By now the comments of the Australian Muslim cleric Sheik Tay Din al-Hilali have spread far and wide over the news/outrage cloud. In among the outrage and the condemnations have come a lot of comments saying that what the sheik is espousing is really not all that different from the way that most men really think (see: In the Company of Men). Thus, any woman alone around men has to go to DefCon 4 and be ready to launch, because she is a wink and a giggle away from having her clothes ripped off and being throttled and abused. Viz:
13. You are a rapist if you ‘nag’ her for sex. Because you manage to
ply an eventual ‘yes’ from a weary victim doesn’t mean it’s not rape.
You are a rapist.14. You are a rapist if you try to circumvent
her "No" by talking her into it. She’s not playing hard to get, and,
even if she IS it’s not YOUR responsibility to ‘get’ her. You’re still
a rapist.15. You are a rapist if you manipulate her into sex
when she doesn’t otherwise want it. If you say, "If you loved me you’d
do X" then you’re a rapist. If you say, "All the other kids are doing
it!" then you’re a rapist.
OK. While I can understand being cautious, there is a difference between exercising common sense and living in abject fear that every man you encounter is a drooling, slavering, would-be rapist. The blanket generalizations that state "All men are like that … " rely upon a couple of highly publicized incidents – and bear as much resemblance to truth as statements like "All Arabs are terrorists."
Which is to say, none.
That being said, the comments of the dingy sheik are stupid and should be ignored. There are always going to be creeps and cretins. They can be dealt with – the growing and ever more pervasive sense of fear that our modern mass media culture seeks to inculcate in us as part and parcel of their marketing campaign is far, far more noxious.
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living in abject fear that every man you encounter is a drooling, slavering, would-be rapist.
However, in this particular case, you pretty much have to account for the lowest common denominator.
You have NO idea which man is going to be able to take “No” for an answer and which isn’t …
BB’s comments are completely genuine. This comment might be basically pointless as you’ll likely never understand, but women DO live in constant fear of men as we simply never know who is or is not safe. You also have never known what it is like to be coerced into sex because of fear that if you don’t give in you will be raped anyway or because of fear that you will be put in a dangerous situation such as being put out on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter. When you figure out a way for women to determine who is or is not a rapist or abuser…please do us women of the world a favor and let us know…
Blessings.
Hi Dave. It’s me again, Cool Aunt, one of the more enthusiastic and vocal readers at BB’s blog.
I followed the trackback to see that you’re still reading from BB’s blog. I also see that you’re having some problems understanding (and maybe even problems believing?) some of the on BB’s Rapist Checklist as well as how extremely vigilant women must be at all times to avoid rape. I know where you’re coming from because I, too, had some problems understanding the same entries that you’ve reposted here at your blog. As I read and learned more and more from BB’s and other feminist blogs, it finally came together and makes sense to me.
At least a fourth of women in the US are in relationships with abusive men. I don’t think this number includes women who have been in at least one relationship with an abusive man in the past and isn’t with an abuser now. The stats for US women who’ve been raped that I’ve seen run from like 1/3 to 2/3, depending on variables such as age (some stats include minors, some include girls as young as 12, others include all females), reported rapes or estimates of unreported rapes…you’re a journalist so you know how the numbers can be skewed to support the story. Anyway, on the rape stats, I split the difference of 1/3 and 2/3 and came up with 1/2 of all women in the US having been victims of rape. That’s not all women in the US, of course, but the number is significant enough that we shouldn’t exclude the experiences of women who’ve been raped when discussing the experiences of women. (I hope that makes sense Also, I know that my numbers could be and probably are off at least a little bit but they should be close. Hey! I never claimed to be a mathematician or scientist.)
Because I’m in the lucky 3/4 of women who aren’t in abusive relationships, I didn’t understand how nagging a woman into having sex when she didn’t want to could be rape. Women in abusive relationships, however, are most often afraid to disagree with or deny their partners any whim or desire, if at all possible, lest they suffer more abuse. Should they work up the courage to say “no,” they know better than to tell him to knock it off if he starts nagging and pouting. They have reason to believe that their partners will or might hurt them for saying “no” because their partners have physically harmed them before.
Because I’ve never been raped, and I assume that you haven’t either, we don’t live with the trauma of having been raped. I’ve learned in my readings that the trauma that victims of rape experience almost never leaves the victim, not like, say, most of us would one day work through the trauma of having been in a terrible car accident. For example, I was in two really bad car accidents, the kind that have the guys at the auto pound telling you that they were sure that whomever was in your car had died, judging by the looks of what’s left of it. Those were during my late teens and early 20s. I’m now in my early 40s and I it’s very rare that driving or riding in a car causes me anxiety, and it’s been longer than I can remember since I last experienced a car crash flashback. It’s not the same for rape victims. What happened to them was no accident and can’t be written off to bad luck or recklessness. Each of them was harmed intentionally, in such a dehumanizing way, many of them by men that they knew. They live every day with having experienced something that, to the rest of us, is unthinkable.
So, when you put yourself in the place of a woman who has been abused by her partner and/or raped, women whose numbers here in the US easily make up half of us, you realize that the vigilance and definitions that may seem extreme to you at first aren’t unreasonable at all. And as for those of us who are fortunate enough not to have been victimized by rapists or to be in relationships with abusers, we can only be safer, maybe enough so that we never are victimized by rapists or abusers, if all men take BB’s Rape Checklist to heart instead of trying to take it apart. (Yes, it rhymed, too. J ) At the very least, we won’t have to lie in bed, listening to a man pout and whine because we don’t want to have sex on that particular night and want to less and less as the nagging goes on because there’s nothing sexy about a man who behaves like a toddler when he doesn’t get what he wants, when he wants it.
CoolAunt
PS for Axinar: I really don’t get you. Your comment here seems so understanding of BB’s message. Yet at your blog, you seem so condescending of her, so sarcastic and insulting. Oh well, I think your BB obsession is cute.
CA