#Rape Culture

[theconcealedweapon]

[rjalker]

"I never doubted him for a second" yeah why do you think that's an appropriate thing to say in response to a celebrity that "no one doubted" being outed as a rapist.

You do not know these people. They are not your friends. You know nothing about them except for what they purposely put out there to be seen. If David Tennant cannot be assed to publicly disavow A known rapist, then yeah there is something to fucking doubt there, and even if he did, you still literally do not know these people. Stop putting these people up on pedestals.

Stop worshiping celebrities and acting like the one you like and have literally dedicated an entire blog too could never be a predator unlike that other guy.

These are real fucking people, not the fictional characters they play. Stop worshiping celebrities and acting like the one you like couldn't possibly ever do anything wrong. When he apparently cannot even be bothered to explicitly disavow rapist.

Condemning the rapist is literally the bare fucking minimum.

For anyone who still thinks David should say something about Neil Gaiman, he has taken down the episode of his podcast where he interviews him. I think it's pretty clear what he thinks. And I never doubted him for a second.

[liberalsarecool]

Men are sexually violent towards children.

Right Wing paternalism and Republican misogyny create structures to protect violent men. See: GOP, police, church

[twoyara]

About how men rape women with “consent”

This post is not mine, but one radfem woman from our community. She works as a sexologist and shared her experience in her work. If you too are a sexologist, or even better, have some statistics on this topic, please share your experiences or links. ---------------------------------------------------------- "When I first started working, I discovered that many men had never experienced the need to refuse intimacy with a regular partner. That is, a man in counseling complains that his partner often refuses him, he attributes her refusals to personal dislike and faded feelings, and when he tries to turn the situation around and remember when he himself had to refuse her, he does not understand what we are talking about. Because he has never had to - he responds to the initiative of his partner every time and considers it a sign of love and attraction on his part.

I heard this very often, I couldn't catch the lie and at the same time I couldn't interpret it. They are not robots, after all, to be available 24/7 at all hours of the day and night?

One day a client in a session literally opened my eyes with one phrase.

She said: “I CAN SEE WHEN HE'S NOT UP TO IT.”

That's the secret. The notorious emotional service. Subsequently, and many other women have confirmed this in a targeted survey: when the desire for intimacy arises, a woman assesses her partner's condition BEFORE taking the initiative. If she sees that her partner is tired, sick, in a bad mood, or preoccupied with something, she does not consider it appropriate to offer sex. I have also heard from many women that in a situation when she can not clearly assess the state of the partner, she prefers to flirt, as if casually get naked, as if accidentally do something that usually arouses the partner. If there is no reaction to this, the woman usually refuses to take the initiative and solves her problems on her own, without forcing the partner to conflict and feel guilty.

Men don't want their partners all the time - it's just that no one gets in their underwear when it's inappropriate. No one forces them to think about sex when they don't want to think about it.

Men themselves don't usually check against anything but their own erections.

They don't care when to offer sex to a woman(the following is a real and far from complete list):

Who is asleep (well, seriously, I don't know any woman who would ever think of waking up a sleeping partner to satisfy her sexually);

who's back from her 24-hour shift;

who just finished cooking a holiday dinner for ten people;

who has a high fever;

who's been vomiting all day;

who is eight months pregnant with a complicated pregnancy;

who has undergone a termination of pregnancy that day;

who is in the terminal stages of cancer;

who's just had a pet die;

returning from the funeral of a beloved grandmother;

waiting for a call from the NICU where their (mutual!) child is (“Let's get a little loose while we wait��) - and so on and so forth.

It may seem like it's a matter of cognitive distortion, that they just don't get it….. But they do. I asked one of them once: does he really think that a person in such a state can want sex? Yes, it is clear that they don't want to, he replied, but I'm just in case - maybe it will work out. I asked him how he would react if it didn't work out, and he admitted that he would be hurt and angry. And that's another “secret” - why it does burn out. Because refusal will inevitably lead to conflict, and a woman often does not have the strength not only for sex, but also for an argument. When he offered sex, she basically can not get out of the situation without damage - either to be raped, or to deal with his tantrums and offenses. And unfortunately, sometimes the first one turns out to be the lesser harm."

[rjalker]

It's also just blatant sex shaming, and even if the person is normal about trans women and butches, the fact that they're not normal about bi women and like to sex shame and victim blame is enough to make them a terrible person.

(the victim blaming comes in because there are 100% bi women out there who are victims of SA from men, and the way these misogynists frame their whole thing is 100% victim blaming and acting like these women are tainted because of what happened to them, and claiming they 'let' it happen.)

