The sadness here is that disparaging boys is much more acceptable, and people immediately assume that these shirts are referring to raping women, completely overlooking the fact that men can be victims of rape as well.
Actually there is an open question whether the USA currently experiences more rapes man-on-man inside of prison or rapes man-on-woman outside of prison. One place to start looking into this topic is http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/....
However given the choice, there is no question that men who are inclined to rape overwhelmingly would prefer to rape women. And outside of a prison setting, women are overwhelmingly the targets.
(All of this is not counting child sexual abuse, which is its own chamber of horrors.)
But, as I keep saying here, the biggest impact of rape in our society is not its effect on the victims, terrible as those effects are. The much broader impact is the culture of fear and blame that women (and largely only women) have to live with every day of their lives. Our society demands that women follow strict (and often contradictory) guidelines for avoiding rape, and then we vocally make excuses for their rapists whenever someone assaults a woman and she didn't follow every single one of them to the letter. (For example, either "Why did you make him angry by rudely brushing off his advances?" or "Why did you lead him on by responding politely to his advances?", depending on the circumstances.)
Prison rape is terrible and must be stopped, but the one and only thing that prevents it from being as harmful overall is that its effects don't really bleed over to warp society as a whole. The results of men raping women affect essentially all women, essentially all the time.
It may not be immediately obvious that those questions boil down to "making excuses for rapists", but if you sit and think about it for five minutes it's a hard conclusion to avoid. The focus routinely shifts away from "that man did something awful" and toward "that woman made some mistakes".
The same could be applied in other situations, for example if I go out alone late at night in the wrong part of town whilst displaying my expensive consumer gadgets , leave my house unlocked and go out or leave my server connected to the internet with a blank root password people might rightly ask "why the hell did you do that?". This doesn't in any way condone the actions of a mugger/burgler/hacker etc but sadly one must acknowledge that there are bad elements in society and recommend appropriate mitigation.
So yes, a woman who put her in a situation where she was likely to be raped did make some mistakes, but that doesn't excuse somebody who takes advantage of that.
I don't see how that is controversial.
This is a great example. I went to a university inside of a major city and at several points during freshmen orientation we were told to be careful about what sort of electronics we display while outside, particularly at night. "Don't wear your expensive headphones while walking around the city, consider buying a case that covers your phone, travel in groups when possible." ..that sort of thing.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed that they were making excuses for muggers.
This stuff is complicated, and I know that it took me an awfully long time to begin figuring it out (or to even accept that there was something I needed to figure out). I used to say things that sounded a lot like your comment here.
I don't anymore. Give it some time, and some thought.
I don't think victim blaming is an imagined phenomenon, but I do think that the extent to which it permeates it's society is often exaggerated, to the extent that people who give reasonable safety advice can occasionally be vilified as contributing to it.
But, as I've said elsewhere, it is my strong impression that the advice given to women regarding rape does not merely mirror other safety advice. There are many places where those starry-eyed freshmen would be forgiven for letting down their guard against muggers (inside their own dorm, for instance), but women are allowed no such safe spaces. The freshmen are given just a few rules to remember ("Don't flaunt your expensive headphones south of 61st St."), but women are given endless lists. The freshmen hear their advice when they show up at college, but women get rape prevention tips drilled into them from childhood so they completely internalize it. And by and large, the advice those freshmen get is simple enough that it doesn't contain any Catch-22's like my earlier example: a woman can be blamed for angering the man who raped her by being rude OR for leading him on if she's polite, so some people will fault her either way.
I completely understand if you're not on board with this perspective right away; it took me a long time, too. But honestly: keep your eyes open from here on out when you read media reports of rape and you will see how universal this "fault the victim" attitude is. Watch for it for a while, and then really do sit down and think hard about it for those five uninterrupted minutes.
Here's an example for starters: media coverage of an 11-year-old girl forcibly gang raped by 18 grown men. You'd like to think they wouldn't have bothered reporting on how she dressed, wouldn't you? http://www.salon.com/2011/03/09/new_york_times_blames_11_yea...
I am in the UK , so perhaps culture is somewhat different here but I would expect that if a woman reported a sexual assault to basically anybody either a vigilante mob or police investigation would be mustered in short order rather than the incident trivialised or the victim blamed.
