I don’t have to tell you that Steubenville is all over the news.
I don’t have to tell you that it’s a fucking joke that Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the two teenagers convicted of raping a sixteen year old girl, were only sentenced to a combined three years in juvenile prison. Each will serve a year for the rape itself; Mays will serve an additional year for “illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material.”
I probably don’t even have to tell you that the media treatment of this trial has been a perfect, if utterly sickening, example of rape culture, with its focus on how difficult and painful this event has been for the rapists who raped a sixteen year old girl then bragged about it on social media.
And I almost certainly don’t have to tell you that the world is full of seemingly nice, normal people who want to go to bat for the convicted rapists. I’m quite sure that you already know about the victim-blaming that’s been happening since this case first came to light. You know about the fact that people have actually come out and said that the real lesson to be learned here is that we need to be more careful with social media (i.e. go ahead and rape but make sure you don’t get caught). You already know that people seem to think that being a sports star and having a good academic record should somehow make up for the fact that you are a rapist.
I don’t have to tell you any of that because it’s all par for the course.
What I do want to tell you is that you need to stop using the “wives, sisters, daughters” argument when you are talking to people defending the Steubenville rapists. Or any rapists. Or anyone who commits any kind of crime, violent or otherwise, against a woman.
In case you’re unfamiliar with this line of rhetoric, it’s the one that goes like this:
You should stop defending the rapists and start caring about the victim. Imagine if she was your sister, or your daughter, or your wife. Imagine how badly you would feel if this happened to a woman that you cared about.
Framing the issue this way for rape apologists can seem useful. I totally get that. It feels like you’re humanizing the victim and making the event more relatable, more sympathetic to the person you’re arguing with.
You know what, though? Saying these things is not helpful; in fact, it’s not even helping to humanize the victim. What you are actually doing is perpetuating rape culture by advancing the idea that a woman is only valuable in so much as she is loved or valued by a man.
The Steubenville rape victim was certainly someone’s daughter. She may have been someone’s sister. Someday she might even be someone’s wife. But these are not the reasons why raping her was wrong. This rape, and any rape, was wrong because women are people. Women are people, rape is wrong, and no one should ever be raped. End of story.
The “wives, sisters, daughters” line of argument comes up all the fucking time. President Obama even used it in his State of the Union address this year, saying,
“We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence.”
This device, which Obama has used on more than one occasion, is reductive as hell. It defines women by their relationships to other people, rather than as people themselves. It says that women are only important when they are married to, have given birth to, or have been fathered by other people. It says that women are only important because of who they belong to.
Women are not possessions.
Women are people.
I seriously cannot believe that I have to say this in 2013.
On top of all of this, I want you to think of a few other implications this rhetorical device has. For one thing, what does it say about the women who aren’t anyone’s wife, mother or daughter? What does it say about the kids who are stuck in the foster system, the kids who are shuffled from one set of foster parents to another or else living in a group home? What does it say about the little girls whose mothers surrender them, willingly or not, to the state? What does it say about the people who turn their back on their biological families for one reason or another?
That they deserve to be raped? That they are not worthy of protection? That they are not deserving of sympathy, empathy or love?
And when we frame all women as being someone’s wife, mother or daughter, what are we teaching young girls?
We are teaching them that in order to have the law on their side, they need to be loved by men. That they need to make themselves attractive and appealing to men in order to be worthy of protection. That their lives and their bodily integrity are valueless except for how they relate to the men they know.
The truth is that I am someone’s wife. I am also someone’s mother. I am someone’s daughter, and someone’s sister. But those are not the things that define me, or make me valuable in this world. Those are not the reasons that I should be able to live a life free from rape, sexual assault or any kind of violent crime.
I have value because I am a person. Full stop. End of argument. This isn’t even a discussion that we should be having.
So please, let’s start teaching that fact to the young women in our lives. Teach them that you love, honour and value them because of who they are. Teach them that they should expect to be treated with integrity because it’s a basic human right. Teach them that they do not deserve to be raped because no one ever, ever, ever deserves to be raped.
Above all, teach them that they are people, too.
The Belle Jar 
No.
The “mother, wife, daughter” line is only dehumanizing in the minds of silly people who look for outrages where there are none. Yes, women are people. But the argument isn’t “women are only important when a man loves them”. That straw man isn’t even made out of straw but of hot air.
We as humans have evolved to care more about our own group than about others. Maybe that’s bad, but it’s how our animal brains work. A random dude in North Carolina (picking a state at random here) cares much more about his mom than about the latest 7-year-old child who was raped and abused in India. So when you want to appeal to emotion, you mention someone in that group as opposed to someone outside it. If you’re talking to a man, it’s difficult for him to imagine getting raped (even though men are also victims of rape), but it’s easy for him to imagine this tragedy happening to someone he loves.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the victim’s gender other than that the specific audience in this case is of a different gender. Nothing. At all. You’re making a mountain out of a PLAIN.
