Rape Atrocity Denial: Men's not-so-secret Weapons in Protecting Male Supremacy

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• Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating. -- Andrea Dworkin

• Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact. -- Andrea Dworkin

• Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so. -- Andrea Dworkin [source for all three quotes is *here*]

I'll add this:

Andrea Dworkin is hated because women are hated.  And because she spoke women's truths to men's violently protected power.

As a Jew with family roots that go to Europe, I comprehend with stunned silence the level of atrocity-denial it must take for people to pretend HaShoah never occurred. One might shake one's head at the racist, anti-Semitic fools who do so but as they are the group in charge shaking one's head isn't nearly enough.

I suppose in an era of Photoshopping and other digital methods of altering images, we might expect that some people aiming to keep white Christian supremacy alive would accuse those who lived through nightmares to deny Nazi genocidal atrocity ever happened. How convenient for one's effort to maintain destructive, sadistic power that one denies is power, eh?

One might be tempted to cut the HaShoah-deniers some slack, given that the horror happened seventy years ago. Except for one thing: it is happening now against Indigenous people globally, and in particular in North America, in a time and place that is regarded as being oh-so-civil. Which, of course Hitler believed Nazi-ruled Germany was also. Now Germany currently has a relatively strong economy--albeit with debt incurred in propping up the pitiful economies of other European nations. And it has managed this, this time, without wiping out hated ethnic groups, and is banning nuclear power plants. Humane action can replace inhumane action.

In North America, the story is entirely different. Indigenous women are the poorest of the poor, the most raped of the raped, and the most invisibilised of the invisible. It's not just that whites don't wish to discuss this egregious elephant in the room, but most truly do not know genocide is happening right now, in part, I suppose, because the term genocide has been equated with tremendous levels of mass murder occurring in a very short period of time. But when the mass murder and attempts at complete cultural obliteration happens slowly while deliberately--with the apparent unawareness of the white masses--in what sense is this not also genocide?

Whites will and do come up with excuses for why we don't know about this, and why we aren't engaged in revolt against the forces which maintain this inhumanity. It's because media--white-owned--doesn't report on it. It's because systematic activism and resistance movements against the status quo--which Indigenous people all over the world are waging and have been waging for several hundred years--is not registered as important and desperate. Fighting for one's life--one's individual life and one's cultural life--is only seen as notable to Christian white het male supremacist media when it is white het men doing it, with the mythological threats being women, gays, and people of color: Muslim Arab and Asian, Ashkenazi Jewish, Black Christian, Brown Christian, and Indigenous. If you're positioned below this dominant group in various ways--such as being a woman who is Jewish and Black, you'll be rendered completely invisible in status quo society's vision of itself  which it uses media to construct in the public imagination. If you're lesbian and of color, you'll not find yourself on television. If you're trans and not M2F or F2M, you'll not find yourself on television. If you're gay, poor, and Brown, you'll not find yourself on television. The Christian whites don't want to know about us. They'd just assume we all go away.

But as lesbian Indigenous poet Chrystos has written, oppressed people--her people in particular, are Not Vanishing.

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Men deny rape is as serious a human rights problem as the imbalance of wealth distribution. Men deny rape in so many ways and for so many reasons you'd think the rest of us would determine this to be proof there must be a whole lot of men-raping-women going on. You really only need ask all the women you know how many women they know are rape-survivors and domestic terrorism survivors to know that rape is endemic and isn't going away. It could go away, but that would require men to not be in denial about it, to defend it, to protect their entitlements to practice it without negative consequence--to the male rapists.

Thirty-five years ago, Andrea Dworkin produced a brilliant radical feminist book called Our Blood. How many men have read both Not Vanishing and Our Blood, that you know? One? None? If Christian white het men were being assaulted by people who were not Christian, not white, not het, and not men, and they wrote about it, and about how they are figuring out how to survive it, I believe those books would be required reading across the educational system. Everyone would be made to read them. They'd stay in print. They'd be passed around among white het men, with a look in the eyes that says, "this speaks to our pain and our endurance".

In Our Blood, there is a very important speech, delivered March 1, 1975, called "The Rape Atrocity and The Boy Next Door". From that speech and essay we have this quote, which every man on Earth ought to have memorised in his own language.

Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us. -- Andrea Dworkin

Indeed. Almost without exception, men will self-centeredly respond: "What about the men and boys who are raped?" To this inhumane response I reply: What about the millions of girls, daily?

What shall we conclude about the moral character of white het men who will not acknowledge the pain and endurance of other people, non-male people--people these white men structurally oppress? What is the level of humanity of these rape apologists and perpetrator-protectors? How ought they be regarded or reviled, statused or stigmatised, by society? This is how they are regarded and statused: as heroes, as geniuses, as brilliant creators. This is how they, as a group, are reviled and stigmatised: not at all, in any way.

If you combine the forces and practices of genocide with gynocide, you get a truly horrifying statistic, which is numbers placed over the violence men do to women. One women in three will be raped by a man--mostly by a white het man--if she's an Indigenous woman in North America. See *this study by Amnesty International* for much more on that. And for more understanding of gynocide and genocide, please see chapter one of Andrea Smith's brilliant book, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide: "Sexual Violence As a Tool of Genocide".

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For Indigenous women's stories of survival of many forms of men's violence, please read Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence.

If you don't get what's incredibly fucked up about this gross protectionism of white het men and their abuses of other people, you're either in great denial yourself, or you're one of lying perpetrators of it.

theoreticalgrrrl, in a recent comment to this blog, noted how many women she knows well are survivors of the rape atrocity. I hope you read it, *here* in a recent post called Hearsay and Heresy.

I welcome all readers of this blog to post their own knowledge of the globalised rape atrocity, committed by men against women, with no relief for women, and no responsibility by men, in sight.

Here's part of what I know:

My mother was raped in a place that was supposed to keep her safe. She was also incested by her father, years prior to that.

My aunt and her daughters were incested by an uncle.

One of those daughters was, many decades later, anally raped by her husband when he was drunk.

A female relative's sister threw herself in front of a train to escape being domestically terrorised--which includes rape--by her husband.

A dear female friend was raped while a prostitute when she was a teenager. She was later street raped by a strange man. And another strange man tried to rape her. She escaped.

Another dear female friend was molested three times one summer by three different men.

Another dear female friend was incested by her father and years later was street raped.

Another friend has been raped in her marriage by her husband, too many times to count. He has been a domestic terrorist.

Another dear friend was raped, as an underage teenager, at knife-point by a young man she didn't know.

Another dear friend was drugged into semi-consciousness in a hotel room by an "accomplished" man who is a serial rapist: his name is Joseph Brooks. He raped many women over thirty years, usually using drugs to physically disable the women. I am relieved to report he is dead.

I could go on and on. Statistically, I'd say, easily, seven of ten women I know is a rape survivor; ninety-nine of one hundred women I know is a survivor of some form of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault with one male or several males being the perpretrator. And none of them reported the rapes to the police, to a lawyer, to the FBI, or to a mental or physical health care provider. Not one.

Please share your stories here, in ways that keep the survivors completely anonymous and safe.

To men: please organise to end men's sexual assault of girls, and rape of women. The reason why men must do this is because it is only men's responsibility to do so.