Evidence-Based Rape/Abuse Avoidance

I’m going to have to put Disclaimers on this post, because people are terrible. Absolutely nothing you do ever makes being raped your fault; rape and abuse are 100% the fault of rapists, not of survivors. If someone is using this, or anything else I write, to victim-blame survivors, they are doing it wrong. Got it? Okay.

If you were socialized female, you probably got a lot of advice about how not to be raped. Don’t wear slutty clothes. Don’t get drunk. Keep an eye on your drink. Don’t walk around late at night, especially not alone or in a “bad neighborhood.” Keep a rape whistle with you. Hold your keys between your fingers so you can stab a rapist in the eye. Don’t wear a ponytail (apparently rapists will use it to hold your hair back while they rape you). Yell “fire” instead of “rape” if you’re raped (???). Et cetera.

This advice is terrible for a lot of reasons. A lot of it is based less on empirical evidence and more on patriarchal theories about what sort of women get raped (drunk sluts) and why they get raped (dude was so horny he couldn’t help himself). It limits women’s ability to participate in routine activities like going to a bar, walking home from the bus stop at night, or wandering around shirtless after Rocky Horror. (Maybe that last one’s just me.) It concentrates on preventing stranger rape, which is only a third of all rapes. Much of the advice requires women to be constantly afraid. A lot of the advice involves making yourself less vulnerable to rape, which is less “rape prevention” and more “how to make sure they rape the other girl.” And, once again, there is no evidence that most of it actually works.

(This is all much better than the advice I got about how to prevent abusive relationships, which was mostly “don’t date a guy who hits you.” In other news, you can cure obesity by losing weight and poverty by earning more money.)

The standard feminist advice is what I’d call the Schrodinger’s Rapist/creepiness advice: “if you get a weird vibe from a dude, you don’t have to talk to him. Dudes, this is how you can prevent women getting a weird vibe from you.” This is actually much better advice than the standard advice, since it at least acknowledges that the key variable in whether a rape happens is the presence of a rapist. Also, people do not have to spend time with people they don’t want to spend time with, and “I get a weird vibe from you” is a perfectly legitimate reason not to want to talk to someone (although don’t be an asshole about it). However, I think it still suffers from some fatal flaws.

—”Schrodinger’s Rapist” is really poorly named, because the initial blogpost focuses on interactions between men and women in public. I mean, sure, in a dark alley “fuck dude’s gonna rape me” is a worry, but if a strange dude approaches me while I’m presenting female and on a bus, my concern is not that he’s Schrodinger’s Rapist, it’s that he’s Schrodinger’s Dude Who Lectures Me For Thirty Minutes About How Reading Instead Of Talking To Him Means I’m An Elitist Bitch.

Anyway, fatal flaws with the “creepiness” model. It assumes that rape and abuse are things women have to fear from men, as opposed to things that people have to fear from people; this is unfair to men, as well as giving abusive and rapey women a free pass. It assumes that people have a gut feeling about who’s creepy or a threat (hi, anxiety issues, I’m scared of everyone, your model does not work for me). It assumes that people’s gut feelings are fair and accurate, instead of influenced by classist, racist, ableist, and transmisogynistic social forces.

Fortunately, we can solve this problem, because as it happens people have been doing empirical research about the traits of abusers and rapists for like two decades! (Of course, not all rapists or abusers show all or, indeed, any of those traits, and some people show these traits and are not rapists or abusers. Nothing can zero out your risk of being raped or abused; it can only reduce it. And what level of risk you accept is ultimately your decision: whatever level of risk you’re comfortable with is right for you. I’m just providing information here.)

Disrespect of boundaries. If you say “no” to something and they don’t listen that is a GIANT RED FLAG OF REDNESS AND FLAGGINESS. Same for pushing boundaries.
Misogyny (for women assessing men), particularly anger at and desire to control/dominate women. Even something like appreciating sexist humor is correlated with likelihood to rape and is a (minor) red flag.
Hypermasculinity (again, for women assessing men).
Antisociality and lack of empathy.
Impulsiveness.
Rape- or abuse-justifying beliefs.
Gaslighting, even if relatively minor.
Excessive jealousy or anger.
Constantly criticizing you or putting you down.
Tries to get you to quit your hobbies or stop talking to your friends or family.
Conversely, seems way too good to be true.
Blames their previous relationships’ failure on their partners.
History of committing abuse or rape. (I mean, duh?)

