No Right Turn: Institutionalised misogyny in the UK

You can find the background and Idiot/Savant’s thoughts here:

No Right Turn: Institutionalised misogyny in the UK.

Cause, you know, there’s only one way of acting when you’re a victim. If you act any other way, then you’re obviously lying. You made it all up, and were never a victim at all.

I mean, why wouldn’t you tell the authorities that you were withdrawing the charges because the accused and his family were threatening you? Oh, I don’t know.. maybe because they were threatening you!?

Privilege, you’re doing it right, unfortunately.

My Rapist was my Boyfriend

There have been a number of conversations lately regarding consent. After reading this article by Tracy Clark-Flory about safewords being ignored, I decided it was time I talked about my own experience.

TRIGGER WARNING: Rape

When I was 23, I was raped.

It took me a long time to realise what happened was in fact rape. I had thought just acknowledging it would be enough to come to terms with what happened, and it did, for a short time. I hope by talking about it now, it will give me some closure, and perhaps stop the same thing from happening to at least one other person.

I was young, inexperienced, naïve and in my first BDSM relationship. French was my Master, and I was his submissive. I was completely infatuated with him, and trusted him completely. I couldn’t talk to anyone else about the relationship, because I was French’s secret mistress, and he didn’t want it getting back to his partner. I got it in my head that because they were having problems, he would leave her for me, and to help that happen, I would do anything to please him.

One night French sent me a text to say he was coming round. I was to meet him at the door completely naked, or we would have anal sex (which we had not had together up until that point, because I was not ready, and had told him so, repeatedly). That was the whole extent of the negotiation. No discussion of safewords, hard limits, or anything else. I didn’t think I would ever never a safeword. Why would I? I (thought I) was in love with French, and trusted him completely. He would never force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. Would he?

I was living in a flat by myself at this point. So I had no safety back up, someone to help me make sure nothing went wrong. Again, I didn’t think I would need to.

I sat on the couch, naked under my bathrobe, eagerly awaiting French’s arrival. He knocked, I disrobed, and opened the door. I thought (mistakenly) that this would show him that I truly had no desire to engage in any anal sex with him that night.

French led me to my bedroom. Some foreplay ensued. He grabbed a condom, put it on. Then it happened. He flipped me over onto my front and pinned me down. I tried to get away, while saying “No! I don’t want to!” He ignored my pleas, even though consensual non-consent was not part of our dynamic (I didn’t even know such a thing existed). There was no preparation, no lube. I stopped struggling, and lay there silently, trying to move into a position where maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much, just wanting it to be over.

When he was finished, I felt numb, unsure what had just happened. Rape never even crossed my mind, after all, he was my boyfriend. Boyfriends don’t rape their girlfriends.

I ignored whatever I was feeling. Dirty. Used. After putting my bathrobe back on, I joined French on the couch, and we watched Project Runway together. And he went home.

A couple of weeks later, French and I parted ways. I had met J, and, after falling for him completely (for real this time), wanted to be exclusive.

About two years later, French got in contact with me again. By this point I had realised the true extent of what had happened, and I told him as such. He sheepishly said he didn’t realise, and had just gotten caught up in the moment. I believe that was his “apology.” I have not talked to him since, and have no desire too.

I know now that I, in no way, deserved what happened to me. I had followed the rules, and he had taken advantage of my innocence.

I don’t regret what happened though, it has helped make me who I am today, and I’m pretty ok with that person.

When is Rape Not Rape?

You know the answer. Never. Rape is rape is rape.

When J shared the following article with me last night, I felt compelled to write about it.

Trigger warning

A registered nurse who had sexual liaisons with three teenage boys has been sentenced to a year’s home detention.

Aroha Veronica Webber, 41, was sentenced in the Rotorua District Court today after earlier pleading guilty to six charges of unlawful sexual connection with the 15-year-olds.

Her counsel, Paul Mabey, QC, submitted if they had been a year older no carnal crime would have been committed. She had not sexually groomed the boys.

