Hekate Jayne #sexist

Hekate Jayne #sexist feministcurrent.com

This restorative justice bullshit is a male fix to a male created problem. Males do all manner of bullshit, bumbling around, like they are trying oh so fucking hard, straining their teeny man minds, trying just so, so hard to fix it! But they just can't hit on a solution, you see. Confused males are so confused.

As an example, rape is endlessly confusing for males. Is it legitimate rape? Forcible rape? What is consent, anyway? Gee whiz a roonie, it just seems like every interaction with female people is potential sexual harassment, we are trying so hard, but we just can't figure it out. Ladies, can you explain again? Won't you please help us out? Sexual assault hurts males, too, you know!!!!! Yet, they don't accidentally rape or molest each other, do they? So they aren't all that fucking confused.

Males know what rape is, they know how to stop it. But they use confusion as a smokescreen so that they can keep raping while hiding behind this bullshit of MALES SO CONFUSED BUT TRYING SUPER HARD, THO. It's fucking insulting to our intelligence. But they love violence and domination directed at us. They will never choose to stop it. They will have to be stopped.

6 comments

old comment by Musicalbookworm

While this is over the top, she does have a point. In a world where men who claim to be allies to women say with a straight face some variant of "I would never be alone with a woman on a work trip because I'm afraid of false accusations," too many men are showing us that they refuse to actually tackle the issue at hand. False accusations are rare. Rape and harassment are not. It would be rational for women to avoid being alone with men, but goddess forbid a woman say that. More to the point, most women are very aware that not all men are harassers and/or rapists. Statistically speaking the risk of a woman being harassed or worse is far, far greater than a man facing a false accusation, yet which fear is it more socially acceptable to over react to?

old comment by pyro

I can't vote on this, because it's a big, generalized reply, and I don't actually know what it's a reply to.

The phrase "legitimate rape" is a contradiction in terms. Anyone who uses that phrase without scare quotes can be dismissed automatically; if there's consent, then it's not rape. If it's rape, then it's not "legitimate". Anyone using that phrase is a misogynist, and if I was sure that this was only a reply to that kind of thing, then it'd be an automatic "meh" vote.

The problem is the implication that justice is easy. False rape accusations are super-rare, but that's actually true for most crimes: most accusations of assault and battery, most accusations of robbery, they're all true. The law still isn't going to take it on someone's say-so; if it's not "beyond a reasonable doubt", they're not going to jail. The deck is stacked against rape victims thanks to the "sex is a private affair" attitude that everybody has. There's never written records of consent (as we all know, a marriage license isn't a written record of sexual consent) unless it's hardcore BDSM stuff, and there usually aren't witnesses either. If there's a reasonable chance that consent existed at the time, then that's reasonable doubt that it was actually rape. The patriarchy uses the cloak of privacy to hide its misdeeds. No sarcasm.

The thing I'm not sure about, though, is if Hekate is mad about the law, which is stuck in a local maxima where fixing it would require changing something fundamental, or the court of public opinion, which actually does kind of suck. Random Twitter accounts should not speculate on whether an instance of rape happened. If a bunch of people are revealing that a celebrity raped them after death, don't call them names. It could mean that the celebrity threatened them with some piece of blackmail, or it could mean that it isn't real, or it could mean a lot of other things. A newspaper article doesn't make you an expert. And it really isn't any of your business.

old comment by Zinnia

Sadly, there are a lot of people, both male and female, have only a hazy idea at best what "consent" actually looks like. For their whole childhood, and at least part of their adulthood, they've been forced to do things (usually non-sexual) for "their own good" (usually, for the good of the person forcing them) or even just "because I said so". And if they complain, a lot of people around them berate them or shames them or guilts them for being such a horribly selfish person. And then romance in fiction tends to confuse the issue, portraying people as "just knowing" what each other really wants, or showing people being worn down by constant romantic or sexual pressure always turning out well for both the pursuer and pursuee.

So when they try to understand the concept of consent, which they have almost no experience with... it's common for them to have difficulty shedding most of their unconscious baggage because they're not consciously aware of it. It's also common to imagine something robotic and unsexy, because with their profound lack of experience, it's literally the best they can come up with. And when they do finally manage to get it mostly right, you often end up with them taking things into account only from their own direct point of view, leading to "I don't consent to your lack of consent" (not usually stated so blatantly, or even normally intended as such, but it's obvious to most who do fully understand consent) or something similar.

So yes, this is a serious problem, but no, most of the men who "don't get it" aren't being willfully obtuse.