I feel like listing them out most of the red flags are… really really obvious? Stay away from absurdly horrible people, they are more likely to abuse or rape you! It is totally valid to be like “that person criticizes me a lot and doesn’t quite grasp the concept of ‘no,’ I am not going to spend time with them anymore.”

[ETA: a lot of people in the comments are like "where are the citations?" I was totally hoping I could get away without citations, but I cannot pull anything on you people. The answer is: I know this because I spent like a month reading hundreds of articles about rapist and abuser psychology and I am way too lazy to dig up all the articles I read. David Lisak, My Favorite Researcher In The Entire World, is a good place to start if you want to do your own research though.]

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Intro To Rape Culture, Or, Ozy Fangirls David Lisak

My boyfriend is confused about the concept of rape culture, which means I need to explain what rape culture is. Again.

For what it’s worth I don’t think it’s necessarily good to use the word “rape culture,” because people who aren’t feminists tend to respond to the word by saying “…but rape is illegal in our culture, everyone hates rape!” and then wander off assuming that feminists are rape-obsessed and probably hate sex.

The Problem

According to very respectable national research done by the American government, about 18% of women and 6% of men are raped over the course of their lifetimes. According to peer-reviewed psychological research, between 6% and 13% of men have committed rape. (As far as I’m aware no one has done similar research on female rapists.) That is a lot of rape.

Rape is also a really big problem. For instance, let’s take PTSD rate as a proxy for severity of trauma. Rape survivors have a higher PTSD rate than combat veterans, which suggests that being raped is actually more traumatizing than fucking combat.

Rape culture is the term for “the cultural forces that make the rape rate so fucking high.”

Why Rapists Rape

Nearly all the evidence about why (male) rapists rape is correlational– “huh, rapists seem to have Trait Y more than the general population, let’s try to reduce that.” (This blog post is a pretty good summary of the research. Yes, I could really replace this entire blog post with “go read the Yes Means Yes archives.”)

Rapists are more misogynistic than non-rapists (angrier at women, more likely to want to control them); therefore we stigmatize the hell out of misogyny, particularly those forms (like the treatment of women as machines that you get sexual gratification from) that seem likely to lead to rape. Rapists tend to have “toxic masculinity” traits such as lack of empathy, impulsiveness, and antisociality; therefore we advocate for a wider definition of masculinity. (I am not aware of research on how these apply to female or queer rapists because people tend to totally ignore female and queer rapists.)

Rapists are more likely to have rape-supportive beliefs, like “if a girl is raped when she’s drunk it’s at least a little her fault for letting things get out of hand” and “guys don’t intend to force sex on a girl, but sometimes they get a little carried away” and (presumably, there has not been research on this one) “if a man gets hard he’s consenting.” That is why we’re against victim-blaming: not just because it’s horrible to survivors (which, Jesus, isn’t that enough of a reason?), but because rapists believe victim-blaming ideas and it is reasonable to believe this is a causative factor in rape.

Rapists tend to test boundaries to see what people will assert them and what people will give in. There’s this whole idea that women need to be polite and kind and not make a fuss when their boundaries are violated, until they’re raped, at which point it’s “why didn’t you fight back? Why didn’t you say no loud enough?” (The linked Fugitivus post, btw, was my click moment about rape culture.) A lot of people also seem to have difficulty with the concept that men get boundaries at all. Therefore, feminists need to assert that boundaries matter and they matter everywhere– not just during sex, but during kissing and hugs and cuddling and tickling and conversation and what food you fucking eat. And that if someone does not respect your boundaries, they are not a good person and it is perfectly reasonable to be pissed.

Rapists tend to believe that their behavior is normal: that most men commit rape, or want to. That’s why we’re against things that normalize rape, including most rape jokes. Because Pat Not-A-Rapist thinks the joke is funny because haha it’s so absurd that anyone would think they and their friends are rapists, and Robin Rapist thinks it’s funny because that’s how they think the world actually works.