You’re taking this from a different perspective than the author. I feel like it’s unproductive and misguided to say the author is wrong, but maybe instead saying you have a different take on it would be helpful. As of right now the author is talking about rhetoric and how that shapes beliefs and actions, and you are talking about something else.
you have missed the point . . . or perhaps you are providing us with an example of just how pervasive and imbedded the rape culture is . . .
Jesus Christ there is no rape culture here. What you were seeing is hero worship at its finest. Football this, ruined career that. Not “omg they were caught raping, darn”
Seriously? I can’t believe any intelligent person would succumb to a made up “culture” to wrap around anything they fit with their made up definition of rape.
I guess you haven’t heard about the Steubenville Rape Crew?
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/02/steubenville-rape-crew-charges/62001/
This case is disturbing, and I will not defend the Steubenville rapists. However I believe that the radical feminist interpretation of neutral rhetoric in this article will only serve to splinter society and reinforce stereotypical differences and inequalities.
Women should undoubtedly be valued as individuals, but aren’t they also a members of society? Wives, sisters and daughters are descriptions of social connections, not male possessions (as was said well above, women can have sisters, wives, and mothers as well). Is it equally horrible to characterize men as “husbands, fathers, and brothers?” This is not an uncommon phrase.
I think that interpreting this phrase to mean that “Women are only important because of who they belong to” isolates women and causes more harm than good. Instead of striving for balance and equality, this view makes women completely separate from men, from society, and even from other women. Separating the genders and radicalizing neutral rhetoric like this will only serve to perpetuate the stereotypes that have hindered equality in the past.
Instead, the focus should be on integration and equality. “Sisters, wives and, mothers” should be viewed as a neutral (if not positive) description of women in society. Those words should be seen to represent women’s personal connections, social importance, and individual value. This interpretation serves to humanize women, to integrate society, and to strive towards legal and functional equality, which should be the ultimate goal.
I am not a mother or a wife, my parents are deceased. Am I therefore not intergrated into society. Are my career, relationships with co-workers and friends meaningless. Do they look through me as though I weren’t there? Am I a ghost person?
I find it very destressing that violence against women continues to be so accepted world wide. Blaming the victum is a way of pretending that if you are careful this will not happen to you. But it happening to you is not the issue. It happened. Blaming the victum will not really make you safer. I believe that a woman walking into a bar naked, still has the right to say “no” to sexual offers. If she is raped it is still a crime, she is not culpable. I don’t think people really get it that a sexual assault robs a person of their sense of phyiscal integrety. The Steubenville rapists may lose a year of their life, but the girl has lost much more. Her loss will last a life time.
No one would say “I love my mother, but she had no intrinsic value before I was born.” They know that she was valuable before she gave birth, before she met dad, before she went to work, before she went to school. They know she had value that was all her own for her entire life because they know her and love her. To say “This woman is as valuable as your mother” is not to say “She is valuable because she is someone else’s mother,” but, “if you knew her as you know your mother, you would love her and never let this happen to her. What makes this victim less deserving of the human respect that you expect everyone to give to your mother?”
You may not be a mother or a wife, but you have as much value as any mother or wife does. If someone accepts that his or her loved one should be valued by strangers, that person must also accept that women who are strangers must be valued even though they are strangers. That they have intrinsic value that is all her own, that is impossible to quantify but intimately understood by anyone who has ever loved any woman…and many people have loved a sister, many more have loved a mother. It’s a convenient way to convey the powerful idea that if your mother is to be respected by strangers, ALL women must be respected by strangers.
If we decide that it is wrong to ask someone to love a stranger as they love their sister-wife-mother/brother-husband-father for just a minute to try and emotionally internalize why this stranger matters, I’m not sure how to go about changing hearts and minds.
The point is a male bias exists in our culture. Or maybe a better way to say it is our society is built from a male perspective. We won’t ever hear the argument that our “husbands, fathers, and brothers” will need anything because the system is built in their favor already. “Sisters, wives and, mothers” will never be neutral terms if it is continued to be used as a line for garnering sympathy for a cause.
Have you never heard the argument for better treatment of “our husbands, fathers, and brothers” in dialogues about the responsible use of our active duty soldiers or mistreatment of war veterans?
CT; that phrasing is equally incorrect because last I checked women make up 20 percent of our armed forces.
This was a really thoughtful response…but your last sentence, for me, sheds light on the problem. “This interpretation serves to humanize women”…the fact that we need a phrase to “humanize” us means that people have trouble seeing women as fully human to begin with and it’s only through the context of our relationship to men that we matter. And I get the social nature of us but I honestly hardly (if ever) hear of men being referred to in this way. I hear people I know referring to men in their lives this way obviously : ) but to discuss men as a whole…nope, I just don’t hear it.