These kinds of people make it very clear they're okay with women being SA'd as long as they experience any attraction to men whatsoever, because they think that's the same thing as "asking for it", and they think the only SA that's really real and bad is when it happens to a lesbian who feels zero attraction to men in any form.

oh you don't like bisexual women? because you think it's disgusting they let men touch them? and you're a lesbian. and a feminist, okay. cool, cool. im sure you're SO normal about trans women and butches. im sure of it

[sickofthis666]

"It's fucked up that no one took the first allegations against Gaiman seriously" yall decided that bashing radfems was more important than fighting rape culture and believing rape victims

[justsomeantifas]

So this is how it’s going on twitter… blue checks will stop at nothing for engagement. ⚰️

[mysharona1987]

[fremedon]

Back in 2014, I did a panel at CON.TXT on dubious consent tropes: sex pollen, fuck or die, omegaverse, and so on. And we talked about how the same tropes can carry different kinds of narrative weight, and how the ways they're used have evolved over time--how tropes that started out as a way to get around the rape culture assumption that Nice Girls Don't were repurposed to interrogate rape culture. By making the coercion external to all parties to the sex act--by removing culpability--they allow for rape and rape culture stories without rapists.

And I proposed that a lot of these tropes were also coming to be used in ways that read as allegories for the impossibility of resisting the conditions of late capitalism. A character is placed under complete social or biological constraint, with no power to escape or fight or do anything but submit, and their only choice is whether to submit gracefully or make a token and futile resistance. And that their decision to make the experience something they want--to claim whatever good they can in it--is an act of power. That to consent, even internally, and make it meaningful, even when they have no way to enforce a refusal, is an act of power.

Because it was a panel on dubcon, and saying Yes is what differentiates dubcon from noncon, in fiction, we talked mostly about stories where the protagonist says Yes; we talked about these consent tropes as allegories for the ways that people do, in fact, find good in conditions they cannot opt out of. People do build good relationships under rape culture. They build communities under late capitalism. These things do happen, outside of fiction, and a story about someone reconciling to life as an omega can have a lot to say about the complicated internal struggles people go through to make them happen.

We didn't talk so much about the flip side of these tropes--that by making that internal Yes meaningful, even in circumstances where No has no power, they also imply that there is meaning in No, even where it has no effect. They validate the worth of an internal resistance, even where it achieves nothing. Maybe we mentioned it? I don't even remember--it was a panel on dubcon, not noncon, and that internal No has the power to change the genre, if nothing else.

I am thinking now, though, about the rise within fandom of a purity culture that strenuously rejects these tropes--while also granting them remarkable power. That claims that, because real life does not have the distinction possible in fiction between dubious consent and nonconsent, that not only is fictional dubcon no different from fictional rape, it's no different from real rape. That returns culpability to these stories and places it firmly with the author. That says that a fictional character cannot consent, to anything--and that the real author, being the only person involved with actual moral agency, owes it to the character to keep them safe.

To exercise moral choice on their behalf.

To say No, in the fictional world where that No is meaningful, and to imbue that No with an irresistible moral weight in the real world.

At any rate I'm not saying the crowd that thinks not voting to withhold their consent from things done in their name is somehow a meaningful form of protest just needs to read some sex pollen about it. But I'm not not saying that.

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

I really don't think it's true that abusers always know they're abusive or that if you're worried you're being abusive, that automatically means you're not.

There are patterns of harm we can fall into without really realizing what's going on. We live in an abuse culture that justifies and even celebrates certain kinds of abuse and makes them seem normal.

Maybe when you're trying to protect yourself from harm you set your boundaries so far out from your own autonomy zone that you're infringing on someone else's. Maybe you think you're being fair because you aren't thinking about what it's like for the other person, you're too focused on staying/getting in your own comfort zone.

Maybe you're so used to dysfunctional interactions that every conversation is a power struggle, and you don't even realize that when you're "winning" all the time you're grinding someone else down—you're too busy being relieved that you're not "losing" all the time anymore like you did in the past with someone else.

Maybe you think you're being "funny" and it's "banter" to constantly tear down someone in your life. Maybe you assume they're having fun with it too and that this is how you act friendly towards someone.

Maybe you believe lies about what rape is or what abuse is. Maybe you grew up being told men always want sex and you don't even realize when you're pressuring him into it that he genuinely doesn't want it and it's not a game. Maybe you believed the lies that women say no to seem modest but if she "gives in" that's how you know for sure she wants it. Maybe you thought physical arousal was the same as consent.

