Reaction Part 2
I wanted to clarify some things from this post and the relating comments thread. Again, I don’t mean this to respond to any particular individual or blog I saw that linked me, because I still don’t like call-and-response blogging (though I feel like I’m doing too much of that in the comments, and might back out of responding for a while). Reading reactions that launched in a completely different direction than I intended really helped solidify my own reasons for having written the post, and some of my own beliefs and feelings about the issue.
Before getting into it, I wanted to clarify (just for clarification’s sake) what my main themes in that post were:
- The mindset that leads to victim-blaming in rape is part of a wider cultural phenomenon where we expect women to behave in a way that legitimizes their abuse.
- You don’t get to ask “why didn’t she fight back” if you have ever participated in this wider cultural training. And you have. So you don’t get to ask, because the answer is already available, and all signs point to you.
- Abuse exists on a continuum. At the far end are physical actions like rape, which we sometimes can recognize as violent and inherently wrong. At the near end are daily social interactions that are invisible and accepted as appropriate behavior and inherently right. We have to recognize and disallow the near end before we can ever move to the far end. Teaching women to fight off rapists is just a band-aid applied to everybody but victims, to make everybody but victims feel better about the existence of rape. We can’t teach women to fight off rapists unless we teach them to fight off you every time you interrupt them, and unless we teach you to graciously accept that as an appropriate reaction.
Yeah, That’s Awful, That Women Are Taught To Act Like That. Good Thing I Don’t Put Up With That Shit
I need to find a way to shorten this reaction, because I see it a lot. It’s the “I’d Never Put Up With That” reaction, INPUWT, and every time I hear it, it sounds like bullshit to me.
Not to say that everybody who has ever proclaimed on the internet that they do not put up with one kind of bullshit or another is lying. And not to say that social and cultural roles haven’t changed enough over the years that more women may feel more comfortable setting more boundaries, and more men may feel more comfortable accepting those boundaries as legitimate and appropriate.
BUT
I think the INPUWT response is more about supporting the status quo than it is about rejecting it.
Victims are kind of the losers of society. Nobody wants to be one. Nobody can possibly understand why other people allow themselves to become victims. When people witness an interaction between a bullying asshole and their victim, they usually come away with at least as much revulsion for the victim’s behavior as they do the bully’s. Why did they take it is as, if not more, disgusting a thought than Why did that bully act that way. That’s status quo. That’s rape culture. That’s the result of othering victims, which is what makes people susceptible to being victims in the first place. If you can perceive of a certain class of person as wholly different than you, with impenetrable and irrational thought processes, strange and alien needs, and possibly disgusting and ridiculous practices, then it becomes a lot easier to dehumanize that person enough to abuse them without remorse. Because, I mean, they are so crazy and needy that they like that shit, and don’t even realize, in their tiny slow brains, that they don’t have to take that shit. It’s a good thing you are not like them at all, because you are somehow smarter and better than that, somehow immune. Somehow a different class of human completely.
It’s sort of the Right (Wo)Man’s Burden, to feel pity for these strange souls who don’t realize that there’s a more civilized way to live. If only they knew that they could come out of those abusive homes, blinking in the sunlight, and see that there is a better way to live. You could show them, because you know how they should live their lives better than they do. Right? (Answer: wrong.)
I get suspicious when the first reaction to “hey, victimization exists” is to loudly proclaim that you are too smart/bitchy/cool/mature/something to be a victim, but yeah, too bad for those other victims and all, maybe someday they’ll wise up and realize they can…
Can what?
Can choose to be hated, victimized, and ostracized for vaguely different reasons? You know, for being a bitch instead of for being a victim?
Because that’s the other thing. The choice here is to be a classical victim – passive, quiet, compliant – or to be a victim with a false sense of power, a victim who uses louder and different words to experience the same damned thing. Whether you’re being harassed because you’re quiet or you’re being harassed because you’re loud, you’re being harassed because you’re female. And to be female is to be automatically placed in a class of people that is worth harassment. You can’t escape that by “not caring” if you’re called a bitch; being called a bitch already indicates that you’re being victimized. “Not caring” if people hate you doesn’t place you outside of the class of women who accept their abuse with resignation; they’ve stopped caring if people hate them, too, have accepted that as the way it is. They’ve found a way to live with that hate, just like the people who “don’t care” about being a bitch.
A victim secretly likes the way she’s treated. A victim can’t live without the abuse. A victim is weak. A victim is slow and stupid to realize her own victimization. A victim relies on emotional reasoning rather than assertive logic. A victim is dependent. A victim is too deaf, blind, and dumb to notice the world around her. These aren’t actually inherent qualities of victims, but they are the intended reactions to victimization. The purpose of victimizing a person is to force them to act in these ways. The entire end game of abuse is to create a person who acts in these ways. An abuser wants to justify their abuse, and so they both imagine and force qualities onto people that allow them to think that person deserves, wants, and needs the abuse. Nobody has inherent victim qualities. Abusers create those qualities, through their abuse, to feel justified in damaging another person down to their core. And the magic of it is, once a victim believes she has inherent victim qualities, then she, too, will believe what the abuser believes: that she deserves it, needs it, and secretly likes it.
Other people outside of the direct abuser/victim relationship who believe the same thing also believe that not performing these behaviors mean they don’t deserve it, need it, or like it, and thus won’t be abused. It’s the flip side of the same coin: if you believe that the way a victim acts is what makes her likely to be abused, then you believe that not acting in those ways will make you less likely to deserve abuse. Which doesn’t mean that you have somehow placed yourself outside the social order of abuser/victim by your savvy wits and plucky courage. It means you buy the abuser’s belief structure wholesale.
Abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it can’t maintain itself without external support. There are very obvious ways that people can contribute to the maintenance of abuse. Ask any woman out of an abusive relationship, and I’m sure she can regale you for hours with tales of, “I told his father that he was beating me and his father told me he has a temper and I just need to learn how to avoid it,” or, “I told my boss I was afraid he might come stalk me at the office and needed to change my extension, and my boss told me to keep my personal life at home,” or, “I told my marriage counselor that he had threatened to kill me and they told me I needed to work harder to understand his emotional state.” We’d all like to think we’d never do something like that, of course, though I’m pessimistic on that account. I think when people imagine that they’d never do such a thing, they’re imagining some Afterschool Special kind of abuser, who has a scarlet A on their forehead. When that kind of guy swaggers onto the scene, it’s all too easy to suss out which side you should be on. Which is why that kind of guy doesn’t really exist – he wouldn’t last very fucking long, would he? Imagine if your brother’s wife came to you and said your brother was abusive; likely you’d stutter and stumble and then eventually end up telling her that she just doesn’t get your brother, that he’s not like that, she’s misinterpreting his actions, because your other option is to throw in with the victim and stand up against your whole family, who can’t believe you’re saying your brother is that kind of man.
What I’m trying to say here is that even in the most stereotypical anecdotal sort of abuse validation, you’re more likely to choose the wrong side than you think. And when it comes to the more subtle forms of abuse validation, most of us do choose the wrong side, every day. When you say something like, “Well, I would never put up with that sort of shit, because I was raised better/learned better/am too strong,” victims around you hear two messages: 1) they do not have any of these qualities that you have, which is why they deserve to be abused and you do not, 2) all she has to do to escape abuse, duh, so easy, is to start acting in a way that gets her called a bitch in daily social interactions. Which somehow isn’t abuse and is wholly different from her current experience. Right?