After a Rape

I have a friend who was raped fairly recently at our nice liberal-arts college full of hairy-legged feminists and dirty hippies. (I have her permission to tell this story.) She reflected that the worst part wasn’t the rape– it was that she can’t be friends with anyone who’s friends with her rapist anymore. They might invite him over to hang out and, well, if she told anyone that she was raped– even just to say “so please don’t invite my rapist over while we’re hanging out”– it would instantly spread everywhere and turn into a referendum about whether she was a lying whore.

See, everyone believes that rapists are evil! Rapists are horrible monsters. They probably have fangs or something. It’s just that people don’t like considering their friends horrible evil monsters. So a lot of people are going to hear “your friend raped me” and respond with “it was probably a misunderstanding” or “you just regretted it the next day” or “you’re a lying whore.”

This means that a lot of rapists experience no negative consequences for their rape whatsoever. It means that repeat rapists– who commit most rapes– continue to have access to a social group where they can rape people. It means that rape survivors don’t get the support they need.

This is why feminists are dicks about affirmative consent (other than the boundary stuff above). Because if the norm is “you don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t obviously want to have sex,” people cannot be like “well my friend probably just misunderstood the situation” and justify the commission of rape. Because we are the 95%, we are capable of telling when our partner does and does not want sex, we are not rapists, and we should not be giving social cover to rapists.

–A related but distinct kind of social cover for rapists, which I would be remiss to end the post without mentioning, is that of prison rape. A lot of people seem to accept that rape is a reasonable punishment for crime, which makes it harder to get political will to end prison rape. Some people even seem to believe that rape is a reasonable punishment for rape, which you would think would lead to this weird recursive thing where rapists are raped by people who are now rapists and have to be raped, and so on and so forth ad infinitem.

(I’m kind of dodging the justice system issue here, because I’m not a legal expert, and because while our justice system often treats rape survivors horribly it’s hard to imagine a justice system that simultaneously protects the mental health of the survivor and the rights of the accused. Anyway, we are not going to lock up ten percent or so of the male population. The solution to rape culture has to be a cultural change, not a legal change.)

Because it is apparently necessary that I link to every post on Yes Means Yes, I want to signal-boost this as a really good case study of rape culture in a particular community– namely, the BDSM community. The BDSM community is a really interesting group to look at because it’s about sex, so a lot of the dynamics that are hidden in other communities are out in the open.

So What Do I Do?

Don’t rape people. Okay, this shit is obvious, but I feel like it needs to be said anyway.
Respect people’s “no.” All the time. For everything. Without fussing about it.
Don’t say “no” when you don’t mean “no.” Again, I can’t believe I have to say this, but apparently some people are going about saying “no” when they don’t mean it and then everyone else is like “women! Sometimes they say no, but they don’t mean no, therefore I am totally justified in having sex with people who have said no!” So seriously, if you pull that shit, stop ruining it for everyone else. (You can do rape play if you want, but use a safeword.)
“Ask before touching people” is a really really good social norm. So is “ask before sex.” (I know this is stigmatized in some social groups– which is horrible and rape-culturey itself. But it’s still a good thing to do.)
Make it clear that you are part of the vast majority of people who are not rapists and that violating people’s consent, victim-blaming, misogyny, and so on are Not Okay. You do not have to lecture people about rape culture– I mean, I do, but that’s less anti-rape activism and more being a boring one-trick pony. But you can be like “dude not cool” when someone talks about how funny prison rape is or about getting women drunk to have sex with them.
Check in and, if necessary, rescue people if it looks like something skeezy or abusive is happening. (Examples of “skeezy or abusive”: person looks creeped out; one person is getting another person very drunk; someone has said “no” and the other person is trying to get them to do a thing anyway)
Believe survivors. I know, I know, some unknown (but small!) percentage of accusations of rape are false rape accusations. But like. It is not that hard to not invite a survivor and the person they accused to the same party, or to keep an eye on people accused of rape to see if they seem to be repeating it, or to provide support to a survivor, or to bluntly talk to someone about their behavior. And if someone has been accused of rape multiple times or has a history of being a gigantic boundary-violating creeper… seriously, you don’t have to be “innocent until proven guilty” on being friends with someone. Not being invited to parties is not a goddamned death sentence.

