rape, men as potential rapists, fear of

[firecat]

There's an Internet conversation about rape, one post about which is here.

After reading that post, I saw several posts in which a woman said although she intellectually understands that many women fear men as potential rapists, she doesn't have that fear, and she has never been sexually assaulted, either because no one tried or because she defended herself with words or weapons.

I'm really glad that these women haven't suffered sexual assault or fear of sexual assault.

But I don't understand why a number of women are apparently responding to this conversation by saying that they aren't afraid of rape and don't have a general fear of men as potential rapists. Do they feel they should be afraid? I'm getting the impression that they feel not being afraid of rape makes them weird. Maybe that it makes them unfeminine somehow? Is this because our culture sends the message that all women should be afraid of rape?

I'm also not sure what I think about the suggestion that a certain attitude or body language -- specifically, attitude/body language that shows a lack of fear -- can prevent an assault from happening. I think it can make a difference in some situations--maybe a lot of situations. (I gather that it's part of what's taught at self-defense classes.) But I don't think it's any kind of guarantee. I know plenty of people who have a "don't mess with me" attitude/body language who have been assaulted.

(For the record, I haven't experienced sexual assault either. I have feared it in a few specific situations.)

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

To me, that post seemed to make the assumption that yes, rape is an integral part of our society, and as such, women should - think of all men as potential rapists, which implies being afraid of them. That is an entirely subjective reading of the post, though; I have to admit, I'm pretty croggled by the whole thing.

I have been in situations where I have feared the possibility of sexual assault; I've been lucky or something that such a situation has never come to pass. I've also been in situations where I should have thought about it as a possibility, but not realized it at the time; again, I've been lucky or something, in that nothing happened.

I make absolutely no suggestions that certain attitude or body language provides a rape-free guarantee. Sometimes, all it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that wrong place can be your own home, and there's really not a damn thing that can be done about it but try to survive. No Blame Attaches to being the victim of sexual assault. I'm pretty sure that a combination of my own attitude, certain learned behaviors, and care about my associates and choices of when to relax versus when to be on my guard has gone some way towards my lack of experience; but there have been times when it really was just luck that there was nobody who decided to take advantage of a situation I was in.

Mostly, what that post and most of the responses are doing to me is making me feel like an alien again. :P

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I got the impression that a lot of the "I'm not afraid of rape" posts were asking the question, "So, what's different between women who are afraid of rape and women who aren't -- and can something useful be learned and gained by studying this difference? Can women in either group make their lives in some way better by adoping things from the other group?"

[firecat]

as such, women should - think of all men as potential rapists, which implies being afraid of them

I didn't read that assumption in the post. I saw it as addressed entirely to men, and not telling women they should anything. But I can see where your reading came from.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think I had some knee-jerk negative reaction to that post because 1. it's very difficult for me to read something like that without seeing it as prescriptive for women, like "all men are (potential) rapists and if you disagree you're stupid and asking for it" - which at least partially comes from having read so many, many variations on the "If you don't do x or do y or associate with z then you're stupid and asking for it", and the whole goddamn blame the victim mentality; and 2. I forgot what else I was going to say. o.O

To me, the "all men are (potential) rapists" concept is inextricably linked with the secondary clause of "if you disagree you're stupid and asking for it." At this point I degenerate into incoherent handwaving because I've only had six hours of sleep and the words, they are not doing what I want them to do, also the thoughts, they are scattered. So, yeah, that.

[tedesson.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the original post, so this is just an en passant comment.

A friend of mine is m-to-f trans, and had moved away around the time of her transition. She made a comment about being afraid to walk on the street near her usual coffee shop, which I thought odd at the time (this was before I knew of her transition), as my recollection of him was someone with sufficient physicality to discourage random street hassles.

Is broadcast fear a female social signal?
And what is the behavior on the part of others it's supposed to encourage?

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

I'm not particularly afraid of rape. Why? I know what situations one can put oneself in that (statistically) are opportune moments, AND I can fight like an angry buzzsaw.