Let me try to be more succinct. I’ve got three points here.
- Pretending that the only thing separating you from a victim is your willingness to be called a bitch is victim-blaming, because you are saying, in effect, that if a woman was just more willing to be called a bitch, she wouldn’t be getting victimized. (Maybe she could stop wearing short skirts in public, too.)
- Pretending that being willing to be called a bitch doesn’t make you a victim of the same old shit is a false sense of power that is used to differentiate yourself from those “other” victims, and keep you from throwing in common cause with them to rally against abuser’s behaviors instead of policing your own.
- Engaging in INPUWT isn’t an argument that puts you outside rape culture, but squarely within it. INPUWT insinuates that you believe you have acquired some sort of power over your victimization that other victims refuse to take. In fact, the power you have acquired is the (false) assurance that you will not be victimized, provided you are willing to buy into victim-blaming. Which is the exact same deal that “classical” victims strike with their abuser.
I’m not saying that people who go all INPUWT are all consciously thinking, “Fucking victims deserved it.” And I’m definitely not saying that INPUWT is a useless tactic, that women should stop setting boundaries and not putting up with shit. What I am saying is that anybody who thinks they are so conscious, brave, and insightful that they operate outside of our culture has acquired that sense specifically because it is a part of our culture and benefits our culture if you think that you are inherently different and better than a despised class of victims. To think that you have acquired some magical ability to not be part of a stigmatized class – some magical ability to be an individual rather than be like those other women – is a barely-there privilege that is granted to keep you from unifying with all those other women. To identify with them is to identify yourself with a whole host of unsavory characteristics, victim characteristics, and it feels much more personally empowering to identify yourself with “bitch” characteristics, which is victimhood with a bullhorn. There is no woman alive who gets out of this place unscarred. There is no woman alive who does not have a myriad of beliefs and traits in common with victim-women. And there is no woman alive who does not desperately want to disassociate themselves from those traits, because we have been trained to think of these traits as legitimizing the hatred and abuse we are all working to escape. The problem isn’t with women who accept certain behaviors and traits, and the problem can’t be solved by pretending you are exempt from those behaviors and traits. The problem is believing certain behaviors and traits legitimize, cause, or are the natural precursor to abuse.
I want to emphasize that there’s nothing wrong with being a woman who is willing to be called a bitch because she sets her own boundaries. But you can’t use the master’s tools to take down the master’s house. You can’t assume that your willingness to do such a thing puts you outside the house, distinct from other women, distinct from their alien choices to be abused, exempt from the whole “it’s your fault if you’re abused” philosophy. You can’t assume that there is something fundamentally different between you and women who are victimized, that all that is needed to avoid abuse is to make the correct personal choices. Well, you can assume that, it’s a personally comforting assumption to make, but you can’t assume that while believing you are not a part of rape culture at the same time. Believing that any behaviors or traits or personal choices makes one more or less worth being/likely to be abused, believing that you have the capability to be exempt from the game if you just play the game differently, believing that abused women just need to be taught to play the game the way you do, are the master’s tools. Quit usin’ ‘em.
Next installment, Reaction 2.5, whenever I get around to it: Full and Free Consent Cannot Exist Between Unequals. This one bothered a lot of folk, I know.
Trackbacks and Pingbacks
- links for 2009-08-23 « Embololalia
- I think I’m turning into a feminist. « Kendra's Blog
- The Budding of a Feminist « Storyville
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Harriet, as you write Reaction 2.5, if you have the time and inclination, would you consider making it very elementary and trying to avoid “Women’s Studies” terms (which you nearly always do avoid)? The reason I ask is that I’m going to force my mother to read it, and she doesn’t have that background. The reason I’m giving mom some heavy reading is that I would call my mother a feminist, and she has nearly always steered me right on sex and gender issues, and she’s taken a lot of crap for being a minister, a Baptist, and a woman ALL AT THE SAME TIME…
… but she “doesn’t like being called a feminist” because of “those extreme feminists that think all heterosexual sex is rape.”
Yeah. Methinks some conservative misrepresented Dworkin to her during her impressionable years.
Anyway, you make some of the clearest, most compelling, most human arguments of anyone I’ve read, and you are certainly better at it than I am.
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Can’t promise anything, but I’ll give it a whirl.
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This turned my brain over. omg GUILTY.
I do mind being called a bitch, though. It makes me angry. Why am I a bitch for protecting my children?
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Thank you for writing this. Several years ago, a teacher took advantage of me but I kept it a secret for a year and a half, blaming myself and feeling overwhelmed with guilt. When I finally ‘confessed’ to my best friend, she told me in so many words that this man had abused me and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it.
I argued vehemently, and it was another year or so before I could finally accept that I had been a victim and I had no control over what had happened. It’s difficult to get to that place, and admit you were powerless to protect yourself, so difficult I was willing to carry the blame for two and a half years. And during those 2 1/2 years, I was probably the biggest touter of that ‘INPUWT’ attitude. It’s good to be free of that blame – the tradeoff is definitely worth it!
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A lot of good points here, and I am looking forward to reaction 2.5.
I see a lot of confusion between cause and effect. People who are abused react in characteristic ways, which are then blamed as causing the abuse.
“Teaching women to fight off rapists is just a band-aid applied to everybody but victims, to make everybody but victims feel better about the existence of rape.”
This is true of those who expect/need children to report abuse as an alternative to supervising them better. Adults find reporting abuse hard enough, and younger children often don’t even understand the issues well enough to know what to report.
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You can’t have a victim without a perp.
Violence against women seems to be the one area where the focus is on the behavior of the victim instead of the perp.
That’s probably wrong, now that I think about it. We also see it in child abuse. That assumption that there is something that the child did to cause, or can do to alter, the adults behavior.
The abusive behavior belongs entirely to the abuser. But if we accept that we also have to accept that our behavior belongs entirely to us.
I think that until we shatter the dominance/submission paradigm the choices will always be to align with either the victim or the perp.
Thanks for writing this very clear assessment of where we are.