He outlined how they had gathered at Webber’s home when she was in a fragile state following her marriage breakdown. As a result of this she had “hit the booze” and the offending had occurred, Mr Mabey said.

She had allowed the boys into her home rather than see them wandering the streets.

Webber strenuously denied a claim in a victim impact statement that one of the boys had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from her.

“She is a registered nurse, she knows her own body’s health,” Mr Mabey submitted.

Judge James Weir also discounted the allegation. He noted her offending had been entirely out of character and had occurred when she was “disinhibited” by alcohol.

- Nurse sentenced for sex with teens

Now let’s step back for a moment. Imagine the accused is instead a 41-year-old male, and the victims are 15-year-girls.

“[If the victims] had been a year older no carnal crime would have been committed” certainly would not be seen as a valid excuse.  It didn’t happen in a years time, or with 16-year-olds, it happened now, with 15 year olds.  A 15-year-old is legally unable to consent to any sexual activity.

It doesn’t matter that the victims entered the accused’s home voluntarily. That doesn’t mean they automatically consent to anything that happens within the home, even if they weren’t minors.

As for the accused denying that it was possible that one of the victims contracted a STD from the encounter because “she is a registered nurse, she knows her own body’s health”, then she would also know that STDs/STIs can be asymptomatic. She could have been a carrier for the disease/infection without knowing. That’s why sexual health checks are important, along with PROTECTED sexual activity, which obviously didn’t happen in this case.

Would the judge had accepting that the accused “was ‘disinhibited’ by alcohol” (‘disinhibited’ isn’t a word by the way, it should be ‘uninhibited’), and that it was “entirely out of character”? I understand that a marriage breakdown is a stressful time, but that doesn’t give you a free pass. What if something more serious had happened, what if this was a murder trial? Would being “‘disinhibited’ by alcohol”, having a marriage breakdown, and it being “entirely out of character” be mitigating factors? Just because she hasn’t been accused before doesn’t mean this is the first time something like this has happened (admit it, you’d think the same thing if she was actually a male).

And what’s with the sentence of home detention? The offending happened AT HER HOME.

This whole thing is just all kinds of wrong… what kind of justice is this?

~~ Feel so dirty after looking for appropriate images for this post… Need to go cleanse myself… I’m so disappointed in humanity.~~

Privilege Comes in Many Packages

After following a link to skepchick (shared with me by Amanda from Pickled Think, she’s on Twitter here), I read a post by Rebecca Watson.

It wasn’t Rebecca’s post in response to Richard Dawkins’ response to her own experience with a creepy guy in a hotel elevator late at night in a foreign country that inspired my own post (seriously, go read her post, his privilege is showing so bad, it’s hard to imagine that he can’t see it). It was the following comment that was posted:

Hi there!

Oooh, thank you for bringing this up again!

I used to be on exactly the WRONG side of this argument. Let me explain why.

I’d considered myself a “feminist”, because I’ve always supported the idea that women should have exactly the same rights as men. I’m a pretty femmy guy myself, for a heterosexual dude, and I’m very comfortable with that. So I’ve always been about Yay Women’s Rights! Woo!

But I’ve always felt like I keep running up against the wrong side of the argument when I get into a discussion about “harassment”. In my opinion, “harassment” has always been clear-cut and well-defined. Harassment is what happens when a guy lays his hands on you and tries to get into your pants by threatening you with demotion or termination at your job. I believed that harassment was what happened on Mad Men. Really sleazy boardroom groping kind of stuff.

Then as we eased into the 21st century, people started getting more “sensitive” to workplace (and other-place) harassment. Now harassment wasn’t just grabbing a woman’s backside in the copy room, it was telling dirty jokes where other people could hear. It was telling a co-worker that her sweater looks nice. I’d always object to this “new” definition of harassment, because some of my dirtiest, most shamelessly suggestive co-workers have always been women.

The response was that I don’t know what the Hell I was talking about, because I’m: 1) Male, 2) Laboring under a veil of Privilege, and 3) Probably a latent rapist. This always struck me as offensive. As I said, I’ve always been a proponent of equality between the sexes, and for me to be viewed as a Schrodinger’s Rapist until proven innocent just seemed to be going a little too far.