Maybe you thought being mean when you're in a bad mood wasn't abuse as long as you don't hit. Maybe you grew up in an environment where any conflict meant you had to hurt the other person as much as possible emotionally in order to "win".

Maybe you're a parent who learned that spanking or scaring your kids is how you keep them in line, which seems necessary to protect them. Maybe you don't realize how cutting some of the things you say are, or how thoughtless or unkind you're being. Maybe you never learned gentleness before you had kids, or don't understand what's age appropriate.

When you're an abuser or a rapist who didn't realize at the time how much harm you were doing, it can cause serious cognitive dissonance to realize the impact of your actions. It's easy to get defensive and decide that since you don't think of yourself that way, there's no way you could possibly be an abuser or a rapist.

It's easy to say that if you don't want to be an abuser, you're not. But it's not always true.

It is absolutely vital that everyone learns how to interact in safe and respectful ways. We're all responsible for figuring out how to not harm other people.

Believing that it's impossible you're harming other people can make you MORE likely to harm them, because you're not checking yourself to make sure that you're not.

[liberalsarecool]

Republicans don't care about your daughter.

Republicans care about protecting rapists and sex traffickers.

[killjoyfem]

alright so, on the pelicot case: i unironically believe that all of them should have been charged with attempted murder. the amount of sleeping pills it must have taken to keep her unconscious and unaware of it all, for so many nights, over and over and over, must have been nothing short of massive. that is life threatening. her sorry excuse for a husband put her life at extreme risk every single time he chose to do this, and all the men that took part in it consented to her life being put in danger too. her dying was an acceptable possibility to them as long as they were able to satisfy their sexual fantasies. we could easily be looking at a case where she didn’t make it out alive and overdosed while being raped multiple times and she wouldn’t have ever even known. think for a second about how monstrous that is. they should answer for that in kind. “oh but the law doesn’t work like that” i don’t give a fuck. we should have as much consideration for their lives as they had for hers.

[kittyit]

link | archive

[rad-claid-plaid]

What a shock.

[atwoodsfemalefantasy]

GISELE PELICOT CASE JUST CLOSED

This brave, wonderful woman was drugged by her monster of a husband who orchestrated her to be raped by somewhere between 72-92 men (sources vary) in her drugged state over the course of nine years. Her case is something that has personally fueled my fire for the 4B movement, and others' as her husband of 50 years was trusted by her completely. She thought he loved her. He made her dessert in bed. She thought it was so caring when he took her to the gynecologist and the doctor when she started having memory loss and other health issues (which was in reality due to the mass rape she experienced unknowingly).

But Madame Pelicot, despite being over 70, spoke up. she took her monstrous husband to court, and had become a role model for rape victims. She says that in rape cases "shame must change sides" to shame the rapists, and that she wants other girls to speak up about their sexual assault because she did it too.

and now, 51 men, nearly ALL of the men tried, have been convicted of rape. her husband is serving 20 years, the rest of the men between 3-15 years. Justice has prevailed and has defended Madame Pelicot.

If you haven't heard of this case by now, i'm glad you're learning about it when the end is good. i'm in tears, i'm so happy right now. Madame Pelicot got the justice she deserves and all those horrible men will go to jail.

i just wanted to inform and celebrate. let this give us some hope that women can be heard and can be defended. let us take Pelicot's advice and stand up for ourselves and our sisters.

I love you, Gisele Pelicot. we are all so proud of you

[pro-birth]

Forcing the term "sex worker" into the conversation has been the stupidest fucking thing people could have done. I had to watch a charity ad about a """sex worker""" who lives in a fucking train station and is forced to give "paid sex" to men and boys who threaten her or her baby with knives but she's a """"SEX WORKER???""""

BITCH SHE IS A VICTIM OF RAPE! SHUT THE FUCK UP! I DON'T CARE WHAT FUCKING SOB STORY YOU CLAIM TO HAVE ABOUT """WORKERS""" NEEDING DIGNITY, YOU TOOK THAT DIGNITY AWAY THE MOMENT YOU TURNED FINANCIALLY COERCED RAPE INTO A FUCKING JOB! ONLYFANS AND PORN ISN'T EMPOWERING BECAUSE THE ONES DETERMINING YOUR WORTH ARE HOLDING THE PURSE STRINGS!!!!

RAPISTS ARE NOT CUSTOMERS, PIMPS ARE NOT EMPLOYERS, AND "SEX WORKERS" ARE NOT EMPLOYEES. RAPE/FINANCIALLY COERCED SEX IS NOT A SERVICE AND THE BODIES OF VICTIMS ARE NOT PRODUCTS YOU CAN PAY FOR, EVER. SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT """SEX WORK"""!!!!