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thank you
your posts keep hitting points that are important to me personally and for a larger discussion of these issues; the comments and discussion are frequently amazingly insightful, and the part where you consistently challenge your readers to face up to the ugly truth of our society, the world we live in constantly amazes me
i was a victim of sexual abuse from my thirteenth birthday through most of high school, which helped turn me into an angry, somewhat overweight punk/club kid for most of the 80′s – i thought if i was unattractive to “normal” men i wouldn’t get harassed, hit on, approached, attacked by people i wanted nothing to do with…
at the same time, i was a sexual being, and at that age i found it hard (ok, impossible) to reconcile my hatred for A and my desire for physical affection and sex, but i also couldn’t seem to find an age appropriate relationship
so i wound up leaving shows/clubs with tons of different people, having casual sex and group sex a lot (i went to hs in nyc, “pre-”aids, unsafe sex was the norm as i was on the pill do to the abuse – i had one abortion at thirteen and even though parents didn’t believe who the father was, they put me on the pill as a precaution) – i am extremely fortunate in that i didn’t do drugs (A and the person who brought him into the house were, i watched it destroy them both and wouldn’t have any of it) and unlike my friends from that era i’m lucky that i survived my naievete, and i am lucky beyond belief that for whatever reason the people who picked me up never raped or killed me
but then i moved away, to a small university in the middle of nowhere, and i felt safer – so i calmed down on the angry punk thing a bit and tried to be a more normal “girl” – bad idea; one date rape (i said no, loudly and kicked/hit; no one in his dorm responded) and one stranger rape (he had a knife) in three years made me realize that i wasn’t safe anywhere, no matter whether i was attempting to fit into social norms or not
somehow, i managed to grow into a strong, together woman (and often a bitch, at least in my last two jobs as NOC managers for Internet Companies) – who still loves sex with the right person at the right time, when it’s my choice; who still goes out to clubs in what most people would consider outfits that scream “she’s asking for it” – but since my undergraduate days i have been harassed and occasionally groped, but i think maybe the way i carry myself and the fact that i can and will make myself heard if you become a problem have prevented further attacks (the fact that i’m now forty-two may have something to do with it too – although i don’t look it at all; i still get carded all the time)
anyway, this response has gotten too long; but i wanted to share a bit of my reaction to all i’ve read here recently, in part as a way of saying thanks
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I’m guilty of this, totally. I am the victim of two attempted rapes, which I completely blocked out of my mind for years, as “nothing happened.” Both men were acquaintances (one I considered a good friend, and one was a friend of my step-mom.) I credited myself with “being a bitch” because I was able to recognized the manipulation early enough to do something before the point of no return, and cry, yell, push back, get the hell out of there, etc. I’ve “been a bitch” ever since. I knew I was selling other women short by seeing myself this way. Thanks for putting this into words.
We don’t need to consider ourselves bitches. We need to acknowledge that we’re doing what we need to to keep ourselves, our friends and our kids safe, the best way we know how. But our behavior isn’t the point. It’s the rapists behavior that’s always, 100%, the problem.
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It hurts to read. I don’t like seeing myself in this post, getting the feeling that both choices of resisting or non-resisting don’t change the game, the culture.
I’ve thought myself better than this, but maybe “being better than this” is the male equivalent of advocating women be a “bitch with a bullhorn” without myself having to take the consequences of being that bitch with a bullhorn. Easier to say this, and elevate myself above it by my correctness, and get a pass.
Until it happens to one I love. And I find myself a player in the game just like every man. And that is a pain beyond measure.
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Thank you for writing this… it brought me to tears.
When I stayed in a women’s shelter, probably 7 years ago… I had to attend a mandatory support group in which I was taught the difference between aggressiveness, assertiveness, and complacency. And in that setting, even, you’d hear a lot of INPUWT.
I wrote about a lot of my experience with abuse online, and sharing it with trusted friends. A number of them challenged me to “not be a victim”, and I remember feeling incredibly isolated and lonely – here again, as I was being threatened, stalked, and terrified on a daily basis, I was apparently doing something wrong by allowing it to happen to me, by not getting out of the way soon enough, by not working hard enough to understand where my husband was coming from.
Even though I have let the past settle into the past, it still hurts to think back to when friends would say these things…. I knew they meant well – they hoped that it would give me strength and resolve to get out of the situation – but it occasionally had the reverse effect. My abuser would tell me it was my fault, too, and so I wondered if I was just a crazy, depressed mess and would fall into further isolation, questioning if the abuse truly was caused by me.
It has taken YEARS to understand that the problem was not me. Sometimes I’m afraid to ever bring up my past, to ever talk about it, even in anonymous forums – because the inevitable attitude of INPUWT comes at me from all sides.
To think that you have acquired some magical ability to not be part of a stigmatized class – some magical ability to be an individual rather than be like those other women – is a barely-there privilege that is granted to keep you from unifying with all those other women. To identify with them is to identify yourself with a whole host of unsavory characteristics, victim characteristics, and it feels much more personally empowering to identify yourself with “bitch” characteristics, which is victimhood with a bullhorn.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
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I am someone who has ended a number of relationships with men he’s known and loved because he’s discovered beyond reasonable doubt that they’re abusers. In addition, with my wife’s support, I have ended relationships with men whose evidence against them is convincing, albeit circumstantial. I grew up with some of these guys; one even talked me down after a horrible breakup.
Likewise, I am two years sober. Alcohol was a poison in my life, and life without it is so wonderful I can’t begin to describe it. Not a day goes by that I don’t want to drink, even though I know I can’t have one, both for my sake and for the sake of everyone I love.
What I’m NOT doing is bringing this up to brag about my moral clarity. I am also NOT telling you that I feel your pain because I defriended some facebook friends. I am also NOT posing the question below as some “gotcha” or “thought-provoking point.” What I am doing is asking a sincere question that I don’t know the answer to: are you, intentionally or otherwise, othering abusers?
I respect and admire your rhetorical tyranny, and therefore understand that Fugitivus isn’t a blog that exists to discuss how multi-faceted abusers are. If anyone has a right to other abusers, it’s you.
I’m asking because I’m curious, and I look forward to ruminating on your response, whatever it may be. Your blog makes my mind work, and it reminds me what a good decision I made flushing that shit out of my life. So thanks, and thanks for letting me write away.
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Possibly. I do think it’s important to understand abusers, because that’s part of understanding and preventing abuse on a larger level. But victims have spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to understand their abusers, because they’ve often been told that if they just understood him better, he wouldn’t abuse them. That kind of understanding is not what I mean when I say it’s important to understand abusers, but in a society that frequently blames the victim and is revving to throw “what about the men!!” into every conversation, talking about “understanding” abusers can very quickly and unintentionally end up taking the focus from victims, and laying all the attention at the abuser’s feet. Most victims can tell you that an abuser is never happier than when you’re talking about his problems, and what must be done to fix them, because it’s a chance to relay sob story after sob story about how hard his life has been and how much it really hurts him when he has to hurt you and maybe if his mother had just loved him more… I’m sure, since you’ve done the whole sobriety thing, that you’ve probably run across people who aren’t quite yet working their programs, and will spend all their time (and demand everybody else’s attention) as they probe and lament every little reason for their addiction, but don’t seem to have any equal effort available for stopping the behavior. It’s sort of the same with abusers; we can understand them to death, but if there’s not an equal effort made to stop their behavior, all we’re doing is feeding their arrogant, self-centered, and self-justifying pity.
I might write a longer post about it someday; this comment will probably set me off to ruminating on it, because I do think it’s really important to understand abusers, esecially because we are likely to see ourselves in them. I don’t like to assume that they are all some crazy alien people who have crazy alien motivations that we normal humans could never possibly understand. Like all people, they’re 3-dimensional and complicated and complex; they like their cats and they have a favorite movie and they have feelings about God and they want to buy a house someday etc. Reducing them down to just the abuse sort of erases the fact that they are real people, not twirly-mustached caricatures, and I think admitting they’re real people makes the horror of what they do far worse. But, more than that, abusers aren’t accessing some “how to abuse and why” database that nobody else has access to. They all draw upon the same cultural stereotypes that the rest of us grow up with. What a victim thinks of herself, and what others think when they look at victims (too stupid to leave, must be needy, must be fucked-up, must have daddy issues, must like the abuse) is exactly what an abuser sees, and what allows him to abuse. All of us can understand the abuser’s mindset, beliefs, and rationalizations, because we were all raised in the same culture sucking up the same messages about men, women, relationships, and violence. All of us act out those beliefs and rationalizations in various ways throughout our lives, and all of us come up with reasons why it was okay to call our ex-girlfriend a stupid bitch instead of just, you know, avoiding her or telling her you were angry; or why it’s okay to mock our youngest cousin until he cries because he needs to toughen up; or why it’s okay to always subtly bring to attention how fat our friend is, because you’re trying to encourage her to better herself. We all have access to the excuses abusers use to victimize others, because we’ve all used them on smaller scales, or watched others use them with our implicit approval. And that’s really damaging to your ego, when you realize that, but it’s the best tool we have to understand some of the scariest people in our society.