Some women that I knew told me to just be quiet and go off in a corner somewhere and read some feminist literature until I wasn’t so damn ignorant. So I resolved NEVER to get into a feminist discussion with anyone, ever ever ever again.

Ooops.

Eventually, quite by accident, I discovered that I WAS ignorant. Not because of my MALE privilege, ohhh no.

I had … um … “nice guy privilege”??

Whenever I’ve been hanging out with my female friends, we cuss, and make sexual innuendos, and flirt, and touch each other all the time. This is because I’m a “nice guy”. I am quiet, and inoffensive, and gentle, and nerdy. I can get away with things that would ordinarily be considered “sexist” and “harassment”, because I just don’t skew as “creepy”.

But recently, I’ve actually had the opportunity to hang around some “REAL MEN”. The kind of guys who have locker room about the women they’d like to bang, and how big their mighty Johnsons are. I knew that this kind of male existed, and I’d always thought that it was just harmless male braggadocio. But these guys were different. They were having a -scary- conversation about women. It was about sex and the hot babes, but the whole tenor of the conversation was much more … aggressive? It wasn’t a conversation about: “That woman is physically appealing to me and I would love it if she would agree to a sexual liaison with me in the future”, but more: “If I thought I could get away with it, I’d hit her over the head with a rock and drag her into an alley”. And it’s not like these were all a bunch of drunken frat boys or anything. To look at them, you’d have though that they were any other group of guys, probably with families and kids of their own.

Okay, so no one SAID that, outright, but I just got the feeling that I’d walked into a much different dynamic than I was used to. I felt downright uncomfortable. I didn’t know that guys like that still existed. When I joke about sex with my nerdy friends, It’s always in good fun. But this was just so much more … “rapey” than I was used to.

Since then, I’ve been more aware of this kind of male. The creepy neanderthal type. I think there are more of those guys than I ever realized.

No, I’m not trying to say that I am some kind of paragon of male respectfulness and politeness. But that I don’t know if there’s a “male privilege” so much as just a general cluelessness. If one of THOSE guys had ME alone on an elevator, I would have been scared, too. It’s not like I was being creepy and offensive to women all these years and just didn’t know it. It’s that the creepy harassment guys are much more prevalent than I’d previously thought. I thought that those kind of guys were pretty rare. But apparently they’re everywhere. I never would have believed Rebecca’s “you should be raped” e-mail if I hadn’t recently met exactly that type of guy. (and if she hadn’t copy-pasted it, of course)

So I apologize for any male/nice-guy/cluelessidiot privilege that I might have had, but I GET IT now. Those guys are just CREEPY.

Even if they’re a respected evolutionary biologist.

[apologies on the long-winded post]

– Craig

This comment just made me think “Yes! This is exactly it!” Here is my reply to Craig:

Oh my god yes!! I, as a woman, also used to feel that way about sexual harassment, but that was before I read my own feminist literature and a true realization dawned on me.

Sometimes it’s just impossible to see your own privilege until someone or something smacks you hard in the face with it.

I always need to remind myself that even though I’m a fat, queer woman, I still need to check my white middle-class privilege.

As a side note, to those commentors on here who are failing to check their own privilege, as soon as you add ‘but’ to a statement, you have become an apologist and have invalidated everything you previously said.

Until I had read that comment, it had never even occurred to me to think about privilege in other ways, but it makes perfect sense!! Upper-middle class, white, straight, and male may be the privileges that most people are aware of (if they are aware of any at all), though they certainly aren’t the only ones out there. Anything that places you at an advantage over someone else is a privilege.

Any kind of privilege needs to be checked, because until you let yourself become aware of your own privilege, you are blind to the disadvantages of others.

PS. Also one of my first thoughts was that J needs to read this, not really sure what that says… that I think he also has “nice guy privilege” maybe?

PPS. You can see more re Watson vs. Dawkins here (thanks to J for the link).