all to those who get upset if you buy curtains without consulting them to those famous male decorators known globally for centuries for their work on palaces and malls and public monuments.

So because there are always exceptions and language has become so fucking absurdly PC of late, it’s quite difficult to talk about shit everybody knows, like the balance that quite plainly exists between a man and a woman, or, rather, in the space between expressed maleness and expressed femaleness, or, in shorthand, the play of Shiva-Shakti.

That is to say that there are, generally but not constantly, qualities we call “male” because they’re most frequently expressed by persons of the male sex, just as there are, generally but not constantly, qualities we call “female” because they’re most frequently expressed by persons of the female sex.

Yes, yes, we also know that those qualities transcend sex; men can mother, women can father, the soul is not gendered. But the point is that it’s there and it affects the majority, and right now it’s fucked up. Women are shrewish, disgusted, and hurt. Men are brutish, disgusted, and hurt. Nobody wins.

And so in spite of all this delicate language intended not to offend anyone’s feelings, here’s what I’m trying to say: there are things that are mostly true about humans, and one of those things is that in a typical or common male-female relationship, the female gets to feel safe, protected, cherished, and respected. And feeling that way is natural and feels good and is something it’s normal to seek. And not feeling that way leaves a gap very, very hard to fill, and the hope of filling that gap is essentially zero when you:

– consider yourself a valuable commodity by virtue of your sex rather than your accomplishments,
– think that masculine interests and pursuits are brutish, ignorant, and/or stupid, and
– express broad contempt for the male sex in social settings.

If you can diss him, sister, he has the right to diss you, too. This is why you aren’t married.

A man willing to make sacrifices for the safety and happiness of a woman is only willing to do so if he gets his own needs met in return. That’s just human nature, because in any other configuration it’s a dependent and sick pairing. And being thought of as an ignorant brute by his partner is not one of those needs. He’ll stay single until he finds a woman who respects what he brings to the table…

…but he will fuck her, if she lets him. He won’t respect her, but he’ll bang her. Because men are more capable than women of having sex without any emotional aspect. Pretending that this isn’t true is to deny reality.

Knowing that men can, under certain parameters, fuck without attachment of any sort, and that women don’t, is the only thing that will get you off the treadmill. Men and women are different. It’s not a bad thing.

He’s not hurting you: you’re hurting you. Until you learn that men and women are different, measurably and demonstrably different, until you stop trying to mimic male behavior, you’ll keep cutting yourself on the sharp edge of meaningless sex and its attendant disappointment and feelings of triumph (“I’m so hot, he couldn’t wait to get some of this”) followed quickly by abandonment (“What the fuck? Why didn’t he call?”) and self-doubt (“Shit, am I a dog?”) and anger (“How can he fuck people he couldn’t care less about? What the fuck is WRONG with him?”)

~+~+~
Feminism is pissed that nobody is cherishing women the way women intrinsically feel and know that women should be cherished. That’s why it dwells endlessly on infantile shit like “feelings” of “pressure” whenever men do inane things like, you know, speak or look.

On the one hand, we have billions of women willingly and deliberately sending hyper-sexual texts and pictures of themselves to males. Much if not most of the so-called objectification of females is done by females themselves, because being a hot chick brings rewards socially, emotionally, and often financially. And those rewards come from other females as much as from males.

Strippers, sex workers, actresses, singers: these women are just fine with the system because it works for them. Nobody’s coercing Miley into running her Instagram account; the girl gamers on YouTube with cams on their cleavages aren’t being forced to broadcast; articles about “the nine hottest girls on Vine” just show you that women are deliberately objectifying themselves because feeling like a valuable, admirable commodity is a feeling they enjoy.

~+~+~
Men don’t, as a rule, feel entitled to access to women’s bodies. They very much want consent, because to know that a woman truly wants you to take your joy from her is wonderful.

Men are socially more aggressive than women (and I’d bet that’s nature far more than nurture, but we await the science), and often feel pressure to perform, to pursue, to exhibit appreciation for the female in order to demonstrate power and ability to be a good partner and provider.

Men can feel nervous and awkward too. Men are human, believe it or not, and, while the sexes do have fundamental differences, we really are more alike than not in matters of the mind and heart.

Sometimes men say “hey, beautiful” because the sun is shining and they see you and they think you’re beautiful. They say “hey, beautiful” with absolutely no interest in your pussy. They say “hey, beautiful” because it’s human to sometimes just verbalize about random passing beauty.

You’re not all that, girl. You’re really not. The majority of men can interface with you as a human being and not give a shit about your genitals.

~+~+~
Oh, and some random caveats. Like, if a woman doesn’t feel that she was raped, she wasn’t raped. You don’t get to tell her she was assaulted just to shore up your own weird narrative.

And yes, some women do desire rough sex. Usually, but not always, in context and with a trusted partner. But this is why you see this so-called “rape narrative” in pop culture: it’s the role of artists to depict our collective unconscious. That our collective unconscious contains rapey fantasies is undeniable when you realize what middle aged women like to read. (If images of rape in pop culture equal rape culture, then the biggest perps in America are the woman who wrote and the women who bought that book, eh?)

I know it’s common to blame “the media” for our low self-esteem, but it’s far too complicated for that. Yes, there are beautiful women in the media. You’re beautiful too. Maybe not as technically beautiful, but in the end, it doesn’t fucking matter. Maturity is understanding these things: some women are better at female power than you, not all men want to fuck you, not all men are rapists, you’re a member of an incredibly privileged class, you are safer than most of your sisters throughout most of human history, your feelings don’t matter as much as your actions, and it’s better to strive to improve yourself than it is to wallow in self pity.

~+~+~
And if you’ve been a feminist all your life and found yourself a nice feminist man to settle down with and still don’t feel quite fulfilled, it may be that having a partner who champions your identity as a victim isn’t all that empowering.

It may be that being endlessly angry about stupid things you can’t control (like people’s legal behaviors in public spaces) while being systematically and politically viewed by your closest ally — at your own insistence — as fundamentally helpless and victimized isn’t psychologically healthy or satisfying.

A good partner tells you to get your shit together and move on after you’ve suffered a setback. A good partner tells you you’re strong and capable rather than intrinsically weak and vulnerable. A good partner lets you think your thoughts, of course, but doesn’t truly believe you’re plagued with troubles when in fact you’re a Western, educated, privileged entity who is, statistically, incredibly safe.

A good partner encourages you to develop qualities like fortitude, self-control, dispassion, and clarity of mind. A good partner does not coddle you (for too long) when you’re full of self-pity. And no one can be a good partner if you revile them at a basic level and require them to pity you even though you’re the more privileged party.

~+~+~
If you don’t “believe” that Western women are an incredibly privileged class, you need to get googling. Western females live longer, are healthier, are more educated, and have more choice than anyone ever has in the recorded history of our species.

~+~+~
Cancer exists. Do we live in a “cancer culture”?

Murder exists. We even see it glorified in media. Do we live in a murder culture?

That rape exists does not mean rape culture exists.

Being ignorant of and upset by male qualities is not an academic pursuit, it’s stupidity.

—
Of course, there are numerous incidents of soldiers, for example, committing rape deliberately, which indicates that under certain circumstances many if not most men are capable of rape. Which means that sex and violence can, for some men, easily be combined. But the psychology of soldiers is not the same as the psychology of civilians, and there’s been no war on this soil since before you were born so you’re not a victim of war.