On the other hand, there are times when othering the abuser is really necessary. When victims are trying to escape, for example. I knew, when I was trying to leave him, that if I ever talked about my abuse, I was likely going to get all sorts of “But why did you let him?” comments. Basically, I would have to hear from other people’s mouths — maybe even people I cared about — the things my abuser told me every day. I really had to work up the strength to deal with that, and trying to work up guts while getting abused is kind of an oxymoron. Some othering had to happen for me to get there; I had to tell myself, “Everybody is not like him, he is wholly different, he is evil, and you cannot explain to evil that it should stop, you cannot control evil, you cannot love evil just a little more or understand it just a little more, it will just be evil.” I’m somebody who wants very much to think of myself as a helping person, somebody who doesn’t kick others when they’re down or refuse to help those in need. Flint used all that against me, telling me it was unfair to demand so much of a sick man, an addict, a man whose wife was leaving him, and how could I keep hurting him instead of helping him? Even when I got angry at him for waking me up in the night to tell me he’d been watching me sleep and thinking of strangling me, he just told me I couldn’t understand mental illness or the stress he’s been through, that I couldn’t blame a man for being sick, and that was really hypocritical of me considering how mentally ill I was and how much I wanted other people to accomodate me for it.
I’m using that example because I want you to see how easy it is for an abuser to turn around any small bit of human decency into more reasons why you deserve to stay with him and be abused. I had to find some way to exclude him from my general sense of a good and just world that I should help if I could, and for a time, I did that by thinking of him as pure evil. When I was gone from him for a while, and was strong enough to deal with what assholes my friends were, and the general state of a shitty kind of world, I could start to identify how much casual abuse or acceptance of abuse there is in the world, in most people’s attitudes, without letting that idea crush me into a bad “it’ll never change, I’ll always be abused, it’s all my fault” kind of place.
Anyway, what I mean to say is, yes, I think I’m othering abusers, but that isn’t always a bad thing. For people who have been told so many times that abuse is their fault, sometimes the first step to recognizing they had no control over the abuse is to turn the abuser into something other than human. You can understand a human, you can help a human, you can love a human, you can make a human better if you just try try try. But you can’t do these things with abusers, because they take that and make it part of the abuse. So you have to find a way to break that mindloop, recognize that you can’t understand or change or love or make your abuser better, so you can get away from the abuse. Abuse really fucks up your ability to think clearly and rationally, and cope with your own thoughts, and once you’ve been away from it for a while, it’s a lot easier to recognize both that they are humans and yet can still do this horrible thing. That’s a painful, frightening, ugly recognition, and not one that’s helpful when you’re trying like hell to convince yourself that you can actually leave your abuser and have a happy life without them.
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Thank you for letting me pick your brain.
All of this has got me thinking about how a lot of people I know could have been spared a lot of excruciating pain had we, as a society, been told that abuse didn’t just mustachioed, flannel-clad rednecks in bars or African American men hiding in bushes, i.e. the dark, mysterious, amorphous, evil villain (Snidley Fucknozzle(tm).)
I don’t want to sympathize with abusers (there’s a reason I don’t talk to these people anymore). I can’t help but wonder if they weren’t fooled by their own brand of INPUWT into thinking their behavior was okay.
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This post struck a chord with me because I know I can come across this way at times and had never examined the assumptions underlying that approach. Of course I should have done, and if I had I would have been horrified, AM horrified at what it meant.
I learnt something today. Thank you.
And I’m sorry.
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There’s a lot I want to say in response, and I’m not sure where to begin.
Last year, I was forced out of my job of 10 years as an Executive Assistant because I was being sexually harassed and abused by a high-level manager and I dared to come forward. I came forward in defiance of my husband, my mother, my friends. They all urged me to keep my mouth shut because they felt a fight I could never win was not worth fighting. I knew that they were right in that I knew I wouldn’t win. I knew that coming forward would harm me, not the abuser. But I did it anyway. Because I felt that losing my job would be better than enduring this man any further.
But it wasn’t what the bosses did to me that left me the person I am today, which is a person who trusts no one and likely never will again. It was what the people around me did. They told me to be understanding. To appreciate that this man was likely experiencing terrible personal problems that made him do the things he was doing to me. They told me that I was overreacting. They told me that if I were tougher he would stop. See, I was labeled as both “The Bitch” and “The Victim.” A bitch who should have been more compassionate toward a man who shoved me violently against a desk to rub his dick against me. A victim who could have made it stop if I had been more assertive. And of course I tried to blame myself. What did I do so wrong to make this happen?
Now, when my husband, Jeff, who aches with guilt (as he posted to you earlier) tells me that I didn’t do anything wrong, I become even more angry and resentful. Why? Because it’s empty to say those words. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” The tone to me is like a child who falls down on stage during her dance recital and her parents tell her she didn’t do anything wrong. It’s condescending. Why do I need these assurances? Of course I didn’t do anything wrong! Something wrong was done to me! But it doesn’t matter if I’m being told that I did something wrong, or I didn’t do anytthing wrong. It feels like two sides of the same coin. It still puts it all on me and not my abuser. I know I sound very angry, but that’s because I am.
And yes, what you say about INPUWT rings true to me. I was always the tough woman, the “bitch” who wasn’t like those victim women. And yet I was still the victim. This is how women side with men and turn against other women. I know better now.
Thank you for writing this. Your posts are the most thoughtful I’ve read on these issues. And when I’m at a lack of words for how I feel, I just point to your blog and say “What she said.”
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Hello folks. I love this blog. I am a little confused, though, as to how INPUWT automatically makes one part of the abuse cycle. I think it’s possible you are leaving out a bit nuance–different mindsets and reactions to one’s own life experiences that manifest in unwillingness to tolerate abusive behaviors when you see them.
I want to clarify that I am not speaking of abuse within personal relationships; I am focusing on work and society, meaning women and girls victimized by strangers in public and in work settings.
What of women who are “willing to be called bitches”–even when it hurts–and essentially take it on the nose for other women who react to systemic abuse in ways that don’t allow them to stand up for themselves? If I give someone the tools to protect themseves or others, or step in to protect because I see that someone is unable to do it for themselves, does that mean I am engaging in the abuse cycle? (Maybe it does–I am honestly asking.)
If I see a man in his 30s harassing a 13-yr-old girl on a city bus, and I tell him to quit it, because if he decides I’m a bitch, it makes no difference to me, does that make me part of the problem? If a woman I work with is fustrated to the point of pretty serious emotional reaction to the handsy men she must encounter weekly and put up with because she is a fundraiser and needs their money, and I give her the tools to step away from the hands or even call out the hands for their behavior in ways that embarrass them in front of their peers/spouses, is that being part of the problem?