I mean. Nearly everything on this list is stuff that people I know– even people who aren’t super-aware of rape culture– do anyway, because they’re not douchebags and they’re not rapists. Because… really if there’s one takeaway point here, it’s that we are not rapists, we don’t approve of rape, and we need to stop fucking acting like we do.

Tumblr Is Terrible At Rape Statistics

Okay so this has been passed around Tumblr as proof that only 0.6% of rape allegations are false. (The report mentioned in the article is here.)

THAT IS NOT WHAT THE STATISTICS SAY. YOU PEOPLE ARE TERRIBLE AT STATISTICS.

In the period of the review, there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape and 35 for falsely accusing someone for rape. 35 is, in fact, 0.6% of 5,651. (The domestic violence numbers were starker: 111,891 prosecutions for DV and 6 for falsely accusing someone of DV, which is a percentage so small my calculator writes it in scientific notation.)

Obviously, being prosecuted for something and actually doing that thing are not the same thing. For instance, someone might retract an actually true accusation of domestic violence because they entered the honeymoon phase of an abusive relationship, and that would be classified as perverting the course of justice. On the other hand, someone might falsely accuse someone else of rape and end up sending that person to prison, and that would not be classified as perverting the course of justice.

In short, this data is completely consistent with the “women lie about rape all the time and the justice system believes them” theory. I mean. That’s a wrong theory, obviously. (18% of women and 6% of men in the US are raped over the course of their lifetime, according to anonymous surveys they have no reason to lie on; in order for a substantial number of rape accusations to be false you’d have to assume a ludicrously high rate of non-reporting.) It’s just that it isn’t disproven by this set of data.

It is very hard to precisely measure the exact number of false accusations of rape, because you end up stumbling on issues like “what counts as a false accusation?” The FBI stats count unfounded rape allegations, which in some jurisdictions might mean “the victim didn’t fight hard enough” or “the victim and the rapist had fucked before.” A lot of studies use police assessments of whether the accusation was false, which has… pretty much the same problem as “unfounded.” Lisak, who is my favorite person in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE to the point that occasionally I realize I am not Lisak and then feel like crying, classified as false 5.9% of rape accusations at one particular university, but that is hardly particularly good evidence for the non-university justice system.

So! We don’t actually know how many false rape accusations there are. Stop saying that we know. That is all.

Prudes’ Progress: Why Not Instrumental Sexuality?

[Part of the Response to Prudes' Progress series, mostly a response to this bit. Trigger warning for rape.]

Sex-positive feminists have this weird tendency to say “anything between consenting adults is okay!” That’s really dumb. Five minutes’ thought will reveal that consenting adults can have all kinds of unethical sex.

For instance: it is not ethical to cheat on your partner or have sex with someone who’s cheating on their partner. It is not ethical to bring a child into the world when you can’t make sure that it’s properly taken care of (whether through adoption or parenthood). Reproductive coercion is not ethical. (In fact, reproductive coercion is abusive behavior.) Lying to obtain sex is not ethical. Having sex with someone when you have reason to believe they will regret it (for instance, because they believe premarital sex is immoral or because they’re not ready to have sex yet) is not ethical. Not giving a fuck about your partner enjoying themselves* is not ethical. Obviously, reproductive coercion and rape are far worse than having sex with someone who might regret it or not caring about your partner enjoying themselves, but these are all Bad.

I think instrumental sexuality is a mindset that often leads to behavior that hurts other people and yourself, and is therefore generally bad, even if the sex is consensual. I would call it bad in the same way hate is bad. A lot of people hate people and don’t hurt anyone, which makes it a bit difficult to call hate strictly immoral; in fact, some people find their hate empowering and enjoyable and generally happiness-maximizing. Certainly it is unreasonable to expect everyone to not hate anyone. Still, if you have a choice between hate and not hate it is generally a good idea to pick not hate, and if you have a choice between instrumental sexuality and not instrumental sexuality it is generally a good idea to pick the latter.

(Disclaimer Time: I’m not talking about mutually enjoyable BDSM that simulates instrumental sexuality here– I’m going to talk about that later, but suffice it to say that playacting disrespect and objectification is not the same as disrespecting and objectifying someone, as every good dom knows.)