As a society, do we not dehumanize everyone outside of our circle? If not, I don’t think it would be possible for us as a world to be content with world hunger when we could so easily solve it. I agree that we need to do everything we can to always remind ourselves that everyone is a real genuine human being. As far as I am concerned, part of what makes us human is our ability to relate to others. The way we do that is by drawing on our own experiences and relationships. Maybe I’m way off, that’s just what I think.
This is one of the most stupid things I’ve ever read….
Utterly fantastic post.
I am a woman and a supporter of women’s rights obviously, but I think to get defensive about a human connection that everyone can relate to is pretty crazy. If I were to give a speech about men I may refer to “brothers, fathers, sons, & husbands” to emphasize their importance in “our” individual lives. It’s a way of relating. Demonizing people for actually fighting for women’s rights (Obama referenced above) seems conterintuitive.
It isn’t about the reference to roles, it is about men, and women too, being unable to relate and empathize and stand with the victim unless they can imagine a relationship they value. Horrible things often don’t happen to someone we value but to those we don’t know but can still care about. Why is it we don’t just value human life.
It is about the language we use that subtly implies value or lack thereof. This blogger was very clear that her point is about personhood and equality. Even an orphaned homeless female is a human being who should be safe from assault, should have the same respect as anyone no matter his/her postiion in society. If we need to imagine victims as other than the people that they are, in order to care, we are somehow lacking, but we don’t want to admit that.
Don’t you feel un heard and unrecognized, practically invisible, when you share with a friend a bad thing that happened to you and she responds by telling you her own story of trauma, and in her telling your story just disappears. That is what happens to victims who instead of being heard and having the community witness and champion their individual pain and bring them some kind of justice, they are dismissed by “imagining them” to be someone else. The victim disappears and in her place we have an imaginary and unreal and therefore not really important scenario, except maybe some fear about our own vulnerabilities. It becomes about us and the real victim evaporates.
Brilliant analysis. Thank you for saying this.
What you are actually doing is perpetuating rape culture by advancing the idea that a woman is only valuable in so much as she is loved or valued by a man.
I don’t believe this is accurate. I think what is being conveyed is a humanizing sense that this could happen to someone you care about. Things that happen outside your monkeysphere only sort of happen, as far as most people can really empathize with. I mean, hey, it’s sure a bummer that Bob from the village down the road got eaten by a lion, but if Alice from across the road got eaten by a lion that’d be a tragedy. And likewise, the folks from the village down the road think Bob’s date as lion-chow is way worse than Alice’s.
It’s got nothing to do with “she’s only valuable insofar as she’s loved by a man”, as much as “here’s this thing you can empathise with” because short of sociopaths, pretty much everyone can empathise with members of their own family much easier than they can with people who only exist on the TV or the internet or in a newspaper. And we don’t live in a culture where “what if it happened to your neighbor” carries as much meaning as it used to, and we definitely don’t live in a culture where we can really even talk about men being raped, so “what if this happened to your son or your nephew” is a complete non-starter.
The Patriarchy isn’t going to simply evaporate one day. You have to get people to empathise in some way, and making the event personal, as opposed something that “happened in Steubenville” is the first step in achieving that empathy. Maybe “what if this happened to someone you care about” is a better phrasing than “what if this happened to your daughter”, but I think you’re going to end up with less sympathy for a cause you want more sympathy for, if you travel in this vein.
Reblogged this on American Pipe Dreams and commented:
YES
Seriously cry me a river. Men get defined by there relationship with women all the time. Someone’s husband, father or son. Alllll the time. Sick of feminists in today’s culture. You guys honestly have enough I think you’ll be ok. Everyone knows you’re people and you may not get treated equally everywhere, but then there’s places men don’t get treated equal to women. Get. The. Fuck. Over. It.
Seriously cry me a river. Sick of men in today’s culture. You guys honestly have enough I think you’ll be ok. Stop getting so damn defensive, nobody’s attacking your penis. Have you even read about this case? Feminism is needed to ensure young kids who get raped and humiliated aren’t blamed for being raped and humiliated. It’s not about criticizing you, it’s not even ABOUT you. Get. The. Fuck. Over. It.
That’s not true. You don’t hear people say “Don’t murder because that guy is someone’s father/brother/husband.” You hear, “Don’t murder.” Full stop.
You’ve got to be kidding. I have no trouble defining men by their relationships. And yes men and boys are victumized too. However look at the numbers. 1 out of 3 girls, 1 out of 6 boys. 50% of women have had some type of violence prepetrated on them. I too think we have enough, enough work, enough being taken advantage of, enough of men thinking they are helping women rather than just assuming their fair shar of house hold tasks, enough of having what ever women accomplish being treated dismissively, enough of women attributing their sucess to luck or ease of task while men attribute their sucess to being due to their personal qualities (talent, hard work, skill) enough of wome attributing their failures to personal qualities (not having talent, not working hard enough, not having skills, enough of men attributing their failures to it being unfair, unrealistically difficult, enough already!