I guess the point is that I KNOW what it feels like to be powerless, but in my own personal experience that is mine and no one else’s, part of that powerlessness was being young and at the mercy of my abusers. I have had the luck/good fortune/whatever to have left my molester in her grave, and I would never ever ever blame a woman, man or child for any abuse they might experience, but is it wrong to offer protective tools to adults who seek them, or step in to protect a child from the drunk creep on the bus?
I might have completely misinterpreted the point of the INPUWT issue…
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i thought this article would be of interest given the topics of discussion lately re: feminine behaviors
http://globalcomment.com/2009/superheroines-sports-and-sexuality-or-why-cant-we-be-both/
the article is about women athletes; this part especially seemed to tie in
“Jennifer de Guzman, a writer and comics editor, took on the question of whether women want superheroines and gave it a spin worth thinking about:
I am kind of astounded that some men don’t see why physical empowerment would clearly be attractive for women. I think it’s intriguing to note that women often like the hot women who kick ass as much, if not more, than men do. Here’s what I think is behind that: As women, we are nearly constantly aware of physical threats. And those threats often are of being violated sexually. When I used to go to campus for night classes and people warned me to “be careful,” what they are saying was, essentially, “avoid getting raped.”
Now, what if, what if, as a woman, you could walk around, be sexually attractive and not have to feel threatened? What if all the rage you feel about women being victimized and brutalized could be channeled into pure, righteous ass-kicking? And, because you’re a woman, you could possibly do that ass-kicking without being seen as a testosterone Steven-Seagal-esque meathead. Ass-kicking fantasies for men are more about proving and retaining power, I think. For women, they’re about finding and asserting power when they’re not expected to have any.
Women’s sexuality has been cast for so long as dangerous, problematic, something that attracts male violence—essentially opposed to male violence. Yet superheroines and female athletes, particularly female fighters, blur the boundaries. They are sexy and tough, able to take you down, take you out, hold their own against the men.”
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INPUWT isn’t the same thing as just setting a boundary and keeping it. INPUWT involves a certain arrogant assumption that because you don’t put up with shit, you are better/different/smarter/stronger than victims, you are not and will not be victimized, and all victims have to do is INPUWT like you and they won’t be victims anymore, either.
Say a friend is telling you about a situation at her work where a coworker is sexually harassing her. She’s afraid that if she speaks up, she’ll lose her job. She’s also afraid that she somehow provoked the harassment.
Non-INPUWT response: That’s not your fault and you don’t deserve it. Sometimes when I’m being harassed, I’ve tried this.
INPUWT response: Wow, that’s rough. Yeah, I can’t ever imagine that happening to me, because I don’t put up with that shit!
The first response assumes that the woman is not at fault, while the second one has a subtle implication that if she just acted more like you, this wouldn’t be happening to her. INPUWT assumes that by acting in a certain way, women will not be victimized, so it falls squarely within victim-blaming philosophy. Simply setting a standard for yourself of boundaries you will enforce whenever possible assumes only that those boundaries are appropriate for you, and that the negative consequences of keeping those boundaries (like being called a bitch sometimes) are things you are willing to deal with. INPUWT is all about blaming women for their victimization because they haven’t chosen the same boundaries as you. It’s also about believing that your boundaries are somehow qualitatively better than theirs (instead of just better for you), and that being called a bitch for setting boundaries isn’t actually victimization itself. That first response above identifies that you have gone through similar harassment, that you understand her experience, because you have also been victimized. The second response is a (likely completely false) claim that you have never been victimized because you wouldn’t be so passive/worthless/stupid to let yourself be — which really indicates that you think victims are passive/worthless/stupid. INPUWT sets up victimization as something that women earn with their actions, poor choices, and bad character.
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Thanks for this, that really makes it clearer.
I’m all for women learning to be more assertive but I think we need to recognise that in some situations, it doesn’t matter how firmly you enforce your boundaries, because the other person has no interest in respecting your boundaries. We can’t control other people’s behaviour. If I learn to express what I want more clearly, this will be tremendously helpful when I’m dealing with people who care about not making me do things I don’t want to do, and I’m trying to overcome some of the things you talked about in your original post for that reason. It won’t stop people who want to force me to do things regardless of how I feel.
You raise a really good point that the retribution for asserting yourself is sometimes as bad as the consequences of putting up with something and saying nothing. It’s always a judgement call about how you think the other person is going to react, and nobody can predict how somebody else will respond to a change in their own behaviour, or control somebody else’s behaviour by changing their own. It’s so patronising for somebody on the outside to assume that they know how the abuser would respond if the victim were to behave differently – the chances are the victim is better able to judge how the abuser is likely to respond if the victim attempts to “stop putting up with it”, or at least has reason for the judgement they’ve made.
Thanks again for another really thought-provoking post.
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“being called a bitch for setting boundaries isn’t actually victimization itself.”
Yes.
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There is no woman alive who gets out of this place unscarred.
This. I’ve never been raped, I’ve never been beaten, but I am certainly not scar-free.
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I have always been INPUWT. My mother taught me that’s it’s okay to be mean to people who frighten me, and I have thanked her many times for teaching me to stand up for myself. I proudly call myself feminist, and have defended feminism every chance I get.
In reading your works, I came to realize that I had been raped – I wouldn’t have called it that at the time and that guy would never believe that’s what it was, but that event changed the way I felt and behaved for the next three years. I did not recognize it, and I could not recognize it, because it conflicts with my self-image of INPUWT. Being a bitch didn’t save me from that guy then, and maybe it wouldn’t now. But I have a clearer understanding now.
Thank you for writing and helping me understand the world better. Maybe I can help my stepdaughter negotiate this culture a little better.
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I came across your website and have been reading through for a couple of hours now. My hat off to you…Great work.
So much truth in what you say, I didn’t know to which posting or how to respond…
But you know, I was one of those “INPUWT” and was called every type of bitch you can think of for acting/saying what I though was right. I THOUGHT I was a strong, empowered woman and some how somewhat better than other women I saw around me being weak and submissive…But all it was is just a false sense of power. It didn’t stop my friend of 5 years from raping me when I was 20 when I came over to watch a movie like I’ve done 100 times before. And I screamed and I kicked and I said ‘no’ any way I could…..in the end just to submit in order to avoid getting physically hurt even more. And you know what? Later, he acted like I WANTED it all….and when I told people what happened, the reaction I often got was ‘well, why were you friends with a guy then?”….including from a couple OTHER guys I was friends with. As if associating with males and being their friend is asking for it!? I didn’t see any of it coming.
I’ve lost a lot of (who I thought were my) friends and now see how things really are around us.
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God, the friend-loss is just the most stunning thing in the world. I had to turn into this dripping sarcasm-bot for a while, all “Geeeeeeee, guys, I’m really sorry my rape is making your Facebook uncomfortable… I didn’t realize my rape was going to bother you that much, I mean, my rape must be really hard on you… I’ll try to be more considerate of who I let rape me, so you don’t have to, like, deny his friend request on XBox Live or anything.”
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your blog is changing the way i think… thank you.
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I have to say Harriet that your dripping sarcasm-bot posts have provided some of the very few laughs about rape I have had since it happened to me…. laughter in that ‘this is so true and so horrible that if I don’t laugh I’ll drown in the sorrow of what has happened to me’ kind of way.
