emanix: (Default)
[personal profile] emanix


Normally I don't pay much attention to uber-feminists who keep telling me we live in a 'rape culture'. Before anyone gets shouty at me, I am aware that there are men out there who think they have rights to womens bodies, just because they are men and we are women, and that they are very wrong. There are also people out there who think that if you are a man then it's fair game to beat the crap out of you for no reason*. There are shitty people out there, full stop, and pulling the 'I'm a better person than you because I do/don't do x' card that I've noted certain people doing in this context is unlikely to help. Leading by example works. Leading by shouting at people, unless you are in the army, or telling them that they should/shouldn't do xyz, generally does not.

However I just found myself wading into the comment thread of a sociology journal - I won't link unless anyone's really desperate to weigh in. The comment thread is long, full of unrelated crap, and I'm sure Godwin's law will be invoked at any moment.

Anyway... the bit that made me think, was one man, a self-defined 'nice guy', who gave the following response to being questioned (politely, if a bit self-righteously) about what he personally had done to stop rape - had he taken direct action?:

"All the fucking time, I don’t mean to flame but FUCK YOU of course I stand up against sexism, express ‘anti rape sentiments’ and don’t associate with people that have contrary opinions (Jesus what sort of people do you know? The kind of men I hang out with don’t need to be reminded of our anti-rape consensus)

Of course I do, fuck you you fucking bag of shit, and I don’t need some random website you just googled** to help me do it"


So, two things occurred to me on reading this.

Firstly, that ‘fuck you’ is a threat of non-consensual sex, which ought to be pretty inappropriate anywhere, but the fact that this was in a thread about an anti-rape campaign really brought home to me how awful that is as a thing to say. That it's thrown into a conversation casually is a clear demonstration of how ingrained the idea of rape is in our culture – because it’s deemed normal to use a phrase like that.
We're supposed to accept that someone saying 'fuck you' is not *actually* going to fuck us, that it's an expression of anger, but using it that way implies that it's okay to use 'fuck' as an expression of anger. Isn't that only a small step away from saying it's okay to actually fuck someone as an expression of anger? Words come with associations, and associations come with thought patterns, and... this is not okay.

The second thing that occurred to me was when I tried to respond to the inappropriateness of the comment by suggesting an alternative phrase that the commenter could have used. A phrase that sufficiently demonstrated the extremity of feeling, without implying rape. What made me shudder was that I couldn't. My mind threw up 'screw you', 'bugger that', 'fuck off' (which at least gives the recipient the option of choosing another partner to fuck off with, but still isn't great) - all still either implying rape or just plain sex-negative. Now perhaps I'm stuck in a rut because of the sheer power of association, so help me out here. (NB. I'm not too keen on references to Hell/Heaven/God/Devil etc. either, as a mostly-atheist, and would really rather steer clear of using religious words on principle.)
So without using religious or sex-related words, and other than resorting to a rather puny 'I'm offended by that' or similarly wussy phrasing, how would you suggest this guy gets his point across the next time he wants to rant at someone?

Do we really have no emotive language that doesn't resort to sex-negativity or God, or am I just too distracted to recall it?



*I don't have the figures, but I believe that statistically, on venturing into public, women are more likely to get raped, whereas men are more likely to get murdered. Neither is okay in any way, but if I had to choose, I'd choose to live.

**The linked website doesn't actually seem to exist, so I haven't included this either.

Date: 2010-03-06 06:04 pm (UTC)
mair_in_grenderich: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mair_in_grenderich
... but what was the tone of that thankyou? ;-)

Date: 2010-03-06 06:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] emanix.livejournal.com
LOL! Entirely un-sarcastic, that one. :)

Not seen you in ages, life good?

Date: 2010-03-08 08:52 pm (UTC)
mair_in_grenderich: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mair_in_grenderich
life is indeed good! currently staying on a enid blyton farm in the isles of scilly and baking lots of cake. not much to complain about there :)

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