John,
Walk in my shoes for a day, no a week, and I’ll gladly walk in yours. But first learn what feminism is all about. Maybe it’s about time we (men & women) were treated equally in All situations, then we All (You & Me) could get the fuck- your word- over ‘it’.
i agree that men are defined by their relationships. and defining a woman as a ‘mother, wife or sister’ but the huge inequalities that women in society experience are not just something we should ‘get the fuck over.’ people should never made to be felt that they have less worth due to their gender, sexuality, race or culture.
Oh John, the ignorance of this post is astounding. Read a book, a news article, read the paper. Women are paid, on average, 80% of a man’s wage in our “culture” and time. We have enough… so you think we’re ok? Do we have what you have? No. Then it’s not enough. Please do me a favour and name a few locations that men are not treated equally to women (suggesting that they are treated worse…). I can’t name one, literally. The sexism is our developed nations is alive and well. I was denied a career once because I was of “baby making age”. I’m going to hazard to guess that you will never have that pill to swallow. I am a “bitch” because I am assertive, men are “good managers”. This being said, I don’t know that I agree with the article, but I do hate reading sexist posts by a man that thinks he’s against “feminism”, not “women” as a whole.
I’ve found “what if it was your [insert relative here]” to be largely ineffective anyway. People with the sort of mindset we are trying to repair already think of their own circle of family and friends as being immune to rape. *Their* daughter wouldn’t drink, or go to a party like that. *Their* wife wouldn’t allow themselves to be in a room alone with a potential rapist. There’s already a fully-formed fantasy structure in their belief system that prevents them from seeing their own kind in the role of victim.
The most effective way I’ve found to bring the subject matter home to these people is to frame it around their own ANUS. “So what you’re saying is that she shouldn’t have been drunk. So, if you got drunk at a party, it would be okay for someone you barely know to push your shorts aside and stick his finger into your rectum? Maybe push a dildo in there and post some pictures on twitter for you to see in the morning… But you were the one who did the drinking, right? So your sphincter is totally fair game to penetrate–you should just expect it.”
It’s amazing how quickly they go from self-righteous to horrified.
Now, that’s a good one. It gets the point across in an easy to understand way.
Tell the boys/men they shouldn’t get drunk, or wear the wrong thing, or they might get raped and get blamed for it.
Women just have to get used to the simple fact that their brains are smaller. They are smart but not as smart as men. I’m not saying rape is right I’m simply saying that once you start demonising woman’s rights activists like Obama you have contradicted your argument. It’s all right though your brain is a little bit smaller than his.
Sarah, it’s weird to me that your email address has the name Corey in it. Are you sure you’re actually a woman who is telling other women that their brains are smaller than men’s?
You’re a fucking genius Sarah. Bless your heart.
Dude Sara, your email address has “corey” in it?
I’m not sure what’s more shocking. That you think you have to use your REAL email address when filling out the email field or that you put your real name in the email address you used to fill out the email field.
A lesson in internet 101: xxx@xxx.com is sufficient. RegExs are used to identify whether the email field is filled with some shit that has taken on an email format. it’s not running your exact email address against existence…
But then, my tiny brain just might not be aware of your entire master plan. Please tell me again about how much more intelligent you are than I.
I hear what this article is saying but I feel that, in essence, the writer is missing the point and that this ultimately makes the main point of her article essentially redundant.
Firstly, women are people and are important and valuable in their own right. Rape is never okay. We shouldn’t need to communicate either of these things but, unfortunately, we do seem to need to.
However, the article seems to be primarily based on reacting to the idea of somebody asking another person to, “Imagine if [the potential rape victim] was your sister, or your daughter, or your wife. Imagine how badly you would feel if this happened to a woman that you cared about.”
The author claims that this kind of approach fails to humanise the victim and instead reinforces the notion that women are only important because of their relationship with others/men. I think that the author has it wrong.
It is a very well known and demonstrated fact in moral philosophy and psychology that “distance” (psychologically, symbolically, or even sometimes physically) between yourself and those who are the recipients of the consequences of your actions will impact the sense of moral gravity in those actions. Consider whether you are more likely to give $20 to help a friend or local versus how compelled you might feel to give that same $20 to a person in a distant country. Consider how difficult it might be to train a soldier to kill somebody through strangulation versus training them to kill using remotely operated drones. Consider how much harder it might be to save a group of 10 children on a railway track by physically pushing an unknown man in front of a runaway cart rather than saving the children simply by redirecting the runaway cart via a control lever even though the same unknown man might be standing on the side track.
