Ever since reading about the Steubenville rape case last year which saw a group of Ohio football players tweet photos of themselves raping a passed-out teenage girls, I've watched the case play out in the media with a kind of disgusted fascination. I feel like I was joined in the past week as the guilty verdict in the case brought to the surface a lot of truly frightening assumptions about rape and sexual violence that are all-too-common in American culture.
From cable news' coverage of the verdict that focused more on sympathizing with how the sentences would ruin the lives of the rapists than the horrificness of their crime to the waves of Facebook and Twitter responses that basically amounted to justifying rape and blaming the victim, it's been shocking and just soul-crushingly dispiriting seeing how many people are willing to apologize for this crime. In response, there's been a torrent of blogs, memes and articles from feminists responding to these attitudes with anger, vitriol and justified horror. Although I'm always comforted seeing people willing to confront discrimination and , I've recently started thinking that all those critiques of the reactions to Steubenville might be missing something.
It's not that I don't find the responses being criticized to be misguided, ignorant and often truly disgusting because, believe me I do. My thought here is that maybe there's something to be said for trying to distance oneself from a surface-level response to what's being said by reporters or internet commentors and trying to view the conversation of a broader level.
You see, the demented optimist inside me thinks that there might be a silver lining in the all this. It's hard to argue that "rape culture" isn't still prevalent in America but I would argue that the reaction that perhaps the cable news reporters' sympathy with the rapists in Steubenville was actually, and bear with me on this, ultimately helpful. Culture isn't something that one can change by fiat and it's often true that well-intentioned people will find it hard to actually live by all their intellectual beliefs IRL. Therefore, I would argue that things such as the media's sympathy with the assaulter or the waves of online vitriol about how the victim "asked for it," actually reveal the existence of a slow, painful transitions about how America thinks about rape.
As an example of how public opinion can be subtly swayed, see Obama's masterful (and often under-appreciated) handling of gay rights. As the editor of the Harvard Law Review and U of C prof, I find it pretty hard to believe that, in his heart of hearts Barack wasn't on-board with gay marriage many for decades. In fact, we have him on-record as favoring them way back in 1996. But rather than hold fast on moral absolutes, Obama played the long game. As a politician on the south side of Chicago, he changed his official stance to a more tenable position of compromise, recognizing that most black Chicagoans in his community (and constituency) weren't ready for a full-on embrace of gay rights and certainly wouldn't be persuaded by someone talking down to them about it. Instead, he favored initially civil unions, then lettings states define marriage before finally copping to support of full equality last spring. In the same way he didn't force the end of DADT on the military, despite loud calls from the left to do so, but instead letting his SecDef take the lead. This let the issue be framed not as a liberal social crusade but rather as military
I would argue that Obama's hands-off approach and gradual "evolution," was essential for getting people on-board. People don't change their minds easily, especially on beliefs about things like sex and gender that are so deeply-held. Taking more middle-of-the road stances with statements like "well I'm not sold on changing the definition of "marriage" but it's wrong to deny loving partners their rights" let's people ease into a totally new way of thinking. The important thing is that they open themselves to a new idea. Once people accepted the broader concept that gay people are like everyone else and deserve some rights, then it just became a matter of before they were able to accept things like admitting that gay people can also be soldiers or have spouses. In the case of gay marriage, the proof of this approach's success is in the pudding with the public reversing its attitude on the subject just within the last decade.
So how does this relate to things like Steubenville where we're talking about people seemingly celebrating not just a crime but a gleefully and repentantly disseminated one? It seems to me that a lot of the responses to this rape here stem from the fact that many people still view sex as something that men will seek uncontrollably and that women must constantly guard against. Often this is done, as with the gay marriage debate, with appeals to "nature" or "the way things are" that don't stand up to heavy logical scrutiny but nevertheless might "feel" right*. Feminists would (rightly) argue that nothing, not how one dresses, not how drunk one is, not what party they're at ever justifies sexual violence against them. The gap between these positions is probably not as unbridgeable as it seems but it will not be a one-stop journey.
I'm not saying that cables talking heads or those misogynist tweeters your're seeing are shrewdly plotting to destroy rape culture from the inside, I do think their reactions show that change is happening. When Poppy Harlow, for example, talked about how the lives of football players have been ruined, it humanized the crime. It showed that rapists weren't inherently evil monsters, they were fairly average high school athletes who, once immersed in a culture full of toxic ideas about masculinity and sex, were willing to not just commit but broadcast horrible, horrible acts. I can only hope that Harlow's right in that this crime will forever alter their lives, that their actions will have negative consequences that they'll never fully escape. Although it wasn't her intention, Harlow ended up broadcasting a powerful message - "look, even these regular kids who had everything going ended up becoming rapists and it ruined their lives, it can happen to anyone."
I would also argue that many of the the horrible online reactions to the brought to us by sites like PublicShaming are merely people trying to process this shift in attitudes towards rape. Part of the reason that rape culture is so pernicious is that it ensnares both men and women in the trap of defending an unfair sexual morality that allows people to externalize unacceptable sexual behavior onto Others rather than confront their own attitudes and actions. When faced with evidence that this view is changing, people got angry. Men saw that they would be held accountable for their own behavior, women saw that rape didn't just happen between criminals and "sluts" and was really a threat to everyone. Those are hard revelations, they're scary and they require a whole new way of thinking. I'm not saying that hateful, sexist speech is ever a good thing or justified, but in this case some should probably be expected.