I’ve become a bit of a dripping sarcasm-bot myself.
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Just a really quick comment to let you know how much I love your blog. You do a great job of breaking these arguments down in a way that anyone can understand AND I can better explain why I think the things I do.
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I had that attitude and I paid for it. Others paid for it too, through my lack of sympathy and my lack of understanding.
I take on the word bitch at times and I try to be tough, but really, the way people treat a woman for being tough, for setting boundaries? That’s just more abuse. I’m still a victim, simply because fighting back gets me treated badly. Lose/lose situation.
It just sucks so much. And I feel like, with this knowledge, I don’t really know where to go from here.
Your response to Jeremiah shook me a bit too. Your description matched all the ways my ex took advantage of my personality, accusing me of just seeing them as their mental illness when I raised issues regarding their borderline personality behaviors. Took advantage of inclination towards being as fair as I can by telling me how unfair it was that I expect them to “control” their mind when all I wanted was for the yelling to stop.
I curled into a ball on the ground when they hit me and I felt like shit for it. I was so afraid of hurting them because they used their past abuse and their past rape at the hands of someone else against me, that I didn’t fight back. They took advantage of the other partner in the relationship’s paranoia, turning them against me and against their family. Took advantage of that other partner’s fear of rejection so that the other partner was so terrified of losing us both that they didn’t tell me when they found out that our ex was convincing me that my back pain was severe enough to justify it and then over-drugging me with painkillers to “shut me up” .
All of this spread over a martyrdom complex a mile wide. Constantly self attacking in such horrible ways that I and the other partner would immediately rush to defend them, trained so solidly that even when the self attacks were completely true and justified, we still disputed them. Because they had been so hurt, so damaged by those past experiences. Me and the other partner (my current partner now actually) both had this urge to help people, to not want to see them hurt that our ex took advantage of completely.
And that ex took advantage of it when they liquored me up and raped me. They only stopped when I started crying uncontrollably. And when I was burned out on tears, they started crying, calling themselves a rapist and saying they deserved to die, expecting me to comfort them.
The few people I told have expressed “neutrality” (or called the relationship, “mutually abusive”). That’s right, old mutual friends, they still talk to that ex, still chum it up with that ex. I don’t know how they see me, but I imagine that whole victim thing plays into it.
Ugh, sorry for the word vomit. This post just dragged it all out again.
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I left out the point to the word vomit… x_x
I was just saying, I understand how one has to other the abuser just to escape. I and the other partner in the relationship wouldn’t have gotten away had we not branded that ex as bad, evil, unsalvageable.
I know that my ex has ridiculous problems. Mental illness causing serious irrationality and a trauma pile miles high. But the moment I let myself think of any of that, I was just trapped again. I had to see them as not a person in order to get away from the abuse (I didn’t realize till long after that I had been raped, denial is strong…)
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This really hit home for me. My eldest sister (to whom I will refer as T) grew up with an abusive mother (from whom my father was divorced before marrying my mother), and put herself into one abusive relationship after another. She was raised being abused and being taught that she didn’t deserve better. T was molested by one of her mother’s boyfriends for over a year. When she finally told her mother, she told my T that she must be lying. She continued to allow the man to live in the house, and he continued abusing my sister. We didn’t learn about this until several years later, when my sister had already moved out. If we had known at the time, perhaps my father’s attempts to gain full custody of her would have been more successful (but then that may be asking too much of humankind). Every time she was sent to live with us for a holiday, her mother would take her back as soon as she sensed that my sister was becoming very happy where she was. My father could do nothing, because he had only been granted part-time custody at the mother’s discretion. It was (and still is) painful to witness this.
Pretty recently, she got a divorce from her abusive husband (with whom she has three children), and has been working to put her life back together. As a part of that, she moved to the state in which I and my father and mother live. To make a long story short, her mother and the ex-husband filed a court case to bring her back (under the guise of a custody battle for the children, though the ex doesn’t even see them on his designated visitation days), and she is now giving in to almost everything they ask of her. She does have a lawyer and is attempting to win the case, but it often seems as if she’s given up fighting. And it has been very easy for me, over here in my comfortable realm with my loving parents and no abusive ex-husband, to say that I would never put up with that shit. It has been easy to say that I don’t understand why she isn’t fighting, that I would never let them take advantage of me like that, that I would never have made this decision or that decision.
I needed to realize that my attitude on that is completely wrong, and that it encourages abuse. Not to say, of course, that I should put up with that shit…but that by saying that, by taking the INPUWT attitude, I am placing the blame on the victim. Thank you for this. It was a much needed slap in the face.
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It’s kind of a fine line, because there are certainly things one can do to make oneself less available for abuse (like refusing to respond or, like she tried, moving away entirely), but those things have nothing to do with stopping the abuse, because the abuse comes from the abuser and is beyond anybody’s control but theirs. If she wasn’t putting up with shit, her ex and her mom would still be trying to abuse her, just like her mom probably still tries to abuse your dad whenever she can; she just might be less available for the abuse to hit its mark.
She might be in a better place if she wasn’t putting up with shit, or she might not; likely learning how to be submissive and passive helped her survive multiple situations where being aggressive and outspoken may have gotten her injured or killed. It was, at one time, probably very intelligent, perceptive, and resourceful of her to cultivate her passivity, because she was accurately assessing her surroundings and choosing a tactic that helped her survive (most victims don’t consider themselves to have been actually actively doing something incredibly intelligent at the time, but only consider themselves to have been pathetic worthless victims who made no decisions of their own, and it might help her to see things another way). Now it would likely be better for her to drop that tactic and learn a new one, since she’s in a new situation where passivity can hinder her and assertiveness can help her. But it can take a while to even realize or believe the situation is different, especially if it never has been before, or, more likely, seemed like it was different before, but just turned into another abusive boyfriend instead. Having you and your dad around will probably be a big help in role modeling a new idea of family and relationships, and the fact that love, respect, and boundaries can actually all co-exist.
I’m pulling for her.
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Came here from a friend’s facebook posting. Thank you for this and the ‘another post about rape’ post. I’ll reread both whenever I have doubts about the political efficacy of honest, well-considered writing; am still perusing and enjoying your archives.
Absolutely we [this "we" being men in particular] need to retrain ourselves across the entire spectrum of abuse, especially the under-the-radar cowing and bullying on whose foundation other abuse is built. I’m unsure how I feel about your description of training focused on the violent end of that continuum as a ‘band-aid’, though. Mightn’t any piece of education that encourages us [and yes, this is a contentious, complex "us"] to know our boundaries & fight back be a useful piece of harm reduction?
If you’re feeling patient, please let me know if you figure I’m misunderstanding this or missing the bigger picture.
The sexual assaults I’ve survived messed severely with what I knew about myself and my world. Similarly to other people who’ve commented here, some of what shook me up most was how emotionally and physically difficult it was in the moment to fight back. [This despite having almost as much strength and privilege as my attackers]. I did in fact manage to fight back, and I credit a little bit of training and practice as part of what helped me in surviving those situations relatively unharmed.
Thanks again for your clarity & generosity.
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Anything that keeps victims safe and prevents perpetrators from perpetrating is good. So, yeah, self-defense training and preventive tips are well-intentioned and can be, in some situations, be helpful.