This is not a comment about whether women are people and deserve to be valued and respected in their own right (which they do). This is simply explaining that human moral intuition tends to operate in a particular manner. Because of the way that our moral intuition tends to operate, people naturally gravitate towards giving advice that appeals to that intuition. By making a potential rapist see women in context and, importantly, encouraging them to empathise with or associate the victim with others psychologically closer to the potential rapist, the potential rapist is more likely to feel the moral force of their actions and be less likely to commit the crime. This won’t stop people who are truly psychopathic but it may deter people with more ordinary psychological profiles.
Except wife, sister, and daughter aren’t gender specific to say – women have wives, sisters, and daughters. Humanizing victims is a rhetorical technique and there are way worse ones. Please think before you speak and stop looking for things to be upset about.
I still am resisting the idea that using the appeal to empathy–reminding folks that the victims of rape are PEOPLE THEY KNOW, i.e., wives, mothers, daughters–is somehow a bad thing.
A recent poll found that 14% of people now supportive of gay marriage said they had changed their minds on the subject. Why? The most commonly cited reason for the change of heart–offered by 33% of respondents–is that they know someone who is gay (http://www.people-press.org/2013/03/20/growing-support-for-gay-marriage-changed-minds-and-changing-demographics/)
As long as rape is something that people can consider “other” to their lives, something that happens to “those other people”–whether “it will never happen to me” or “my female friend/relative/co-worker is a good girl so this would never happen to her” or whatever–then we will see no effective changes to public attitudes towards rape and thus no changes to rape culture.
We can say all day long that people OUGHT TO already consider these people as human/humanized, but the simple reality is that humans as a species, like other primates, are most connected to people in our in-group. To make the faceless millions of rape survivors REAL to most people, we are FORCED to use such devices as the appeal to empathy: “Imagine how you would feel if YOU had been raped. How would you feel if YOUR mother, YOUR sister, YOUR daughter, YOUR friend had been raped?”
Utopias are all nice and well, if you are a philosopher. Those of us in the trenches, however, are not dealing with Platonic ideals. We are dealing with basically selfish apes who worry most about their own needs, followed by the needs of their close associates. It is to these people–the everyday “Joes” and “Jills” who are blissfully unaware that they KNOW victims of rape–that we must make the appeal to empathy.
At the same time, it’s extremely helpful to “come out of the shame closet” on rape as a survivor and TELL the people in your in-group the general details. If they are open to hearing it and you can do so, tell them a little about the real and painful effects on a rape survivor. This is the only effective way to change minds and make the problem real to everyone.
I’m a rape survivor. I fight Complex PTSD every damn day. And after thirty years of silence, I am silent no more.
Did you know that 80% of rapists know their victims? Clearly a close relationship with someone vulnerable to rape doesn’t stop it. Men rape the women in their lives, and men they know as well (i.e. junior teammates) not just strangers but people with whom they already have or have had a relationship.
At this point men will have the most influence on other men to stop rape when they openly and clearly acknowledge that it isn’t okay to rape or take advantage of anyone at anytime under any circumstances. We are all related and equal by being in the same universe together.
How we use our language does change our perceptions. If we need to imagine a victim as someone else in order to have empathy, perhaps we should imagine it being ourselves.
Hell. Yes.
Sing it.
As much as I agree that attempts to marginalize ANY group or sub-group of people are lazy and harmful to society I also feel that the larger point is being missed. Arguing amongst ourselves is as pointless as the circle of congratulation that occurs when something goes our way, Talk to the ignorant, rant at them if you need to but remember; if you need to first teach the language the lesson has already been lost. Simplification of a set to teach an important lesson is not necessarily marginalization. I am offended by ignorance and the miss use of language every day but I rarely let that get in the way of trying to provide a positive influence through my own actions and speech.
I totally support everything she wrote here! She just pulled the splinter out.
This blog is fantastic. I hate how they’re portraying this crime, it’s awful. I love your point about how women are characterized as humans only if they have a relationship to another, it’s complete bull shit. You’re awesome.
I would be doing myself an injustice if I didn’t play devils advocate for one second… 🙂 (and can I also preface this with I am also a bit of a feminist?)
The little boy who was killed today in Maine by his father’s own plow truck.. He was someone’s son, possibly someone’s brother, and someday maybe, someone’s father. THAT is how humans (both men and women) feel pain, by empathizing as if that person were “one of their own”.. The statement does not define that 6 year old boy, just as the “someone’s mother, sister, daughter” does not define that poor girl, or make her rape any less real and/or disgusting. Humanizing that girl does not make her any less of a person; it makes her someone close to us, to you, and to me.
