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One in Four - Conversation & Criticisms

So, in posting my last article on facebook, a conversation sprung up about gender dichotomy and blaming... I really value a lot of the insights in this conversation, and I want to respond very directly in my next blog post. So, for the sake of fidelity, I am posting the entire conversation here.

Andrew Robins: I've read the "Schrodinger’s rapist" blog post a few times now. The more I read it, the more annoyed I got. Since this woman is using Schrodingers name (incorrectly) for her own cause, I'm now calling it "Schrodingers blog post" in that it's a blog post that's simultaneously anti-men AND anti-woman.

Ginger MacDonald: Andrew, first of all, it makes me super happy that you read my blog posts in the first place. Whatever disagreements we have about stuff, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy that you're interested in the conversation at all.

So: how do you see that post as being anti-human? She is pretty much just talking about her experience of culture and human interaction. And I think her experience is pretty common to a lot of women in North America.

Andrew Robins: With the idea of Schrodinger's cat being that eventually someone will actually observe the cat and the experiment will be over. With this woman's blog post and pretty much every conversation about rape culture with feminists is that there's a set belief that on a long enough timeline, every man will eventually become a rapist. Boyfriend, husband, male friend, guy on the street, all of them. This is bullshit. At no point in my life have I ever wanted to rape anyone, nor do I intend to, but every time this ladies blog gets touted as gospel, it's telling me that I have no control over my actions and I have to be treated like the boogyman by every girl I might interact with for any reason until the end of time because I *might* rape someone. But that's only the second highest reason on the list this blog gets elevated to hypershitty status. Enough blog posts and news stories have been written about how we as a society should teach men from day one that they're stupid beasts who have no control over their sexual appetites, that I can toss this one on the "Offensive to men in general" pile and not feel bad about it.

The number one is that this blog is also pretty anti-woman. You are a WEAK woman who can't help but get raped eventually. You have to treat every guy like he's a rapist, because you have no other choice. Live in fear, because this woman and the propaganda machine of rape culture is telling you that you will probably get raped by a man. So at every point throughout the course of a day, this woman (and every woman who reads her blog and blindly nods along) with it gets to treat every man they interact with for any reason ever like an eventual rapist. So conveniently, every mans role in society gets to be reduced and defined by women. That is not equality, that's pushing for female superiority and weakens the argument as a whole. I get to decide what my role in society will be, not you. I like the idea behind feminism generally, but when I have feminists as a group telling me I have zero control over myself, I find it hard to support their cause.

Additionally with this post (and yours), the entire focus is on men. We rape, we beat, we commit domestic violence, and we just rape all willy nilly whenever we have a drink. Where's the blog posts about women beating or raping men, and how wrong that is? The implication is that it has never happened, ever. Since we know that's not true, there's a ratio of women who HAVE beaten and/or raped men to women who have NOT beaten and/or raped men. However small of a number that might be, it's still there. I won't treat the majority of women like they're going to punch me in the mouth at every moment because it *might* happen. And no, just because the ratio of men wronging women is higher then the ratio of women wronging men does NOT make discrimination towards men more acceptable, because that lets *only* women define where this magical line that gets crossed where we treat a group as a whole like rapists during every waking moment. That's a hell of a tricky ledge to walk right there

Additionally, Domestic violence is committed by women too. I'd be willing to bet more then a small amount of money that female to male violence is a lot higher then reported. However, men don't get to call the police when they get slapped or punched or attacked by women, because they'll get perceived as weaklings by pretty much everyone who gets involved, from the reporting officer(s), the court system, the woman herself, and his friends and society as a whole. If the woman doing the beating IS actually arrested, she will invariably be released with no charges (She's just a girl you see. She's too small to do anything like that) OR even worse, gets a sentence that doesn't compare to what a man would receive in the same situation (Because she didn't REALLY hurt him.)