But it's the awareness of fringe zones, the understanding of social behaviors that indicate a tendency to ignore female consent, and the avoidance of situations in which judgement and consent barriers are impaired or broken that give me this confidence. (If you think this means I only drink around people I would trust with a gun to my head, you're right).

This doesn't stop me from telling my son, "Don't fuck drunk people. They CANT give consent."

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I'm generally not particularly afraid of rape. Being almost six feet tall, muscular, and a martial artist helps, I'm sure, but mostly it's just not something that I tend to worry about. (I also don't really drink, and tend to be careful about putting myself in positions where people have power over me.)

I also have been raped. And while if everything were completely different then everything would have been completely different... it wasn't on the surface a high risk situation. (Ah, that would be the most recent time. Which was still half my life ago.)

[pgdudda.livejournal.com]

I think the thing that squicks me about "all women should fear and suspect all men" is that it feeds into and supports the patriarchal/kyriarchal paradigm, in ways I haven't yet figured out how to verbalize. The only way I can start to get at it, is to say that it is different from "all people should exercise caution and judgment over where they are and who they are with" in gendered ways that I find troublesome.

(Admittedly, my perceptions are skewed out-of-norm by both my sexual orientation and by my personal history in which my perpetrators-of-violence were not particularly distinguished by their gender. My personal experience is that women are just as violent as men; they are simply socialized to enact that violence in different ways.)

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Someone on my own post put it perfectly, or at least in a way that exactly explains my own feelings on the subject: It all stems back to this concept that men have a right to women's bodies regardless of their consent and so if he decides not to exercise that right, he's being incredibly considerate and deserves huge kudos. It's putting the emphasis on the woman's body as a sexual object, without any context about people on either side of the gender line.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

It's *complicated*. Because yes, a lot of women are taught to be afraid. (I was mostly not, actually.) But even if you aren't, there is a societal assumption of vulnerability associated with the feminine - even if you're tall and muscular and wearing sensible shoes. Even if there's an excellent chance you could hand most guys their asses, minced, baked and served on a platter. Long hair makes it worse, BTW. I suspect the large breasts / small waist bit makes it worse, too, but that's not such an easy fix as the hair. I've noticed it a lot more since I moved - I think the gender roles in Cleveland are rather more rigid than I'm used to. (A lot of things combine hitting upon with icky power dynamics. Ew. Ew. Ew! No, being paternalistic is not attractive. And making a point of holding a door for me and then acting like they've put a down payment on my tush?!)

Are you familiar, though, with the stats regarding violence towards transwomen?

[firecat]

it feeds into and supports the patriarchal/kyriarchal paradigm

If there is a "should" in it, it absolutely does.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

But I don't understand why a number of women are apparently responding to this conversation by saying that they aren't afraid of rape and don't have a general fear of men as potential rapists. Do they feel they should be afraid? I'm getting the impression that they feel not being afraid of rape makes them weird. Maybe that it makes them unfeminine somehow? Is this because our culture sends the message that all women should be afraid of rape?

Well, yes, actually, it does make me feel weird; I find myself wondering how it is that I missed out on being socialized to this attitude. It's similar in nature -- although by no means in degree! -- to my learning in my late 20s that women can't wear white shoes from Labor Day to Memorial Day, and that everyone knows that.

And I wonder, too, should I feel more afraid? Am I kidding myself? Am I setting myself up for some kind of disastrous fall? And when that disaster strikes, will it be my fault because I wasn't properly cautious?

I do not, ever, intend to blame the victim of any kind of assault, sexual or otherwise. However, I do think there are some things that people can do to reduce -- not eliminate, but reduce -- the likelihood of being assaulted. I also know perfectly well that a person can do everything "right" and still fall victim to someone who is determined to do harm, or who is completely unconcerned with the results of his/her actions on others.

It's a very difficult mental dance.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

At first, I thought you were talking about comments to that post, rather than separate posts. Then I read through my friends list and saw a number of posts in various women's journals, and realized that this was the kind of thing you meant.

