We demand that women live in fear and behave impeccably to avoid 'asking for it'

[niyad]

We demand that women live in fear and behave impeccably to avoid 'asking for it'
Kate Harding

In an extract from her book, author Kate Harding explains how women order their lives around the fear of rape – and of being blamed for not preventing it.


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The author, Kate Harding, spent years researching and defining “rape culture”. Photograph: Patty Michels



One summer night, while I was working on my book, my friend Molly walked her greyhound over to my house for a writing date. Earlier that day, my husband had driven to Indianapolis on business, so Molly and I sat in my living room with our dogs and our laptops, drinking tea and clacking away for hours. It was lovely.

Around 11pm, Molly asked me for a lift home, per our usual routine when she visits my apartment, about a mile away from hers. But when I went to grab the car keys, they were missing. I checked all of my pockets and a couple of purses, to no avail.
. . . .





This is why I have no patience for anyone who insists that women must learn self-defense moves and memorize lists of specious advice to prevent our own victimization. We’re already calculating risks and taking reasonable precautions every day. We don’t often talk about that in public, though, lest we be accused of letting fear control our lives, of being completely irrational about the relatively minor statistical risk of being attacked by a stranger.

It’s a maddening catch-22. If we get assaulted while walking alone in the dark, we’re told we should have used our heads and anticipated the danger. But if we’re honest about the amount of mental real estate we devote to anticipating danger, then we’re told we’re acting like crazy man-haters, jumping at shadows and tarring an entire gender with the brush that rightly belongs to a relatively small number of criminals.
. . .

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/17/kate-harding-asking-for-it-extract-rape-culture

[malthaussen]

1. Doesn't much matter if you do.

Stipulate the existence of such a paragon who lives exactly in the approved manner -- she may still run afoul of any number of pitfalls, and once she does, she's damned with the rest. The point, I'm afraid, is that you're supposed to be invisible unless I happen to want something from you -- whether sandwich or sex, they are of equal value.

Although I suppose you are also to be visible as objects of status to prove how manly your owner is. Seen but not heard, perhaps? Definitely not heard.

-- Mal

[niyad]

2. DEFINTELY not heard!

[A Little Weird]

3. I will have to look for that book

Another excerpt:

This ubiquitous idea that, by controlling our behavior, appearance and whereabouts, we can keep ourselves from being raped does nothing to help women (let alone potential victims who aren’t women). It merely takes the onus off the rest of society to seriously consider what we can all do to prevent sexual violence. It keeps our focus on what the victims did “wrong” instead of on what type of person rapes, or how he chooses his victims, or how we can prosecute sexual assaults more effectively. It trades on reductive, sexist ideas about how “good” and “bad” women behave and strongly suggests that some victims, frankly, had it coming.

[malthaussen]

4. Thought about control

After reading this I was ruminating about the need for control. I've always been slightly unsatisfied with the idea that it is ultimately about schadenfreude, about keeping other people down. Yes, that's a great part of it, but it seemed to me that was incomplete.

If you read Tom Wolfe's book about the first astronauts, he relates how the test pilots reacted to the death of one of their own: they would meet and mourn, of course, but spend the whole time criticizing his flying and trying to figure out "what he did wrong." This was very frustrating to their wives, and finally one of the most outspoken of them said "What was he supposed to do? The plane broke!" Sad to say, the pilots just looked at her blankly -- and went on telling each other what the dead man should have done.

Considering this, it occurs to me that, for the ambitious people at the top of the food chain, the illusion of absolute control of their whole environment is critical, perhaps necessary, for them to succeed. There's an old saying in the infantry that you don't need to worry about the bullet with your name on it, what you need to worry about is the one that says "to whom it may concern." The test pilots have to believe they are masters of their own fate, that their lives don't depend on a simple roll of the dice, because if they did, they'd never have the courage to get into the cockpit in the first place. I'm sure examples could be multiplied, but these are the ones that came to mind as I was thinking about the subject. What this means, depressingly, is that it is possible that the authoritarian patriarchal need for control and dominance isn't personal at all, but a trait that is necessary to function. And naturally, one that spills over into all other considerations, eating up everything and anything in its path, wholly impersonally, like the proverbial black hole.

Obviously, depersonalizing some other one is useful if one wants to exploit, abuse, or otherwise injure them in pursuit of some goal. Redqueen and I once had a little chat about a rape thread in Reddit: it was a forum for rapists to describe their feelings about raping. Many of the men noted that they didn't want to look at the woman's face while they were raping her, which suggests that depersonalization, in some cases at least, is an important component in raping someone. Going back to war for a moment, some units in Vietnam would take new soldiers off somewhere and have them mutilate and abuse dead bodies, with the idea that this dehumanization would serve to "harden" the recruits to the work of killing people, since despite society's best efforts, our young soldiers are still often squeamish about the actual killing part. The point is, this is necessary, or perceived as necessary, it isn't just some accidental bloody-mindedness. If this need for control is a necessary component of success (as we define it), then maybe we need to forget about changing it, and just focus on damage control.

-- Mal