My initial reaction to this blog was offense (obviously)… This horrific act, this poor girl, and the sad lack of justice served, should NOT make her a poster child, or fodder for, someone else’s personal views, on feminism or anything else for that matter.
End rant. 🙂
AMEN!!!!!!
Hm. I see what you’re saying. You certainly got me riled up. Yeah! I said. I’m not just someone’s daughter, sister, etc. But then, I am. That’s what I fight for: for the closeness of real intra-personal relationships, and the hope that one day our empathy will expand beyond our immediate relationships. Yes, I suppose the language does have to change a bit, but it’s the weight behind our words that really must change. This is a real opportunity to bring forward all women. In my posting on the subject, (https://thisgrowingup.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/consentissexy/) I quoted Candy Crowley, who asked on CNN, “What’s the lasting effect, though, on two young men, being found guilty in juvenile court of . . . rape, essentially.” Then I asked what would have been the lasting effect, on every teenage girl in the country if they had not been found guilty. This is where we need to focus our anger and support. Small though it may be, this conviction is a victory, because it was not swept under the rug or ignored all together. There are very real, if arguably non-sufficient consequences here. Not everyone has built in morality. Some (maybe most of us) need societal pressures, and these high school boys needed to see that society does not condone this behavior, that it is not okay. Rape is a difficult subject. Dad’s don’t tell their sons not to rape anyone. The more it is in the news, in our blogs, in our everyday lives, the better. And I think to exclude the language of human connection (perhaps add simple genderless terms like friend or co-worker), would do a disservice to forward momentum. May I also say that “women are only important when a man loves them” seems to forget that women are the sisters, daughters and wives of women, too. I appreciate your anger, but think such a strong voice can be used more effectively without becoming semantically stuck.
You’re an idiot. This article is not only ridiculous and unfounded, but supports the separation of gender by blaming men for using simple terms of phrase when referencing women. Yes rape is wrong for all people you ignoramus, but statistically women are the more sexually assaulted gender. I wouldn’t say “the world is at war” if I was actually referring to the U.S and Iraq. This person does not speak for my gender.
My friend posted this on Facebook and I read with interest, intending to share the article, until the crux of the argument came to light. I haven’t read all the other comments but briefly glanced at one that seems to correlate with my point of view, so apologies for any redundancies in my comment:
While the whole Steubenville case is horrible, disturbing, disgusting, scary and sad, I think you’re missing the point that they use the ‘wives, daughters, sisters’ thing to make insensitive people think that something bad could happen to someone they care about. It’s a way of getting people to see a connection to the humanity around them. You could say it’s a way to make stupid men (or insensitive women) wake up.
This isn’t the only case where people use this method: e.g. if someone is cruel to someone in another way (many kinds of bigoted behaviour, as a vague example) – people might tell them ‘that could happen to you one day, too’ (poverty, maiming/disfiguring accident etc.) – it makes people think that bad things can potentially blight the lives of anyone and they people they affect can be randomly ‘selected’.
Because, as much as some men think it’s OK to treat women like dirt, if someone else did that to their mother, wife, sister …. they’d be on the war path. (Think of any formerly-womanising man who later has a daughter… it’s so cliched but I think you can see what I am saying.) I don’t think it’s a way to say something like: ‘rape truck stop prostitutes because they probably don’t have any family’. That was a short-sighted argument, taking things far too literally and making for a very small view of the situation. I don’t think that women are defined exclusively by their relationships to men or other women.
I don’t think the wives, sisters, daughters argument necessarily works, even though those boys were crying in their mommies’ arms in the courthouse – it’s clear that there might be some women in their lives they don’t treat like objects but maybe that’s just because they don’t want to sexually assault their own mother (so there are some taboos that remain).
i am
I have been reading about this…and I in no way feel sorry for these boys. I DO however, get VERY upset about the VICTIM. I’m sorry, but she was 16 years old and SO drunk that she couldn’t remember what happened to her the night before? She ONLY knew she had been assaulted because she saw it on a social media site? Are you freaking kidding me? Someone needs to explain to this girl that if you are going to hold others responsible for their actions, you have to be responsible for your own. She NEVER should have been drinking like that. I don’t want to hear that I am blaming the victim, because I’m not. No matter how drunk she was, they should not have touched her. BUT, there is NO reason for her to have been drinking to the point where she could have DIED from it. She needs to have self respect and self responsibility, and not do things to herself that could result in injury or death WITHOUT anyone else’s involvement. Kids these days just don’t understand or accept consequences.
Okay, and now that I’m on a roll, I have one more thing to say. I was raped. I was viciously and angrily raped by a man who broke into my apartment. This girl wasn’t. She got finger banged. She doesn’t have the risk of pregnancy or STD, and dshe doesn’t even know if she wanted to do it, because she doesn’t remember it. She only knows about it because others told her. Legally, it is considered a “rape” but in reality, IT IS NOT. What happened to me, was rape. it is NOT the same thing.
