DOOM! Magazine

Posted by newageamazon on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Photo ©2008 Gabriela Camerottit / CC BY-NC

Rape is bad.

Seems straightforward enough, right? Violating a person sexually is not a good thing. Performing sexual acts on their body when they haven’t consented to them is double plus ungood, comrade. Most sane, healthy people in society recognize this fact.

So why does our society not only fail to condemn, but in fact has been known to glamorize date rape?

Bands who have appeared on major corporate sponsored tours perform songs with lyrics such as “You scream “meat sucks!” / Well you’re out of luck / I’ll fuck you in the face / And leave a nice taste” and “I’m gonna slip you a drink you think is Pepsi/then I’ll slip in my cock when you’re good and tipsy/ Bitch I ain’t calling you again, now it’s my bro’s turn/he do you again.”  Even worse, these bands’ fanbases are made up of largely teenage and young adult women who cheer the lyrics as “edgy” and even “funny” and repeatedly comment that it’s okay for the band members to perform these songs because “they’re hot.”

And it’s not like you have to go to little-known niche market bands like these, either.  In their single “Saints of Los Angeles,” Motley Crue waxes poetic on date rape.  “Red line/tripping on land mines/Sippin at the Troubadour/Girls passed out/naked in the back now/Everybody’s goin to score.”  Years ago, Dr. Dre appeared on a song by his protege Eminem entitled “Guilty Conscience,” the second verse of which involves Eminem as the “devil” half of a man’s conscience, urging him to drug and rape a 15-year-old girl at a rave.

Of course, none of this is helped at all by the failure of society to recognize that date rape actually exists.  Which is confusing, to say the least, considering that the majority of rapes are perpetrated by steady dating partners or acquaintances, rather than random strangers.  In fact, the US Department of Justice Statistics reports that of rapes reported between 2000 and 2005, 38% were committed by a friend of acquaintance, and a disturbing 28% by those described as “intimates” of the victim.

But there are many naysayers who will claim that those didn’t count as rape.  Rape apologists, desperate to blame the victim for whatever reason, will fall back on tired arguments such as “Did you see how she was dressed?  She wanted it!”  “She went out and got drunk, she deserved it for acting like a whore.”  “She probably consented and felted guilty the next morning so she claimed it was rape.”

Pop culture doesn’t do much to dissuade us of these ideas, either.  Even supposedly girl-powered TV show Veronica Mars showed the lead character realizing during the course of the show that, no, she’d consented to sex while drunk at a party and just forgotten, so now didn’t she feel bad for running around telling everybody that hot guy raped her?  Veronica was spunky, curious, but ultimately she was “just mistaken” about her rape.

And don’t even get me started on the portrayal of rape on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.  While I’m an avid fan of the show, I still wanted to put my fist through a TV screen after the title character was nearly raped by a soulless vampire she’d been sleeping with on and off throughout an entire season.  Buffy, the girl who saved my soul in high school, the girl who taught me never to be afraid to be strong and to fight back, cowered against a bathtub as the big bad vampire she’d beaten many times before tried to force himself on her, with his excuse being “You can’t just stop sleeping with me because you want to.”  And then, post-rape, almost immediately trusting this monster again with the life of her teenage sister.

So when even strong women are being portrayed as not-really-victims, what chance do the rest of us stand?  Especially with attitudes like the ones espoused by Alex Knepper of The American University’s Eagle newspaper.  Knepper just this week ran an editorial claiming that feminists were ruining sex by demanding that people be clear that there was some form of consent.  He also falls back on that tried and true “how can you blame the rapist?” logic:

Let’s get this straight: any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK? To cry “date rape” after you sober up the next morning and regret the incident is the equivalent of pulling a gun to someone’s head and then later claiming that you didn’t ever actually intend to pull the trigger.

“Date rape” is an incoherent concept. There’s rape and there’s not-rape, and we need a line of demarcation. It’s not clear enough to merely speak of consent, because the lines of consent in sex — especially anonymous sex — can become very blurry. If that bothers you, then stick with Pat Robertson and his brigade of anti-sex cavemen! Don’t jump into the sexual arena if you can’t handle the volatility of its practice!

That’s right, ladies.  Don’t go having sex if you don’t want guys to violate your body!  If you consent to sex even once in your life with one person, that is a free pass for any guy out there who might want to stick it in you.  Why would you have to say “yes” to him?  You already said “yes” to someone else, slut.

But Alex Knepper and his ilk apologizing for rapists is one thing.  Seeing young women apologize for rapists is another.  The disturbing trend with young women, among the same as those who idolize and buy albums by the little-known-bands mentioned at the beginning of this column, is to immediately jump up when a girl is raped and begin to examine why it was her fault.  What did she do to encourage it?  What did she do wrong that led to it?  How can we shift the blame from the rapist, who was the one who actually did the raping, and onto the girl who was raped?

Is it a defense mechanism?  Do young women really believe that if they can find a fault with the victim they can, in turn, be sure they’ll never do that and therefor be totally sure they’ll never be raped?  Is it to in some way try to separate themselves from the rape victim, yes, something terrible happened to her, but she’s NOT like me?  Is it to avoid having to feel empathy for her?

Or is it something more sinister?  Is it the world at large attempting to stop rape by redefining what rape is to young women?  After all, what’s the easiest way to lower your rape statistics?  Change what you count as rape.

It wasn’t rape if she was drunk?  Hey, lower percentage of rapes.  It wasn’t rape if she’d previously had sex with the guy?  Lower percentage of rapes.  She wasn’t a virgin before she was rape?  Psh, like that counts!  Hey, guys, we’ve practically eliminated rape on college campuses!

Nevermind that women are still being sexually violated.  It all looks good on paper, doesn’t it?

And here I am, scared out of my mind.  Because while we could be spending this time and energy teaching the actual rapists not to rape, not to have sex with a woman without her consent and no, saying “You’re hot,” after chugging a fifth of Jack does NOT count as consent, no, just because she’s had sex with you before doesn’t mean you can take it whenever you want it no matter what she says now, and no, the fault does not fall on the girl you raped, but on you, the person who STUCK YOUR DICK IN HER.

But no.  No.  Let’s just laugh and joke about how “the slut had it coming.”  And make sure when you do that, you give any girls near you meaningful looks to teach them “and you’d better never be that slut, whore.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 8:52 PM. It is filed under Blog, Commentary, New Age Amazon and tagged with feminism, music, rape, rape apologist, sexism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.