Why Rape is Everyone's Problem

I started writing this as a response to MB's post and it turned into an enormous rant so I thought I'd spare her comment box. It's only tangentially related to what she wrote, it's more a comment on the perceptions informing the article she linked to.

"On the subject of rape, when will people realise it is not a form of entertainment?"

Even for women who are turned on by what we would see as sexualised violence? I'm always wary of the, 'it exerts a subtle influence' argument.

Society is what makes rape acceptable. A media that pillories an entire ethnic group because of a few rapists while giving socially important rapists a pass is what makes rape acceptable. In that you can see the concepts of 'our women' being possessions that can be protected from some and given to others. That's what makes rape acceptable. It's the same kind of chauvinism that insists that women are so fragile in society that they must be 'protected' even from imaginary sexual violence. Culture and art of all kinds is largely a *reflection* of society as opposed to a director of it.

There is a well known perception that people hold. It's that media of all kinds is always more influential on the minds of others than themselves. You can completely ban all sexual expression deemed to be inappropriate, but you will still be more at risk of sexual violence in Saudi Arabia than in Japan because they are different societies with different things being acceptable in each. Japan isn't necessarily perfect either but the point here is that when a society determines something should not happen, it will not happen, regardless of imaginary depictions. Just look at paedophilia. 20-30 years ago, the most common way to deal with a paedophile was to simply get kids to avoid them, "don't let person x alone with the kids". Now it is completely and totally beyond the bounds of even inadvertent tolerance in society.

Rape games would be illegal in Australia and yet we have adolescent kids forming rape gangs and sexually assaulting a young girl on film and then selling copies for $5. As far as I can tell, none of them went to prison. I think that says much more about rape as entertainment in our society than the existence of any kind of depiction of rape ever can.

Rape is tolerated in our society and it is all but encouraged as part of our sexist society (we rank only behind the US in the developed world in measures of benevolent sexism). This means that a significant number of women hold the same attitudes towards rape as well. Focussing on games, books, ideas of rape etc. is at best dodging the issue and at worst a flat out waste of time and detrimental to the shared cause of every sensible person who values human rights.

There's no point messing about worrying if this or that depiction of women leads to a society condoning violence against them. We already know the facts. In developed nations at least, when there are high levels of benevolent sexism, people will be more likely to blame a person who is raped by someone they know as opposed to someone they don't know. When the victim is judged to have violated gender roles (this is a benevolently sexist society) people will be more likely to blame the victim. And when the perpetrator has high status compared to the victim, the victim is again more likely to be blamed. This is no mystery. there are mountains of evidence that describe this aspect of our society.

This is why you are fucked if you go out for a good time, wear a short skirt, pash a footy player and wind up being raped by 20 of his mates. Because the people around you will blame you and our society will turn on you like a pack of rabid animals because you stepped out of the bounds of the role that had been defined for you.

Certainly we can screw around with porn, etc. but until we cut through the bullshit and realise that rape happens because someone you know thinks it's excusable under certain circumstances, we're all just wasting our time.