That’s awfully cruel and dismissive of you, isn’t it? Who are you to define what rape is or isn’t? Any unwanted sexual contact against a person’s will can be considered rape or molestation, and as a victim of it yourself, you shouldn’t judge this poor girl so harshly.
Powerful woman, I am sorry that you had the experience you had. I hope that you were were able to find good counseling and support after your experience.
The details of the Stuebenville girl’s rape are in the court documents and the boys were convicted of rape, so according to the law she was raped. To my understanding all undesired, unconsensual sexual penetration is rape. Sadly rape has many ugly forms.
Comparing the degrees of assault may not serve the purpose you would may desire, but there is no denying your anger and outrage at what happened to you. I imagine it has made you an even more powerful woman than you already are.
Though you were doing nothing wrong, nothing society could find fault with when you were raped, there may have been a time in your life when you were in her vulnerable situation, but no one took advantage of you.
This thing of equality causes girls to want to experience the freedom of abandon and release from inhibition that alcohol brings, just as the boys do. Everyone reacts differntly to alcohol, and unfortunately one of the things it inhibits in our brains is our good judgment. There is also the possibility that she appeared “so drunk” because she was drugged by someone else.
I am sure that the power within you can also find compassion for this young girls mistakes, but you may still need to fully heard yourself again, even if you already had therapy and counseling.
The national Rape Crisis hotline 1.800.656.HOPE is staffed by trained adcovates who are always available to listen to and validate your experience, even if it is something that is triggering a previous assault that happened weeks, months or years ago.
I know that my comment will be lost in this but here it is…
I get the point that is being made, but really… who would hear that rhetorical statement and think that? Who hears that and is getting the message that rape is only wrong if someone is there to be angry for or who values the victim? I think it’s a bit reaching.
I don’t think using that phrase is a failed attempt at humanizing the victim… I think it’s an excellent way to humanize the perpetrator… to bring them back into the mindset that women ARE people… people that are very possibly being cared for by a husband, brother or father. As I’ve read above in some shared opinions, it’s reminding the perpetrator of the feelings they may have for someone in their own life.
Otherwise, I too am disgusted by the thought that the boys’ lives were ended when the judge declared them guilty… Their lives ended when they decided to defile and rape that girl.
I do. My brother used that argument against me in a discussion about pacifism (what if someone wants to kill our sister and you are holding a gun?). It is not an argument because the act itself is a crime. If this is the reason why someone doesn’t decide to rape someone else, they haven’t learned a thing. (sorry for bad english)
The first time I heard the words, “what if she was your daughter” with regard to this story, was from a young woman on the tape confronting a young man bragging about the rape. She was effectively searching for some compassion by asking the question. I think she was searching for an answer, “how could you be so cold as to think the gang rape of this young lady is something to be proud of and brag about?” Please people, teach your children to care for others and respect each other. I think the girl that asked the question is on the right track. Where is the compassion for others in these young people?
Reblogged this on Shail's Nest and commented:
Yes indeed.
Empathy should be automatic, and a modicum of decency (at least enough to NOT RAPE SOMEONE) should be automatic toward any human being, even if they are not wife, mother, sister, etc.
That being said, their sentences were fairly light given that I’ve had clients be sent to out-of-state reformatories for much, much less. But I guess they weren’t “gifted” enough athletes?
I like your blog, by the way.
This was a rape case. That 16 year old girl is not a suffering, oppressed woman, and we do not live in the world of decades passed where women are oppressed. I, for one, as a man am insulted that you turn a rape into a women’s rights issue. This is not the issue here. The issue is not “its hard for women, and how dare the media attack this girl because shes a woman”. The sympathy the media portrays for these boys has NOTHING to do with their genders. It has to do with the fact that, despite the fact that EVERYONE (the girl included) made some poor choices on the night in question, those boys are now suffering their entire lives because of a mistake they made while intoxicated. While that girl cannot be held responsible for the actions the boys chose to take while she was unconscious and unable to consent, she does have some responsibility for the events leading up to the rape. It simply is idiotic of her, or anyone, to think that she can get blackout drunk, throw herself at some hormonal teenage boys and nothing will happen to her. If you believe that’s not a precarious situation then you are an idiot. She knew the dangers of the situation. And while no one can consent for her passed out on her behalf, I believe its prudent to look at how she ended up passed out. Of her own volition. The media simply seems to think its unfair for those boys to suffer such a harsh punishment for a situation that arose from events that weren’t entirely their fault.
Now, I don’t see anywhere in that whole explanation that says “this happened because of misogyny.
Take your feminist drivel elsewhere. True cases of violence against women strictly for their gender are out there. Maybe you should be focusing your attention on that instead of crying “hate crime” over this case.