Partially, this is because instrumental sexuality tends to lead to assorted kinds of asshole behavior. If you treat other people as a means to your orgasm, it’s very easy to be like “well, they consented, whether they’re happy about it afterwards is their own business.” Or “well, they consented, I don’t really have to care about whether they liked it.” Or “well, they consented, never mind I had to ask them half a dozen times first.” Yay, you get the coveted Not A Rapist Award,** go you.

And partially because I’ve noticed– in both my case and the cases of people I’ve talked to– that sex is actually the most fun when we have it with someone we like and want to be happy. Sex we’re having for validation, or as a conquest, or because everyone else is doing it, or out of a sense of duty or obligation, or to prove something to ourselves, or because we’d feel like a loser if we didn’t, or out of desperation, or because it’s something you’re supposed to do– that is, instrumental sex… well, it’s just less good sex.*** I’m a utilitarian. I want there to be more good sex in the world!

This is not, of course, to say only relationship sex or sex where you’re in love with your partner is good sex. You can like someone and want them to be happy and want to fuck them if you met them two hours ago! You can certainly like someone and want them to be happy and not be in love with them or want to date them. Conversely, you can be in love with someone or in a relationship of long standing with them and have all the instrumental sex.

*Please note that I mean “enjoying themself” in the broadest possible sense– for instance, someone can enjoy giving their partner pleasure, or playing a particular role, or exploring the limits of what their body can take, or whatever. Talk about what you want out of sex ahead of time! This message brought to you by Sex-Positivity.
**Except the third person, who gets the Possibly A Rapist Depending On The Exact Circumstances And What Definition of Rape We’re Going By Award. ***Every time I make a generalization about sex I get at least three people in the comments telling me that they are, in fact, completely the opposite of my generalization. So this footnote is to say that if you have sex for those reasons and it works for you and you aren’t hurting anyone else, great, knock yourself out. I dunno how much you’ll get out of the rest of the series though.

The Perfect Survivor

TW for discussion of being a rape survivor.

Continue reading →

Is Drunk Sex Rape?

My mention of this article on Twitter got a lot of pushback, so I figured I should talk about it in a space more suitable to… like, any nuance. At all.

First: “X can’t be rape because then I would be a rapist” is a colossally stupid argument. Most rapists do not self-identify as rapists! In fact, as Lisak shows, most rapists have reached levels of self-delusion in which “I just held down someone and fucked them while they said no, it’s not like a rapist” is a thought they actually have. So don’t make that argument! It sucks.

On the other hand, “X can’t be rape because then I would be a rape survivor” is a fairly coherent argument, as seen in the number of sex workers who have said something along the lines of “I’ve done sex work, and I’ve been raped, and the two are in no way comparable.”

Second: there is some really massive miscommunication happening on the subject of intoxicated sex and rape.

I feel kind of uncomfortable talking about this, because I’m straightedge. The closest I’ve come to being drunk is having a cup of a friend’s butterbeer recipe, which includes a splash of butterscotch schnapps. You literally could not find a person more unqualified to draw the line between drunk sex and rape. So if I talk about this kind of vaguely, that’s why.

At a certain point of intoxication, people become too intoxicated to meaningfully consent to sexual interaction, and then having sex with them is rape. (Of course, you can give meaningful consent ahead of time, just like you can with someone having sex with you while you’re unconscious.) This is literally what every feminist I have ever talked to believes about rape by intoxication. It is also what Rebecca Watson believes– to quote her post, “I’m going by the common definition here, of someone whose faculties are impaired, e.g., slurred speech, stumbling, etc.” The legal definition of rape, while it varies by area, also usually includes a similar kind of rape by intoxication.

I’m not saying that there aren’t people who believe that having some booze to loosen up before sex is rape, you can find people who believe any stupid thing, but they are clearly not the mainstream of feminism. Seriously, the closest I’ve come to meeting the “if you have a beer and have sex you’re a rapist!” feminist is a woman who thought that we should legally define all drunk sex to be rape because people who weren’t raped wouldn’t prosecute and rapists wouldn’t get off on a technicality by fiddling around with blood alcohol levels. You can have lots of opinions about that position (here’s mine: it’s dumb), but she clearly doesn’t believe that having a glass of wine and fucking is rape.