But I don't understand why a number of women are apparently responding to this conversation by saying that they aren't afraid of rape and don't have a general fear of men as potential rapists. Do they feel they should be afraid? I'm getting the impression that they feel not being afraid of rape makes them weird. Maybe that it makes them unfeminine somehow? Is this because our culture sends the message that all women should be afraid of rape?

O.o

Sorry. That paragraph seriously boggles me. It also hits on a real hot button thing for me. I'm not sure I can be coherent about it yet. One part: people routinely use their own LJs to look at how other things (news stories, somebody else's LJ post, whatever) directly relate to their lives is a big one of them, but that lately a post ruminating on one's reaction to someone else's post is judged as off-topic if it does not conform to the parameters set by the original poster, even if that ruminating post is in one's own journal, which one presumably has so that one can ruminate sometimes if one wishes.

Your bit in the comments ("I didn't read that assumption in the post. I saw it as addressed entirely to men, and not telling women they should anything.") is what hit the button for me. The button is mine, and I own it, (says the Lioness with a wry grin), but I think there's something going on in conversations-as-aggregate I want to figure out. It'll take serious pondering, because it's connected to so many other things.

elynne's comment ("Mostly, what that post and most of the responses are doing to me is making me feel like an alien again. :P") resonates for me, though possibly differently than intended. It never occurs to me to wonder why somebody posts about their own reactions to something in their own journal.

There's a rhetorical trick (which I definitely DON'T think you're doing) where somebody "wonders" why somebody would post something, and what they mean is they disapprove. (In a sort of "I wonder why anybody would post that?" way.) While I don't think you're doing that, the speculating about motive gets my back up. ("Do they feel they should be afraid?" "Maybe that it makes them unfeminine somehow?") Maybe it gets my back up because it reminds me of people saying, "Why do you want to talk about that, anyway?" with a strongly implied "What's wrong with you?" Because maybe they want to talk about it to figure out more about what it means for them and to them.

Sometimes a person doesn't know stuff until they ruminate on it a bit in company.

Most of my ruminations are locked, these days, for reasons strongly linked to the "must conform to the configuration of the original post" attitude thing. So it's entirely possible I'm looking askance at what you say here for reasons that hadn't oughtta be brought in. But it's what I got, and here I am getting bold and commenting. I'll go back under my rock now. I miss the days when I felt bolder much of the time. But the widespread "why would somebody post X? Are they [speculation] or [speculation] or [extremely distateful speculation]?" is really grating on me on LJ these days. It keeps feeling to me like the complete inverse of consciousness-raising, if that ancient reference makes any sense.

I realize that you're just posting in your own LJ ruminating on your reactions to all these posts. Which is why I almost didn't say this. But it left me shaking, and I figured hey, I might as well get my guts together and say something.

Wish I knew a good way for all these things to get pondered. Maybe the way we're doing it is the way. Maybe reacting by wanting to hide under a rock is just my own personal problem. I dunno. But I don't wonder why they posted that way. What I wonder is why I don't have the guts to post. (And this just suddenly made a huge lightbulb go on for me about questions-heard-as-disapproval as it connects to disability stuff related to hearing loss, and I am going to have to go figure out a post about it. Huh! So thank you.)

[firecat]

I find myself wondering how it is that I missed out on being socialized to this attitude. It's similar in nature -- although by no means in degree! -- to my learning in my late 20s that women can't wear white shoes from Labor Day to Memorial Day, and that everyone knows that.

I knew about the white shoes all along (I read my mom's copy of Emily Post as a kid), but I didn't encounter "women should fear men as potential rapists" as a social meme until I was 18, as part of my initial encounter with feminism in college.

[snippy]

I'm not "afraid," but I am aware that despite my best judgment of a person, that person might nevertheless be a predator.

I keep thinking "this is derailing just as much as when I claimed my husband didn't have white privilege" because it's systemic, not individual.