The same thing goes when it comes to reporting female on male sexual assault. Recently, a 29 year old famous singer (Carrie Underwood) brought a 12 year old boy on stage to give him his first kiss because of a sign he was holding. Everyone cheered and applauded and went on their way. Now, imagine the UPROAR, the ABSOLUTE indignation of women and pretty much everyone on the planet would have been if their genders were reversed. Carrie Underwood would have been crucified before he got off the stage. When a female teacher gets caught banging a male student, the reaction is 95% "Lucky kid!." and the woman gets a much smaller sentence then When the reverse is true. Recently, I went to see a movie with a female who I've had several conversations like this about rape and rape culture. During the previews of another movie, a scene was shown where a man says something along the lines of "I got fucked in prison ted. I was fucked." and it was in a comical notation. And the girl I was with laughed. So in societies eyes, rape is funny when it happens to men, and horrifying when it happens to women.

Maybe when this woman's blog post and posts like yours stop saying stuff like "men will rape and beat you no matter what eventually" and start saying things like "Violence and rape under any circumstance is wrong, regardless of the sex" then I'll start taking them more seriously.

Aimee Eddins: Hello Andrew, It's been a while; I hope you're doing well.

I appreciate your call for a gender-free definition of and social movement against any kind of violence and rape. I agree both are wrong in any circumstance regardless of the gender of the perpetrator or victim. I don't think rape is funny in any context.

It sounds like you don't appreciate the gendered focus on women's experience of possible threat. It sounds like you feel that this marginalizes the experience of those men who have been the recipient of these sorts of violence.

I appreciate you finding a current events example of the bias that exists in our society (with Carrie Underwood).

My understanding of Schrodenger's cat experiment is that before observation, we cannot know if the cat is alive or dead and so we must assume it is both at the same time until such time as we can observe it's actual state. After observing its actual state, we then know with certainty in which place it exists. I find this to be a pretty good analogy for my own experience of men in the world at large when I come into contact with them in potentially compromised situations. I have experienced very scary aggression from some men I know- even know well- and I have been trained by a lot of sources since early childhood to be wary of people I don't know. These things seem to correlate in my mind. It makes sense to me to be wary of people I don't (and do) know when they aren't paying attention to my own sense of safety and bodily integrity. Having this/these experiences, I find much in common with the article. I also have friends who have - by the literal definition of rape and sexual assault- raped and sexually assaulted people I know. These friends do not see themselves as having done so. Calling out men as being in the wrong is not helpful, as you suggest, however it does start to bring up the conversation. I think we need to re-frame it by focusing on creating a culture of consent and teaching men and women how to respect boundaries. How would you feel about having a conversation about that instead?

Andrew Robins: I agree entirely. There should be a culture of teaching everyone not to hit or rape. There isn't one though. It's entirely focused on men on women. I'm not trivializing the violence that women receive, but in focusing on the issue solely in the way that I've perceived feministic culture wanting to, we are not only teaching boys that their body is violent, dangerous, and they have no control, but that they are incapable of being the victim. We are also telling girls that they will be a victim at some point, and they are incapable of being the perpetrator of such acts.

Teaching girls that they WILL be attacked and should always be prepared for such an attack (By learning Ju jitsu or carrying pepper spray) is totally acceptable when it's coming from women blogs, and other feminists, but if a guy gives practical advice like "Don't go to a shitty area wearing a tube top and a miniskirt" all of the sudden he's misogynistic piece of garbage who is perpetuating rape culture.

Finally, you're right about the cat. Except in the case, the door never gets opened, and every guy is treated like a dead cat, for all time and ever. With this treatment, all men are being asked to bend over backwards to accommodate a females potential feelings, and never once has anyone called for the reverse. That's how discrimination begins, not ends.

Creation Myth...

In the beginning, there was a mishy-mashy swirling lump of consciousness.  Or maybe it was a speck of dust... It had no form, no gender, only potential (potential equals love).

And, having nothing else to do with its (their) infinite time, the consciousness began to make love to itself.  For eons, upon eons, rolling waves of pleasure.  Waves upon waves, and torrents, streams, waterfalls, pools, and eddies of pleasure.

And all this action began to create forms.  Wave patterns of energy coalesce into echos of themselves, and these echos condense into spheres... And the spheres begin to move, and create patterns and currents of their own...