Take my feminist drivel elsewhere? Like, away from this page which, you do understand, is my own personal blog? Oh okay then. Sorry to have contaminated your internets, friend.
You know, it’s funny. Because if those boys hadn’t decided to rape her, she never would have been raped, and would have been passed out the whole night! Alcohol doesn’t rape anyone. People do.
And yet you think it’s not entirely their fault… do you really think that these “hormonal males” are so incapable of controlling themselves? Do you, as a man, think that if there was an innocent woman unable to help herself, that you would just absolutely be incapable of controlling your terrible desires and you would just rape her?
2salty4me
Why do you assume that the woman is the “wife, sister or daughter” or a man? She could be any or all of those things of a woman too/instead.
this is fantastic! i hope you don’t mind, but i have included a link to this post on my own blog, and on a blog a colleague and i are working on collaboratively. inspired by recent postings and blogs regarding the events at Steubenville, we’ve (my colleague and friend, Erin Easley) put together a blog site centered on opening a space to talk about rape and rape culture. featuring voices from graduate and undergraduate students across America, international academics, scholars, and more, please check it out, and if interested, PLEASE contact me (malarid@me.com) about contributing! we want to hear your voices. we need to hear them. they MUST be heard. and follow us!!! thank you for this wonderful post!
the first post is up. check it out:
http://freemymanhood.wordpress.com
http://voicesspeakingout.wordpress.com
“Imagine how badly you would feel if this happened to a woman that you cared about”
Remove “woman” from this sentence, and replace with “person”, then adjust the following arguments accordingly. Does this entire blog post still hold water? …Well, yes. It does. In fact, it’s better than before now, because now, it’s not mysandrist.
It’s 2013 and people are still just as selfish as ever!
I’m afraid that’s the point you’re missing. Just because we have high-speed Internet, an African American President, and more people going to college than ever in history, that doesn’t make the human race more civilized than it ever has been or ever will be. On the inside, people are just as bad as they always have been.
Some are really bad. Those who would commit rape or murder.
Others are just bad for not caring enough when it happens to someone they don’t care about.
I completely agree with you in term of ideals. People are people, and it shouldn’t matter who they are — whether they are man or woman or neither — we should care about them because they are people.
But we don’t. Or at least, very few of us do. And it has nothing to do with society. Nothing to do with not being educated or enlightened enough to know right from wrong. Nothing to do with the kind of figures of speech that we use.
Most importantly, this is not a feminist issue! People are selfish. They care primarily about themselves, and possibly a few other people in this world who are close to them. But how many people care about the faceless stranger who becomes a victim?
Women care about rape because it’s something that could happen to them.
To get men to care about rape, you have to remind them that it’s something that could happen to someone they do care about.
Forget about this notion of “rape culture”. How about the narcissism culture? That’s the real culprit. People caring too much about themselves rather than caring about others. Even the Golden Rule is telling you to care about someone else’s well-being, simply because you care about yourself. How is that any better than “wives, sisters and daughters”?
Reblogged this on The Arkside of Thought.
A few points
1. I really disdain the term “rape culture” because it is a mutualizing term. Women, for the most part (only 2% of sexualized violent crimes are perpetrated by females and 80% of those are because they are an accomplice to a male committing the crimes). So we don’t have “rape culture” we have “male rape culture”
2. stop making women feel that being wives and mothers or daughters is an “essentialist” or shameful thing. I CHOOSE to be a mother, though I have never been a wife and I lvoe it!
Reblogged this on Life as a Side Project and commented:
“I have value because I am a person. Full stop. End of argument. This isn’t even a discussion that we should be having.
So please, let’s start teaching that fact to the young women in our lives. Teach them that you love, honour and value them because of who they are. Teach them that they should expect to be treated with integrity because it’s a basic human right. Teach them that they do not deserve to be raped because no one ever, ever, ever deserves to be raped.
Above all, teach them that they are people, too.”
i fully agree that we need to raise up our women with as must self-respect as we can engender in them, but that won’t stop rape.
Men who come from rage and insecurity about themselves who haven’t had respect for women socialized into them, will use power & control to overpower any woman, to get whatever momentary sense of superiority that gives them, and when doing so as with these Stuebenville rapists will feel entitled to commit these crimes, as did the other paricipants and observers; so entitled they won’t even think what they are doing is a crime until they are caught, convicted, sentenced and are serving time, and even then they may beleive they’ve been mistreated. Especially young men who are put on pedastals with a false sense of entitlement that makes them not think about laws and other people, and if they do think, they think they are above the law.
Reblogged this on Apttravelgroup – Công ty du lịch APT and commented:
you gomy blog
Reblogged this on She Flies with her Own Wings and commented:
Taking it one step further to where it needs to be.