Rape is Rape
(updated below)
Just saw a discussion on Twitter in which a female user watching a football game objected to a male user’s assessment of his team’s performance:
“getting raped here”
She responded angrily that “rape is RAPE” and the discussion went from comparisons between the number of male and female victims of rape, comparisons between rape and being beaten up, generalizations from both parties and the male user coming off as a tosser thanks to ignorant tweets such as ”Got a feminist on my case about using the word “rape” within a football context… surprise surprise she is very UGLY!”
However, the female user does not seem to realize the really important thing about her own point that “rape is RAPE”, which is not semantics. She proceeds to say:
“I really, really hate it when a guy pulls the ‘what about the male victims’ card on an issue where women make up 90+ percent of the victims.”
This does not make the issue yours.
Women can be raped by men. Women can be raped by women. Men can be raped by men. Men can be raped by women. Children of any gender can be raped by men and women.
All of that is rape.
And concerning male victims, she does not take into account that the emasculation they suffer can make the reporting of said rape even more difficult than it is for women, which leads to a greater possibility of under-representation of male victim numbers. Her kind of attitude, in fact, makes it more difficult for male victims to believe they will be taken seriously. And regardless of how many women are raped in comparison to men, that does not make the male victims any less important, as the tone of her tweet implies.
This kind of mentality is precisely what hurts the very cause she’s fighting for. “Rape is RAPE,” she says, with the intention of not letting the word be trivialized, yet proceeding to trivialize all kinds of rape that are not male on female because they’re not as widespread.
Rape is atrocious and to be taken seriously in any case. Rape IS rape. Except that I mean that in a way that actually matters, not purely semantics, which I think has little importance. Hell, one of her later tweets was “Excuse me while I go shoot myself” in response to a soccer game. People actually do that in response to being raped. Do I think her tweet is trivializing suicide?
I think limiting our ways of self-expression is not going to help fix any issue.
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UPDATE (January 16th, 2012): This post was inspired in great part by an article in the Guardian called “The Rape of Men”, by Will Stork, which details the use of rape as a weapon of war, and the difficulty men have in finding treatment because rape of men is not considered common. When I saw the dismissive tone of the female Twitter user regarding this kind of rape, I had an urge to write about it, but I must clarify:
My point was never to diminish male-on-female rape. My point was not to diminish any kind of rape so the full spectrum of the issue — already difficult to grasp due to how underreported it is — can be studied and understood with broad statistical data.
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(Source: treacherousgreymatter.com)
1 month ago • 0 notes