Now, you could make the case that there are lots of people who have sex while stupid-drunk and don’t feel raped in the morning. This is very reasonable. Personally, I think of it similarly to the way I think of someone initiating sex with someone while sleeping: there’s a chance the person will consent to it, in which case no harm no foul, but you still shouldn’t do it without clearing it with them first, because if they don’t consent you just raped them. Also there’s the concern that two severely intoxicated people could have sex and end up raping each other, which seems like a weird result? But then you need mens rea to rape someone, which you clearly don’t have if you’re that drunk, so I suppose you’d end up with two rape survivors and no rapist.

All that aside, there’s a fundamental disconnect here between the broad consensus of anti-rape-culture people, which is “sex with people too intoxicated to consent is rape,” and what a substantial contingent of people is hearing, which is “tipsy sex is rape.” I have no idea why. Are there multiple meanings of the word ‘drunk’? Is there another word anti-rape-culture people should be using that other people will understand better? (Honest questions: my straightedge self is not really up on you kids and your lingo.)

Short version: Anti-rape-culture advocates, please realize that when some people disagree with you it is because they literally do not understand what you are saying! People who think someone might be saying tipsy sex is rape, they probably aren’t! Thank you and goodnight.

On Rapists Who Have No Idea That Rape Is Wrong

Trigger warning for rape, including a description of an instance of rape/sexual assault.

I have a friend who was… I’m not sure how to describe it, because he doesn’t define his experience as a rape and I don’t want to disrespect his autonomy in that matter, but it walks and talks and quacks like a rape to me. Call it an instance of incredible disrespect for consent.

My friend had just recently broken up with his fiancee, the only girl he had ever dated, and he was understandably heartbroken. His friends thought he should fuck another girl to cheer himself up, but he wanted to reserve sex for a committed relationship. So one night when he was on X for the first time at a party and had probably taken too much and was in no way capable of resisting one of his friends had sex with him.

The thing is… I think that girl doesn’t think of herself as a rapist. Or even as someone who forced sex upon someone. From her perspective, she was cheering up a friend after his breakup, the sort of thing a good friend would do.

That doesn’t mean she’s a nice girl who made a few mistakes. It doesn’t mean that it’s something anyone could do. It doesn’t erase her culpability. It doesn’t make it a fucking MISUNDERSTANDING.

free glitter text and family website at FamilyLobby.com
[Sparkly text: Intent! It's fucking magic!]

Fun fact: sometimes people believe things which make them think that it is okay to do evil things, and that doesn’t mean they aren’t evil. For instance, if you believe it’s okay to murder someone for cheating on you, it does not mean you aren’t a murderer. If you believe that God commands you to spank infants, that does not mean you are less evil for spanking infants. If you believe that you can fuck a sleeping woman because she was flirting with you the night before, you are not a nice guy who happened to misunderstand her signals.

Of course it’s important to examine why people believe evil things. The blame for people spanking infants doesn’t just belong to the people who spank them. It belongs to Michael Pearl for writing a book that says spanking babies is God’s will and to the larger culture of normalization of abuse and “parental rights” and lionizing obedience to authority without question. But blame is not like a pie where if Michael Pearl gets a bigger piece then the people who spank infants get a smaller one. It can be everyone’s fault at the same time.

I do not know what shop people get this “people do evil for reasons, therefore it is not evil!” illogic from, but it needs to close down yesterday.

Why I Left The GMP

Trigger warning for rape.

Because of this, this (trigger warning: this is from the point of view of an unrepentant rapist), and this.

I would like to make one thing clear: Noah Brand, the Editor-in-Chief of the Good Men Project, is one of my closest friends. I hold him in the highest respect. I find his decision in publishing these pieces… well, let’s just call it “questionable.” Nevertheless, despite my anger at him about these articles (we had a pretty epic fight, to be quite honest, in the movie version there’d be Eye of the Tiger as we typed furiously at each other), my opinion of him as a writer and a feminist is undiminished.