I've been reading a collection of essays by Polish democracy activist and journalist Adam Michnik recently. Despite being jailed multiple times by the Communists, most of the essays in this collection see him arguing against trials or public shaming of people for their actions during the Communist era. His position is that people who live a society with horrible problems are faced with impossible choices. Those who oppose it from the outside must in some ways cut themselves off from that society while those who try to maintain their lives within it must make horrible compromises to survive. Although the analogy here is far from perfect, his logic appealed to me.
We can believe that there are hundreds of millions of people in are country who are hopelessly misogynist rape apologists, that they fundamental support sexual violence and that they want rape to be normalized and that the media supports them. There's a lot of seemingly good evidence to support this. But I'd argue that's what's more likely is this - there are a lot of people who identify with a culture that normalizes sexual violence in a way that they ultimately know is wrong. That they are being asked to changed and often times they are and that this pisses them off. Thanks to social media we now give people a platform to post thoughts that they would have earlier kept personal or shared only amongst close friends. Those thoughts are horrible, their based in fear and anger and they're frightening but in most cases they're probably not an accurate representation of who those people are.
So I'm trying my best to see Steubenville and the reactions to it as an incremental victory for feminism. I hope that it will force people to recognize that rape is a major problem in this country that is generally not committed by evil men but by normal guys doing evil things. I hope that it will move us closer to a place where we make sexual assault as horribly damaging an action for the perpetrator as the victim. I hope that it will force people to see rape victims as people** and it will remind them that being drunk isn't a form of consent. And most of all, I hope that all those men and women posting on Facebook or talking to people about rape culture and consent will help weaken that culture by not allowing it go on unchallenged.
I know that not everyone will agree with my glass-half-full assessment but I hope that it will provide a little perspective to those in the trenches of battles against rape and sexism. I know that battle generally seems endless and sometimes hopeless, sometimes it's good to remember that we are actually gaining ground.
*A recent dispiriting argument I had with a friend of Facebook over the Dave Chappelle quote about how a women who dresses provocatively "may not be a whore but" is "wearing a whore's uniform" drove home for me just how entrenched the idea that women who break sexual norms somehow invite some form of assault is.
**Though I didn't say it, I think that forcing people to see rape victims and sisters or daughters is essential to the debate. Although I understand the argument that women should be valued as people, not merely in their relationship to others, I think that when people see rape victims as similar to people they know, it makes it a lot harder to dismiss them as "sluts" and forces one to recognize their humanity.
From cable news' coverage of the verdict that focused more on sympathizing with how the sentences would ruin the lives of the rapists than the horrificness of their crime to the waves of Facebook and Twitter responses that basically amounted to justifying rape and blaming the victim, it's been shocking and just soul-crushingly dispiriting seeing how many people are willing to apologize for this crime. In response, there's been a torrent of blogs, memes and articles from feminists responding to these attitudes with anger, vitriol and justified horror. Although I'm always comforted seeing people willing to confront discrimination and , I've recently started thinking that all those critiques of the reactions to Steubenville might be missing something.
It's not that I don't find the responses being criticized to be misguided, ignorant and often truly disgusting because, believe me I do. My thought here is that maybe there's something to be said for trying to distance oneself from a surface-level response to what's being said by reporters or internet commentors and trying to view the conversation of a broader level.
You see, the demented optimist inside me thinks that there might be a silver lining in the all this. It's hard to argue that "rape culture" isn't still prevalent in America but I would argue that the reaction that perhaps the cable news reporters' sympathy with the rapists in Steubenville was actually, and bear with me on this, ultimately helpful. Culture isn't something that one can change by fiat and it's often true that well-intentioned people will find it hard to actually live by all their intellectual beliefs IRL. Therefore, I would argue that things such as the media's sympathy with the assaulter or the waves of online vitriol about how the victim "asked for it," actually reveal the existence of a slow, painful transitions about how America thinks about rape.
As an example of how public opinion can be subtly swayed, see Obama's masterful (and often under-appreciated) handling of gay rights. As the editor of the Harvard Law Review and U of C prof, I find it pretty hard to believe that, in his heart of hearts Barack wasn't on-board with gay marriage many for decades. In fact, we have him on-record as favoring them way back in 1996. But rather than hold fast on moral absolutes, Obama played the long game. As a politician on the south side of Chicago, he changed his official stance to a more tenable position of compromise, recognizing that most black Chicagoans in his community (and constituency) weren't ready for a full-on embrace of gay rights and certainly wouldn't be persuaded by someone talking down to them about it. Instead, he favored initially civil unions, then lettings states define marriage before finally copping to support of full equality last spring. In the same way he didn't force the end of DADT on the military, despite loud calls from the left to do so, but instead letting his SecDef take the lead. This let the issue be framed not as a liberal social crusade but rather as military
I would argue that Obama's hands-off approach and gradual "evolution," was essential for getting people on-board. People don't change their minds easily, especially on beliefs about things like sex and gender that are so deeply-held. Taking more middle-of-the road stances with statements like "well I'm not sold on changing the definition of "marriage" but it's wrong to deny loving partners their rights" let's people ease into a totally new way of thinking. The important thing is that they open themselves to a new idea. Once people accepted the broader concept that gay people are like everyone else and deserve some rights, then it just became a matter of before they were able to accept things like admitting that gay people can also be soldiers or have spouses. In the case of gay marriage, the proof of this approach's success is in the pudding with the public reversing its attitude on the subject just within the last decade.