The problem is when self-defense training and preventive tips are the only forms of help available. That sends the message that victims are the only people with the responsibility to stop an assault, which also sends the message that if an assault occurs, it’s because the victim somehow failed to stop it. Prevention that is victim-based and only activated at the very moment of assault should be the last line of defense and prevention, the thing you must do when fifty thousand other options have failed. Instead, we treat it like the first and only line of defense and prevention, which sets up a dangerous and unrealistic standard of accountability for victims, and a dangerously loose (nonexistent) standard of accountability for everybody who is not the direct victim.
The reason I say it’s a band-aid is because, by itself, victim-based defense is woefully ineffective at preventing rapes. Women who fight back are raped, women in long skirts are raped, women who didn’t go to a party get raped, women who took a self-defense course get raped, because none of these things have anything to do with rapists, who are actually creating these crimes. Without them, there would not be rape. So, to take the band-aid analogy, imagine you keep stabbing yourself in the leg with a pen, until you have a gaping horrible wound. Not to worry! You cover the wound with a band-aid, and then keep stabbing yourself! The problem isn’t the wound, but the reason why the wound exists in the first place. The problem isn’t with victims, but with the perpetrators who turn them from citizens into victims. Healing a wound isn’t worth as much as preventing one, and keeping one person from becoming a victim isn’t worth as much as keeping person from becoming a rapist who creates victims. All our prevention of rape strategy right now relies upon keeping one person from becoming a victim, instead of keeping one person from going around stabbing people in the legs with pens.
So there’s got to be some reason why we keep pounding away at “wear long skirts have an escort take a four-week class”, and it’s not because it works. I think it’s because 1) it keeps the blame off rapists and rape-apologists, who encompass a much larger proportion of the population (and probably any given person’s social group) than we like to think, and 2) it makes us all feel like we give a damn and are doing something about it. It’s a lot easier to tell your female friend, “Make sure to always keep an eye on your drink!” than it is to confront your male friend about his roofie jokes. And it’s a lot easier to blame a woman for her rape — because she didn’t watch her drink — or throw your hands up and say, “Who could have known?”, than it is to admit that, yeah, your friend pretty much stated how much he digs rape over and over, and you just said nothing, so you could have known, and you are to blame.
I think these victim-based defensive tips also impart a false sense of security to women. I won’t get raped, like those other raped women, because I don’t walk alone at night. I won’t get raped, because I don’t go to drunken parties. I won’t get raped, because I don’t talk to strangers. I won’t get raped, because I never walk past bushes. I won’t get raped, because I engage in tactics so under-effective they may as well be superstitions. I won’t get raped, because I wore my lucky socks and counted to 30 backwards and forwards twelve times.
So, no, I am not saying we should get rid of self-defense classes, or tell women that it’s okay to leave your drinks unattended now. But I am saying that when we, as a society, leave the prevention of rape to those tips and those tips alone, we’re doing more to support rape culture than we are doing it to end it. We are saying that rape prevention is the responsibility of the victim; we are providing the victim with almost useless tools; we are then stepping away and saying, “Well, we did all we could, if she gets raped now, it’ll be her fault for wearing the unlucky socks.” That’s a mindset that’s squarely within victim-blaming and rape culture, instead of a progressive mindset outside of it.
Please note that I’m not saying that people who admonish women to take self-defense classes and be careful walking alone at night are bad people who are all about rape culture. As I say a lot, we’re all fish in the same pool, drinking and breathing the same water, and somebody who really truly wants women to not be raped and uses these tools to do it is just working with the very flimsy tools misogyny gave them. What I am saying is that these tools are not enough, believing that they are enough is harmful to victims, and once you stop believing that, you have a responsibility to take aim and fire at rape culture long before it ever coalesces into an actual rape.
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Thanks for your response. It’s an analogy that works across a whole lot of different strata of abusive behavior, & I’ll keep trying to talk about responsible pen-wielding in some of the quarters where it counts.
I’d like to link to your blog from some of those quarters. Are there online environments from which you’d prefer not to be linked, or may I send the mostly male traffic from (for example) some online discussions of adult industry issues in your direction where it seems not-too-inappropriate?
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Thanks for asking, but you can link me anywhere. I moderate out the riff raff, if it appears.
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Goddamn. This entry is currently, as I type working on my mind and changing it.
I’m sort of bummed that you didn’t go to Harvard Law; the world could use a lot more lawyers with scruples and powers of rigorous logical persuasion like yours.
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>> You don’t get to ask “why didn’t she fight back” if you have ever participated in this wider cultural training. <<
In that case, the question won't get asked, and questions that don't get asked won't get answered, and that seriously undercuts the chance of solving the problem.
We NEED to ask, "why didn't she fight back?" followed by "how can we remove or alter those reasons so that women WILL be able and willing to fight back?" and "where did those messages or lessons come from?" and "how can THOSE things be changed?" and "what could we be teaching women and men that would avoid these problems?" and "how can we make a healthier society?" Because if the discussion gets shut down because the questions are uncomfortable, we're getting nowhere, and I don't want to stay where we're at.
"You're the problem" just shuts down the discussion. It doesn't provide enough detail to be useful. It's just an attack. It's like saying "Your story sucks" or "You're a frigid bitch." If we want to fix this, we have to look closer. Cutting off the discussion is unlikely to aid progress.
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Barrette: I think you need to visit here before you come back here. Specifically, you need to read and re-read this. And, if at the end of this comment, you’re super pissed at me and coming up with some rationalizations about why I’m wrong wrong wrong, I’d suggest this.
To think what you’re saying — that nothing will get done unless the oppressed hold the oppressors by their hand and listen to their ignorant abuse with compassion, patience, and infinite tolerance, following up with continuous explanations of why blaming rape victims for their torture is fucking bad — is something new, unheard of, or even barely out of the camp of misogyny tells me you’re too 101 to hang out here right now. I mean, really. Listen to people who think it’s okay to blame rape victims? Explain patiently to them why it’s not okay? Make them feel as safe as possible so I can have the unvarnished opportunity to hear how much they think somebody like me is a stupid slut who deserved it? Patiently draw out their misogyny like poison from a snake bite, because that’s what I want in my fucking mouth? Why didn’t anybody think of that before?!!! Congratulations, you just solved the patriarchy! Apparently, all of us were just too busy to realize what we needed to do was pay attention to misogynists! You’d never guess, but unless you make them feel really safe and comfortable, they’re too timid to open their mouths and blame you for your rape!
Everybody is responsible for their own bullshit, even the ignorant, unintentional bullshit. It is not my job to fix the sexist, broken assholes. It is their job to fix themselves, and it is my right to refuse to engage their overwhelming privilege to ask blaming questions of victims until they do. You can engage them if you like. But I’m not obligated to create a safe space for rape apologists, nor am I obligated to provide my time and resources to explain to people so privileged and lacking in empathy that they don’t somehow already know that this shit is fucking wrong. I can’t imagine a bigger waste of my day than giving all my attention to somebody who thinks “rape — maybe women’s fault?” is a viable point to argue.
To that end, I don’t have time to babysit your comments either. You’re banned from these comments for a year. Feel free to give the discussion forums a try. They are not moderated by me, and there’s a section called “Educate Me 101″ there where you can spout off comments like this all you want, unless the moderators ban you, too.
