Relationships May 9, 2017
“The very wording of ‘Rape Culture’ seems to me a bit hysterical.”
A history teacher from Grant High School in Oregon rudely interrupted a discussion on gender and rape culture in another classroom to share his important, white male opinion.
Apparently, that intrusion wasn’t enough, however, because he then went on to type up “the reasons I find assertions on rape culture dubious” in an unsolicited three-page rant that he then distributed to the unwitting students.
Yes, this guy mansplained rape culture to these students. Guys, I feel like Ross trying to read Rachel’s letter in “Friends” “The One with the Jellyfish” (18 pages FRONT AND BACK!). I am too tired for this.
But the damage has been done so I’m going to take you through a few particularly entitled and heinous points from this atrocity of a letter.
“Rape culture is a theoretical construct that is ill defined. What exactly is ‘rape culture’ ? I don’t see it in my life or the lives of any of the men and women I have known.”
Oh, wow. Okay, you and your – I’m guessing – small group of friends haven’t personally experienced rape culture so it must be false? That’s how that works? Look, David Lickey, I’m willing to bet that you do know women who have experienced rape culture, but they’d never felt comfortable enough to tell you about it.
Walking back to our cars holding our keys like a weapon in case we get jumped. That’s rape culture. Do you do that? Texting your roommates/friends where you’ll be when you go on a date in case they want to murder/rape you – ever done that? How about having someone else order your Uber so someone will know if they try to kidnap you? Yeah… that’s all fucking rape culture. And OF COURSE you’ve never had to worry about it as a straight, cisgender, white male. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
“The punishment for rape in our culture is long terms in prison followed by a lifetime of stigmatization as a sex offender – our penultimate sanctions… All of the men in our community find rape to be a heinous crime, we must therefore deduce that those who commit it are not acting according to the culture’s norms and expectations but violating the culture’s norms.”
You are correct in saying that rape is highly stigmatized in our culture… for the victim. That’s why women are constantly told not to drink too much or are asked what they were wearing because maybe they were “asking for it.”
But for rapists? Yeah, not so much. If you are a white man, and/or a particularly wealthy one, you are protected from long sentences. You’re lucky to receive any prison term, let alone a long one. Take Brock Turner for instance. Or look at Bill O’Reilly. Bill Cosby. Woody Allen. Casey Affleck — He just won a freaking Oscar! And they made sexual assault activist Brie Larson present him the award. Hollywood has no shame.
And, can we not forget about the man currently residing in the highest office in the land who was literally caught on recording bragging about sexually assaulting women? Please, Lickey, tell me again how rape is viewed in our culture as such a “heinous” crime.
“Moreover, if we continue blaming rape on patriarchal male ‘culture’ we are excusing the rapist from their behavior, excusing the individual violates from responsibility for their actions. This seems like letting the real rapist of the culture hook in order to chase a shadow.”
Yeah, you’re kind of twisting our words here. If Tommy rapes someone we’re not saying, oh, it’s not Tommy’s fault. It’s rape culture. Don’t jail Tommy.
Tommy’s a piece of garbage and deserves jail time. But also, our society is garbage. And if we don’t stop telling girls to wear less makeup and longer skirts and thicker sweaters and to stop drinking, instead of just telling men NOT TO RAPE, then men like Tommy are going to continue to rape. And if we keep pretending this isn’t a societal issue, we’re never going to progress.
“The very wording of ‘Rape Culture’ seems to me a bit hysterical.”
Because women are always hysterical when they’re not just doing what men want them to do, right?
“Rape and sexual assault are declining… fairly sharply. Doubtless the reason women are safer on campus is the higher ed. system has made progress in elevating and addressing the issue of sexual assault as a serious matter and assumed a role in protecting their students using educative means that foster consensual relations and disciplinary policies that hold people accountable for their actions.”
Umm… you know that’s just not true, right? Twenty-three percent of female undergraduate students experience rape. And schools really aren’t taking care of it. I mean, Baylor University just let go of their president Ken Starr last year because a report showed that they failed to adequately respond to sexual assault allegations. And they’re not alone.
A 2014 study showed that even when a student is found to have committed a sexual assault, they’re only expelled in one-third of cases. To put that in perspective, I was terrified in journalism class every day because if I misspelled a name I could fail, and I didn’t want to fail out… but you can apparently rape someone and most schools will let you stay. What. the. fuck?!
Lickey also seriously compares rape culture to the Salem witch trials, not getting the irony that they also targeted women for not behaving the way society wanted them to.
“A third critique of the theory is I find it both misandristic and unlikely to help young people navigate their sexual lives… Presuming that half of us are predatory doesn’t strike me as helping anyone navigate the sexual shoals of life that are inherently difficult and pregnant with the possibility for both fulfillment and hurt.”
Right, well, again, Lickey, you’re not a woman. So you wouldn’t have to think about how it helps. Here’s how “presuming half of you are predatory” helps – did you read the story about the girl in Australia who fell to her death trying to climb out of a window to escape her Tinder date? That’s how.
Or of the many women who have tried to report their exes to the police only to be ignored and/or mocked and then murdered by them shortly thereafter? That’s how. We HAVE to have our guards up. We HAVE to be worried and vigilant, because while it may not be all men who are dangerous, a damn good portion of them are.
And this is not coming from our imaginations. Or the media. Or some telenovela. This is our personal experience. And I’m sorry if that knowledge upsets you. I’m sorry if being a man is just some big, worldwide fraternity and it upsets you when someone gets held responsible for something bad that they’ve done, but that’s just the way it is.
“Being liberal, I tend to error on the side of liberty and trust that in the marketplace of ideas the right and the just will be embraced over the mean and exploitative in the character of free people. Do you want to give Donald Trump, Attn. Gen. Jeff Sessions, a Republican dominated Congress the power to legislate what you can and can’t say, broadcast, watch, surf, etc….?”
This, a sub point in his fourth point on the third page of his very long, very error-filled letter, went off on some tangent about women in the media. This here seems like just a place for him to say that he’s liberal, as if that will make us like him and forget everything else he’s said.
Snaps for you. Good job for being liberal! But the addition of Trump and Sessions just seems in bad taste, especially since they’re campaigning so hard to take away all of our reproductive rights and access to healthcare right now so… not cool.
“Plenty of women wish to do the same and do so every time they buy a fancy dress or go to the make-up counter at Nordstrom. If a person feels empowered by cultivating displays of physical allure, I don’t think anyone has a place to criticize them for it.”
Finally arriving at his last point, he once again thought he was being the good guy but cemented one of the most annoying and persistent points of rape culture – that the way a woman dresses should be in any way relevant.
The fact that he even mentioned it proves the existence and relevancy of rape culture, and yet this fool is trying to argue why we’re just hysterical, man-hating women who’ve made the whole thing up.
“I don’t think there are in these thoughts anything even remotely chauvinistic or misogynistic, quite the opposite. If you disagree, I’d love to hear your thoughts.”
In conclusion, the grand mansplainer would like to assure you that he, of course, is not at all misogynistic. He’s just a helpful guy, helpfully explaining to you the awful thing you deal with everyday that he literally knows nothing about.
God help all of the women at this school for not tearing this idiotic man to pieces when he delivered this hateful piece of mail, after disrupting their discussion that I reiterate, was not his class.
How any men could still think rape culture is made up, is beyond me. And for any women reading this, still curious about the letter, save yourself the time and just go bash your head against a wall. That’s pretty much the gist.