And the peaks of pleasure grew so great, the energy to hot, the vibrations so intense that...
         
thiny atoms of matter pop into existence... permanent echos of the orgasm of the great cost cosmic consciousness.  Billions of tiny pops... {...pOp...} {...PoP...} {...POP!...} so many the it might have sounded like one great big {...BANG!...}

[hmmm, Great Cosmic Consciousness is a little wordy... but oh, to find a name, or a title... Do we even have a word for a sexy hermaphroditic grandparent?  I don't think we do.  Maybe some other language, in some other time has/had/will have such a word...]

And in all that swirling of newly fissioned matter, our solar system began to swirls its own spiral sphere.  Began to coalesce itself around a glowing org of hot, orgasmic fission.  And our sun began to birth planets.  Let's call our sun Grandmother Sun, since she's about to do all this birthing.

And of all the planets that Grandmother Sun birthed, there was this one... this blue/green marble of joy.  And this planet, this mother/father sphere of consciousness, began to birth a million billion tiny bursts of consciousness.  Multidimentional beings of light, and joy, and... oh, let's call them SOULS.

And the souls began to birth unto themselves, out of the body of the Earth, into all of the creatures of the world; the mountains and the rocks, the oceans and the rivers, the plants and the animals and the insects.

And in the beginning, the creatures of the world took time, time to learn how to have bodies made of matter, and how to live, and die, and be born again.

And this learning tood another very long time (though not quite so long as the eons before...).

More drawings

Journaling doodle - about self liberation and being the story I tell myself about who I am... 

More doodling.  This one's not finished yet, but I really like it. Sort of the same subject matter. 

One in Four... and reincarnation of the collective consciousness

So in my last post, I made the following assertions:

"One out of every four women in the United States has been raped, or beaten by an intimate partner. New York Times, Dec 14, 2011" 

ONE IN FOUR WOMEN. To put another way, within a four generation cycle of women - 5yo daughter, 30yo mother, 60yo grandmother, 85yo great-grandmother - in EVERY family, one of those women has been sexually assaulted.

From another perspective: one out of every four men is a rapist or has beaten his intimate partner. ONE IN FOUR MEN. In your own family, sons, father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers... one of those men have committed a rape.

And more than a few people came back with the main question: 1 in 4 rapists? Do you really mean to assert a 1:1 ratio of rapists to rape victims?  Surely a rapist rapes multiple women and the actual occurrence of rapists in the general population is much lower...

Here is another blog post about a women's intellectual relationship with the possibility of rape:

While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?    I don’t.

from: SCHRÖDINGER’S RAPIST: OR A GUY’S GUIDE TO APPROACHING STRANGE WOMEN WITHOUT BEING MACED

First of all, let me say that her blog post is amazing, and you should read all of it.  It offers a very insightful window into the experience of women interacting with unknown men.  That said, she is making a different point than I am, and her statistical logic is fuzzy and unscientific (as much as it seems like a reasonable estimate).  Not that my statistical logic is better than hers, but I did look up a few more numbers - and I'm gonna look up some more other numbers to back up my unscientific assertions...

Unfortunately, there aren't any real statistics out there assessing the number rapists in the general population (not that I've been able to find).  Shockingly, almost all of the research seems to be focused on the victims... and how the victims can avoid putting themselves in a "risky situation..." as apposed to researching the people committing the crime and how those individuals could avoid becoming rapists in the first place...  And that is a point that Miss Lonely Hearts and I are in complete agreement on.

Ok, so: to start out with, some definition and defining.  The 1:4 number for women includes both completed rape and violent assault.  Being beaten by an intimate partner encompasses much of basic domestic violence - which is often a situational crime of passion, as opposed to a predatory act.  Specifically, this definition of rape includes force or coercion of any kind between married couples.

