Sources for this audio post are here:
http://dedgurlcingztheblooze.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/i-wasnt-going-to-talk-about-this/
http://blip.tv/file/4872727
See also this post from What About Our Daughters *here*.
Thank you to The Blogmother, and to dedgurlcingztheblooze.
Here are some of my own thoughts for right now:
My prayers are with that girl. And all the girls the world over being group-raped and raped individually by men and boys, disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous. The society must crumble, as dedgurl says in the audio blog.
Punishing a few perpetrators of atrocity pretends rape would end of only we sent all the rapists to jail. It wouldn't--especially in jail. And also the class-privileged white men who travel the world to rape girls won't ever get put in jail so how does killing or locking up only Black and Brown men solve the rape problem? It may make some individual survivors feel safer to know their assaulter-terrorist-violator is in prison. And I'm not opposed to rapers of children or of women going to prison--let anyone who violates a girl or woman sexually or physically be sent there for the rest of his life, as far as I'm concerned. At least she'll be safer, but only from him. Not by the other male relatives, the other procurers, the other date-rapists, the other boyfriends, the other men wanting a little action.
Most rapes of girls, after all, are committed by their own fathers and step-fathers and other male relatives. And by "sex (read: rape) tourists", procurers, pimps, traffickers, and slavers. None of those men will get put in jail, folks. Group-rape is not the usual way girls and women are raped, even while it is disgustingly, reprehensibly, outrageously common.
So what are we going to do about all that? The political approach is not to pretend justice is served by locking up a few predators. Girls and women remain unsafe no matter how many poor men go to jail. Rape is a reality because in this society, white het men want it to be one. The political approach that has a spiritual center, a humane core, is to radically transform society into an non-predatory, non-misopedic, non-misogynist one where girls and women are not targeted from birth to death for rape and other violations and degradations.
This is precisely what radical feminists have been demanding for eons - an end to male supremacy and thereby an end to innumerable men's belief that they have the innate right of sexual access to any woman or girl 24/7. Catharine A. MacKinnon succinctly stated the truth when she said that we cannot distinguish between normal male heterosexual expression and rape because what passes for normal male sexuality is in fact rape - aka male domination and male control over women's and girls' sexualities and their bodies.
ReplyDeleteTherefore rape is about the eroticisation of male sexual entitlement which is why it is so hard for most men and many women to be able to tell the difference.
We need to eliminate the widespread belief that men are entitled to have sexual access to women. Whilst women - well all we can do is either to say yes or no and hope that the individual male will decide not to rape us, but if chooses to ignore our demands, he knows male supremacist society will support him and excuse his crime against women. Why? Because he was enacting normal heterosexual male entitlement to women and hence no rape occurred.
Female sexual autonomy will not eliminate all rape but it will certainly challenge men's belief they are never accountable when they rape a woman or girl.
That explains why malestream commonly trivialises male sexual violence against women by either eroticising it or else twisting the reality of men's sexual violence against women into yet another piece of sensationalist misogynistic reporting.
The daily 'little rapes' men and boys commit against women and girls are not 'real rapes' they are supposedly just normal male expression of their sexuality and sex right to women and girls.