So how does this relate to things like Steubenville where we're talking about people seemingly celebrating not just a crime but a gleefully and repentantly disseminated one? It seems to me that a lot of the responses to this rape here stem from the fact that many people still view sex as something that men will seek uncontrollably and that women must constantly guard against. Often this is done, as with the gay marriage debate, with appeals to "nature" or "the way things are" that don't stand up to heavy logical scrutiny but nevertheless might "feel" right*. Feminists would (rightly) argue that nothing, not how one dresses, not how drunk one is, not what party they're at ever justifies sexual violence against them. The gap between these positions is probably not as unbridgeable as it seems but it will not be a one-stop journey.
I'm not saying that cables talking heads or those misogynist tweeters your're seeing are shrewdly plotting to destroy rape culture from the inside, I do think their reactions show that change is happening. When Poppy Harlow, for example, talked about how the lives of football players have been ruined, it humanized the crime. It showed that rapists weren't inherently evil monsters, they were fairly average high school athletes who, once immersed in a culture full of toxic ideas about masculinity and sex, were willing to not just commit but broadcast horrible, horrible acts. I can only hope that Harlow's right in that this crime will forever alter their lives, that their actions will have negative consequences that they'll never fully escape. Although it wasn't her intention, Harlow ended up broadcasting a powerful message - "look, even these regular kids who had everything going ended up becoming rapists and it ruined their lives, it can happen to anyone."
I would also argue that many of the the horrible online reactions to the brought to us by sites like PublicShaming are merely people trying to process this shift in attitudes towards rape. Part of the reason that rape culture is so pernicious is that it ensnares both men and women in the trap of defending an unfair sexual morality that allows people to externalize unacceptable sexual behavior onto Others rather than confront their own attitudes and actions. When faced with evidence that this view is changing, people got angry. Men saw that they would be held accountable for their own behavior, women saw that rape didn't just happen between criminals and "sluts" and was really a threat to everyone. Those are hard revelations, they're scary and they require a whole new way of thinking. I'm not saying that hateful, sexist speech is ever a good thing or justified, but in this case some should probably be expected.
I've been reading a collection of essays by Polish democracy activist and journalist Adam Michnik recently. Despite being jailed multiple times by the Communists, most of the essays in this collection see him arguing against trials or public shaming of people for their actions during the Communist era. His position is that people who live a society with horrible problems are faced with impossible choices. Those who oppose it from the outside must in some ways cut themselves off from that society while those who try to maintain their lives within it must make horrible compromises to survive. Although the analogy here is far from perfect, his logic appealed to me.
We can believe that there are hundreds of millions of people in are country who are hopelessly misogynist rape apologists, that they fundamental support sexual violence and that they want rape to be normalized and that the media supports them. There's a lot of seemingly good evidence to support this. But I'd argue that's what's more likely is this - there are a lot of people who identify with a culture that normalizes sexual violence in a way that they ultimately know is wrong. That they are being asked to changed and often times they are and that this pisses them off. Thanks to social media we now give people a platform to post thoughts that they would have earlier kept personal or shared only amongst close friends. Those thoughts are horrible, their based in fear and anger and they're frightening but in most cases they're probably not an accurate representation of who those people are.
So I'm trying my best to see Steubenville and the reactions to it as an incremental victory for feminism. I hope that it will force people to recognize that rape is a major problem in this country that is generally not committed by evil men but by normal guys doing evil things. I hope that it will move us closer to a place where we make sexual assault as horribly damaging an action for the perpetrator as the victim. I hope that it will force people to see rape victims as people** and it will remind them that being drunk isn't a form of consent. And most of all, I hope that all those men and women posting on Facebook or talking to people about rape culture and consent will help weaken that culture by not allowing it go on unchallenged.
I know that not everyone will agree with my glass-half-full assessment but I hope that it will provide a little perspective to those in the trenches of battles against rape and sexism. I know that battle generally seems endless and sometimes hopeless, sometimes it's good to remember that we are actually gaining ground.
*A recent dispiriting argument I had with a friend of Facebook over the Dave Chappelle quote about how a women who dresses provocatively "may not be a whore but" is "wearing a whore's uniform" drove home for me just how entrenched the idea that women who break sexual norms somehow invite some form of assault is.
**Though I didn't say it, I think that forcing people to see rape victims and sisters or daughters is essential to the debate. Although I understand the argument that women should be valued as people, not merely in their relationship to others, I think that when people see rape victims as similar to people they know, it makes it a lot harder to dismiss them as "sluts" and forces one to recognize their humanity.
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