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I’ve been reading your older blog posts a lot, and they are definitely expanding my thoughts about all sorts of things, but especially rape culture. I am wondering, did you by any chance do a follow up of this post, the 2.5 about free consent not existing between unequals?
I’ve been thinking over that lately, and would be really interested to read if you did in fact write a more detailed post about it.
I completely agree with that point, being female bodied and having to frequently explain to college dudes/peers my abstinence/refusal to be with men. I’m very conscious these days of the narratives presented to me regarding sex, particularly narratives that glorify male involvement while diminishing or even demonizing female involvement. For example, men “scoring” chicks, versus the ubiquitous usage of the word “slut” to explain any female that looks like she might have had sex or something (but of course doesn’t, in fact, have to have had sex in order to be insulted that way)
The ground is so grossly uneven when it comes to heterosexual sex. That language I detailed is one tiny area of focus, I realize, among many other bigger and much more significant aspects of sexual inequality, but all the same it makes me feel very profoundly that I have much more to lose in having sex with a man than he could ever possibly lose in having sex with me.
This doesn’t entirely relate to how women can’t give full consent without being full equals, but it sort of circles that much deeper issue, just in that, if a woman consents to sex with a man, she stands to be damaged by it in a way that he doesn’t, which is victimization in itself if a woman has to lose or be conquered/scored upon in order to have sex.
Anyway, rambling kinda. I just wondered if you did end up writing more extensively about that concept, or if you could refer me to a good source to look into it further?
Thanks.
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: I didn’t really get around to it, though you pretty much summed it up here:
The idea, basically, is that if one party may possibly experience very damaging consequences if they disagree to an act, that limits the possibility of a real “choice.” Consent exists when the choice is between “do the thing” or “don’t do the thing.” Coercion exists when the choice is between “do the thing” and “don’t do the thing and maybe be punished on a scale of viciousness rating from the low end of verbal abuse to the high end of physical torture.” In a rape culture, women consent to heterosexual sex under the coercive model. That’s not to say women do not ever truly want sex, but they’re unable to escape the context of their desire. They may want sex, but they also know that not wanting sex may cause them to be attacked. It’s hard to say when that does or does not come into play in any given individual scenario where all parties consent to the fullest degree possible, but what it does say is that all you can have is “consent to the fullest degree possible.” You cannot have true, free consent in a patriarchy.
I might still get around to writing a post about it sometime. But in the meantime, I would say your best resource is Dworkin. She’s the one who put this idea out in the first place. And if you can’t get your hands on a book of hers, or find them too inaccessible, just google up “feminist blogs Dworkin” and you’ll probably find what you want.
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Thanks so much for responding. I appreciate your insight, and I took your advice and looked into some Andrea Dworkin material (on the internet. I checked my local library and found not a single piece of her work, but I’ll spare you my frustrated tirade about that library’s total failure) and I’m already working my way through some of her concepts about consent. It’s incredibly interesting and couldn’t be more timely and pertinent, because I just found myself in a situation where some of these same powers were at work.
This guy I’ve been hanging out with, getting coffee with, semi-exploring the possibility of a relationship with asked if he could kiss me the other day. I find that awesome whenever a guy asks, although it shouldn’t be amazing/surprising, it should be completely standard- Still, so many women and girls I’ve known have told me that their first kiss with a man was simply taken by force, rushed into without her permission or even her expectation at all. So there was that in his favor, and I agreed to be kissed. But I found myself really unhappy with that decision just about the second I opened my mouth and spoke it. I remembered from one of your other posts (literally right as this dude is kissing me) about how women, being taught never to protest or cause a scene or enforce their own boundaries, not surprisingly DON’T do those important things. I felt pretty deeply that I didn’t want this, it shouldn’t be happening, and I should stop it. At this point my friend was getting completely too physical, his body moving over mine, positioning me the way he wanted me. It was fucking disgusting, to be frank, but I didn’t protest or say anything. This person knew from the start that I was not sexually interested, I made that explicitly clear from the beginning of our courtship, but he still took my consent specifically issued in regards to kissing as permission to crawl over me, spread my legs, and start rubbing himself on me. And I still didn’t say anything, even though I continually felt like I could possibly vomit. It was a disappointing illustration of how I let myself down, because I know better than to let a guy get away with exerting his privilege and his power over me, but I still did nothing. So I verbally consented to a kiss, but it was completely against what I actually wanted, and I offered that consent strictly to avoid being awkward or hurting his feelings, because I’ve been given clear enough instruction from every source in my life that I’m supposed to tiptoe gently around a man’s ego, and be pliant and ready for him to dominate. And he did, he dominated my body after I said only that he could kiss me. So really, I’m in a Dworkin mood. And I’m going to be letting him know that I have no desire for a relationship with him. It’s sad, because he’s not a bad guy. He’s just doing what he knows he’s allowed to do and has been told he’s supposed to do. Both of us followed our scripts, only mine was designed in a way that explicitly undermined and demeaned me. And so with that, I can fully see how consent is not possible between unequals in an unfree society.
Here’s an excerpt from that Dworkin reading I did that really stuck with me:
“Fear, too, has a special power to change experience and compromise any possibility of freedom….women are supposed to treasure the little grain of fear–rub up against it– eroticize it, want it, get excited by it; and the fear could and does keep millions quiet: millions of women; being fucked and silent; upright and silent; waiting and silent; rolled over on and silent; pursued and silent; killed, fucked, and silent. The silence is taken to be appropriate. The fear is not perceived as compromising or destroying freedom. The dictators do flourish: fuck and flourish. …fear has compromised freedom; and when a woman has intercourse– not hiding, dropping the disguise–she has no freedom because her very being has been contaminated by fear: a grain, a tidal wave, memory or anticipation.”
Being afraid to say no is certainly not saying yes.
I hope it’s alright that I’ve unloaded that anecdote and these observations in your space. I really do hope that you will write up a post about the issue of consent, because I would love to hear your take on it and your experiences, and I thought maybe adding in my own would be useful, if only in further encouraging you to take up that project, though I know you have plenty of others. The way you put things has been very illuminating in the past (you changed forever the way I receive rape jokes, and I’ve become the prickly one no one can say them around without unleashing some unpleasantness.) So it would just be awesome to hear your thoughts on that subject. Thanks again!
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This Bitch-Victim dichotomy is personally fascinating to me, because it reminds me of a similar (but far less dysfunctional) duality within the scope of warfare: The Lion and the Fox. The Lion (aggressive, decisive action; bold maneuvers,etc) is the Bitch part of the equation. The Fox is often construed as a Victim and vice versa. This is where the misconception comes in: People assume that the victim is “putting up with shit” because they are weak/because they don’t know any better/because they (*insert bullshit victim-blame*), when in actuality the victim (adapting to the abusive circumstances) is doing what must be done in order to survive (passivity, appeasement, “playing dead”).
I don’t know if that contributes a whole hell of a lot to this discussion, but just my two cents. And if I had to guess, I would say I haven’t been guilty of INPUWT, but only because I can’t maintain that level of denial. I can’t mentally/psychologically separate myself from “the victim”, because I know that I would do the same thing under the same circumstances. That seems to be the point of, not merely abuse, but the systemic cycle of abuse-blame-more abuse: To get us to act in ways that make up us easier to abuse.
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