I've never been raped, but my sister has, my mother was, one of my uncles was (as a child), and I've been verbally threatened with rape more than once, in the presence of people who did nothing about it, did nothing to shut that person up or get me to safety. And that is the problem under discussion: not whether women fear that men will rape them but that society doesn't take rape seriously as a systemic problem, it brushes it off as individual perversion.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I just read a post that said,

"
Over the years I have tried to discuss this, with varying success (usually not much). People tend to hear "it doesn't happen to me" as "it doesn't happen," which is NEVER what I mean. But it seems to me that if there is a bad thing that happens to some people in a category and not to others, it might be useful to try to discover what makes the difference--NOT with an eye toward blaming the victims for not being different than they are, but for the possibility of understanding more about the pathology of the perpetrators. (That is, what does the fact that the perpetrator chose as a potential victim this person rather than that person tell us about how we can help keep people from becoming perpetrators?)"

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Posting their own reactions and ruminations about how the topics relate to their own lives in their own LJs is derailing?

Edited to add:

Oh, the hell with it. Thank you for making my point so well.

If my journal goes friends-only in its entirety or is deleted later today, this is why. I'm sick of this, sick of the way I am reacting to it, and there's probably not anything I'm saying of value anyway, so nobody will miss it. I've got it backed up on Dreamwidth anyway, under total private-lock, so I'll have it in case I ever want to go back and look something up. But the hell with it.

[firecat]

I appreciate your commenting. I'm sorry my post poked your hot button. You're right I didn't intend to do the rhetorical trick of saying "I wonder" when I mean "I disapprove," but I see why my post could look like that.

I also agree with you that speculating about motive can be disrespectful or judgemental. I didn't intend disrespect, judgement, or "What's wrong with you?" but since it's easy to read speculation that way whether or not it's intended, I probably shouldn't have speculated at all.

I'm looking forward to your post.

[snippy]

When the discussion shifts from the subject of rape in society to the fact that somebody has a feeling that differs, then yes, it's derailing. And they haven't only been posting it in their own LJs, some of the same people have commented in other LJs with the same comments.

Of course they have the right to derail in their own journals, to make it be about them--that's the point of my journal anyway, a place where I can make it be about me instead of whatever the subject was. I've done it, and been called on it, and defended my right to do it in my own journal. To little avail: my friends were still hurt by what I'd said.

Going off on a tangent is one of the best things about conversation, but it is kind of by definition derailing the original conversation.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Not sure it'll ever get made. As I said in a comment down the way, right now I just want to f-lock totally or, better yet, delete my LJ.

Am going to take some time away, and go breathe for a bit. But things just went cumulatively over the top for me, what with my reaction to a comment below, and

Eh. I do know that you didn't intend disrespect in your post here or any of those things. I really truly do. Thank you for that.

I go off to ponder. Or to not ponder. Not sure which I can manage just now. Lunch would be prudent, so I'll probably start there.

[firecat]

I initially had a reaction along the lines of "this is derailing" but decided that wasn't really valid because they were individual posts that happened to show up in my friends list, they weren't comments on the original post.

I did think the original post was intending to discuss rape as a systemic problem.

[firecat]

I agree with the general usefulness of figuring out the pathology of the perpetrators, but it seems to me that a person who (a) isn't the perpetrators and (b) hasn't personally encountered the perpetrators is going to have less insight into the issue than other people.

[firecat]

[hugs]

rape happens to those who're scared -- and those who're not

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

if the post had stopped there, that would have been nice.

since it didn't, and it also didn't sound like it was gonna find out anything about the perpetrators because it was all about how this person hadn't ever encountered any of them, and wasn't scared, and also, had this fighty aura and intuition, yay!

if you're neither a perpetrator, don't know one, nor are you a person who has been raped, or even been scared of rape, that sort of reasoning feels... skeevy to me. and i can well see why prior discussions didn't have much success -- i walked away from it after my response got the usual non-reponsive reply. *shrug*.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

trans women are statistically in greater danger than cisgendered women.