Alyssa Royse’s comment is one of, if not the, most strikingly immature things I’ve seen on the Internet. And I have a Tumblr, that’s saying a lot. Yes, Royse, sometimes people disagree with you. Virulently, even. That doesn’t mean you get to be snotty about one of the most groundbreaking rape researchers of the past decade and the single best sex-positive feminist book of all time. (If you haven’t read Yes Means Yes, go out, buy it, and read it. My blog post will wait.) Surprisingly, researchers have discovered that you can disagree with someone and still respect their work and contributions! And that, in fact, doing so is the mark of being a grown-ass adult!

But that’s not really why I left the GMP. Incredibly immature people happen all the time, and by themselves they’re not enough to make me quit.

I honestly do not comprehend how the Royse piece and the anonymous article came to be published, because no self-respecting feminist should publish those pieces of rape apologist garbage.

Well, I suppose I can kind of understand. Both pieces make good points, points that I myself have discussed with Noah late nights. The ways that party culture is also a rape culture, the way that bullshit rape culture narratives about “playing hard to get” and “no doesn’t always mean no” can lead to the actual commission of rapes… those are important discussions, discussions we need to have. However, the way they went about it is exactly the wrong way.

To consider the Royse piece: there is no “nuance” about sticking your dick in an unconscious woman, even if she flirted, even if you had no idea that this qualified as rape. You are a rapist. It is your job, if you are a good person, to make amends: to accept whatever consequences the survivor wishes you to experience (from leaving the friend group you’re in to prison time), to commit to learning about rape culture and consent and to unlearning your sense of entitlement to others’ bodies, to be fucking slavish about good consent in all parts of your life from this time forward. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Finding out your friend is a rapist is not a time to be wanking about misunderstandings and “he didn’t know” and “but he’s such a nice person really.” It is a time for accountability and the hard work of real change.

I cannot believe, if Royse is an anti-rape advocate, that she is unaware of the way that “nice person” narratives are used to shield predators who rape again and again. She’s nice! Everyone likes her! It was probably just a misunderstanding, things got out of hand, sometimes when things get heated one person thinks it’s okay and the other doesn’t, it’d be a shame to stop being friends with her over something silly like that… when actually she knows exactly what she’s doing, and the survivors are left without a support network while she has more than enough support in finding her next victim.

It is basic due diligence to make sure that your anti-rape article cannot be used to prop up those narratives. It is literally the bare minimum requirement.

But even that wouldn’t be enough to make me quit. What finally threw me over was (massive trigger warning) this anonymous article from the point of view of an unrepentant rapist.

Unrepentant rapists do not get to talk. Ever. Their voices are going to be completely fucking erased from the discussion about rape. Repentant rapists can talk. Those who do studies of unrepentant rapists can discuss the psychology of unrepentant rapists. Unrepentant rapists themselves? No. Do some accountability work on yourself before you expect anyone to listen to you. The fact that the Good Men Project ran an article from an unrepentant rapist about how he is totally okay with the risk of raping people… it literally does not compute. I cannot imagine this article being approved of by those whose judgment I know and trust. And yet it was, which is starting to make me come up with explanations that involve body-snatching aliens or supervillains with the power of mind control.

Here’s the thing. If you get drunk and can’t tell whether people consent, you should not have sex while drunk. If you cannot stop yourself from having sex when you’re so drunk that you cannot tell if other people consent, you should either not get drunk or make sure to only get drunk by yourself or when there’s an Accountability Buddy around to make sure you don’t rape people. If you cannot stop yourself from drinking without taking those precautions, you need to go to recovery.

This is literally the bare minimum requirement of decent human.

And no blog that dares to consider itself better than an MRA hellhole should publish a post that even remotely begins to suggest that not taking precautions to avoid raping people is okay. Because it is NOT. There is NOTHING OKAY with taking the risk of raping people, and particularly not because you think that parties are omgsuperfun. I am sure that you can find other things that are omgsuperfun that do not involve the risk of you raping people.

I presume that the GMP disagrees with the conclusion that one should be okay with possibly raping people because parties are omgsuperfun, but if they do, why the fuck did they publish a post that supports that conclusion? This is not one of the subjects that reasonable people can disagree on, like macroeconomic policy or literary criticism or whether robots are going to take over the world. There are exactly two sides to this argument: rapists and everyone else on the planet.

I guess we know whose side the GMP is on.

Ozy Frantz's Blog

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