In fact there have been cases of premature "justice" taken against individuals before all of the facts are in. And it's not completely unknown for threat of fake rape accusations to be used as a method of blackmail. In other words branding somebody as a rapist is a sure fire way to fuck their life up, quite different from "everyone blames the victim".
Even though it is not pleasant reading I don't think it hurts to report on all of the facts in such cases if doing so might help others to avoid these situations. For example if I had a daughter I know I would want to give frank and strongly worded advice if I thought it might make her even a little bit safer, but if something were to happen I would certainly not blame her.
Unfortunately, this is not typically what happens. Remember, we're not usually talking about some guy leaping out of a dark alley and grabbing a stranger walking by. Most rapists know their victims and interact with them socially in the lead-up to the assault. Many deliberately arrange circumstances designed to create doubt about what happened and whether it was consensual.
I hate to link to a scumbag, but there was a reddit post several months ago by a serial rapist describing his methods that illustrates this quite clearly: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/x6yef/reddits_had... It is absolutely chilling reading, but horribly informative (as are his replies to questions later on). I'm as skeptical of anonymous comments as the next guy, but in the aftermath I saw a number of people saying, "Don't give him the attention he wants: you can see exactly the same methods and mentality in formal studies of convicted rapists instead." (Sadly, I never saw links to those studies, so I'm still linking to the scumbag.) It's clear that this isn't the sort of thing that inspires vigilante mobs, but my understanding is that it's by far the most common scenario.
Meanwhile, you need to be really cautious about bringing up the "false rape accusation" objection. Yes, they happen, and it's awful when they do. But every statistic I've ever seen indicates that the number of false accusations is miniscule compared with even the number of reported rapes, let along the number that don't get reported at all (perhaps because the only evidence was "he said/she said" that would get brushed off as potentially a false accusation). Treating actual rapes and false accusations as some sort of evenly balanced poles deserving equal consideration is not justified by the statistics.
There is zero difference in that you're stating that the woman had something direct to do with enabling her rape.
Men do not face that pressure. And yes, I'm sure that there's a corresponding judgmental tone in questions like "Weren't you man enough to fight him off?", but everyone understands that a man can be beaten in a fight. It's an entirely different atmosphere.
And of course it's bullshit (the rest as well, but that one is just especially idiotic) to ask "What was she wearing?" (in general). But that's something that people are actively trying to better. Not for men.
It is plausible to me that there is also a culture of shame affecting men who have been raped, along the lines that you have described. But if so, it is very silent compared to the rape culture surrounding women, and thus has far less impact on men who are not themselves victimized. It is no doubt no less awful for men who are the victims of rape, and I agree that any such culture must, must, must be fixed.
But at the same time, I can't blame the activists out there for targeting their primary effort at the side of the problem that has the broadest effect and the widest societal impact. And also, I optimistically believe that if we eventually do manage to fix the culture of shame and blame attached to rape that affects women, a lot of that progress will automatically carry over to the case of men who are raped, too. Feminism has never been just about making things better for women! That's just where the first big steps are naturally found.
It seems the only people making that assumption are you and the grandparent.
http://www.missrepresentation.org/not-buying-it/
People worldwide are using hashtag #NotBuyingIt to call-out sexism in the media.
Let the media know: sexism won’t sell. Use #NotBuyingIt on Twitter to challenge the misrepresentation of women and girls.
You're looking for a bias that just isn't there. Our society most definitely has a problem with rape and sexual assault— specifically towards women— but I don't see any Twitter users making the assumption that "t-shirt advocating rape" == "t-shirt advocating rape against women" There are men who are victims of sexual assault and rape, and you do them a disservice by ignoring them to push your own agenda.
Several of them include the #NotBuyingIt hashtag, a hashtag specifically related to sexism against women.
I really hesitated to respond to you again, at this point it seems you are doing nothing more than post hoc rationalization of your original inaccurate assertion.
I should also clarify that I am in no way arguing that rape is equally a male and female problem. Women deal with rape culture much more than men. My argument is that I don't believe these twitter users were upset because it was targeting women. I think they were upset because rape is a terrible thing to happen to anyone.