From the current Wikipedia article on "Rape":

In 2012, the FBI changed their definition from "The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." to "The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim." for their annual Uniform Crime Reports. The definition, which had remained unchanged since 1927, was considered outdated and narrow...
Some countries, such as Germany, are now using more inclusive definitions which do not require penetration,[17] and the 1998 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda defines it as "a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive".[17] In some jurisdictions, the term "rape" has been phased out of legal use in favor of terms such as "sexual assault" or "criminal sexual conduct".[22] Other countries or jurisdictions continue to define rape to cover only acts involving penile penetration of the vagina, treating all other types of non-consensual sexual activity as sexual assault. Scotland, for instance, requires that a rapist commit a sexual assault with a penis, so only males can legally be rapists.

 Frankly, I lean more towards the Rwanda definition.  I understand that it seems important to some people to distinguish between assaults that involve genital penetration and those that do not, as a way of gauging the severity of the violation... but to me, it simply matters that the person's body has been violated in a sexual way.  That someone has said to them, "my sexual desires are more important than your personal autonomy."  That their wishes, their individuality, their sovereignty to decide for themselves how they will relate to the world and to other people... are less important than those of a person of greater power.  That the person of power is entitled to take what they want... that it is their privilege.  They deserve it. Conversely, that they cannot control themselves... that they are passionate, carnal people, and at a certain point of arousal, there's just no going back, and they could not stop...

And how did the men of our society come to be trained in such entitlement?

Genesis 3:16 Unto the woman [God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. (book of Genesis seems to have been written between 1400-800 bce)

Though the bible repeatedly announced that a woman who dared to make love to a man other than her husband was a shameful and profane degredation to the entire faith, Hebrew men went about honorably collecting as man women as they could economically afford. ... A lack of fidelity on the part of the man seems to have been taken for granted, unless the other woman was already married or betrothed.  This was regarded as sinful because it was a legal infringement upon the property of some other man.  It was hardly a romantic fidelity for both partners of the marrieage that was deemed as important or sacred, but only for the woman that premarital virginity and sexual fidelity became "moral" issues, attitudes we see reflected even today.  (pg 191 Shekina Mountainwater, "When God Was a Woman" 1976)

For nearly two thousand years, we have been living in a patriarchal society, with every facet of that patriarchy being reinforced and programmed into us by religious myth and law.
(Analysis of what the world was like prior to the rise of patriarchy and monotheism is for another blog post... suffice it to say that I completely reject the idea that male domination is "the way it's always been", and that that's how we evolved.  Current archaeological evidence and interpretation point more and more to dominant female deities, and matriarchal control from the dawn of human consciousness, 60,000 year ago, up until the the rise and takeover of monotheism and patriarchy, roughly 2,000 years ago.)

So, whether or not we think that we are religious... whether or not we even believe in god or believe that religion is a bunch of bullshit... we each carry the social programming of two thousand years of society ruled by religious priests and ideas.  Social programming.  And at the very core of many of those religions, is the assertion that God is male and men are supreme, and women are to be subservient to men.

And in reference to that legacy, feminism and gender liberation have made incredible strides in the past 100 years. That's about two or three generations. Maybe four.

And right now, today, 1 in four women has been raped or sexually assaulted.

Because men still feel that entitlement.  Because our society is still patriarchal, and men hold a power and privilege over women that is reinforced by two thousand years of cultural heritage.

The only statistics I could find about rapists is a series of information that seems to be based on surveys of college students done in the 1980's and 90's.  

• Between 62% (4) and 84% (1) of survivors knew their attacker.
• 8% of men admit committing acts that meet the legal definition of rape or attempted rape. Of these men who committed rape, 84% said that what they did was definitely not rape. (1)
• More than one in five men report "becoming so sexually aroused that they could not stop themselves from having sex, even though the woman did not consent." (8)
• 35% of men report at least some degree of likelihood of raping if they could be assured they wouldn't be caught or punished. (9)

http://www.oneinfourusa.org/statistics.php

So... to come back to my assertion that 1 in 4 men have committed a rape, or an act of sexual assault...  I would say that yes: 1 in 4 men is capable of getting a woman drunk and then having non-consensual sex with her.  Capable of coercing and pressuring a younger woman to sleep with him.  Capable of getting drunk and smacking his wife/girlfriend around and then forcibly fucking her in their bed in the middle of the night.  Capable of intentionally copping a feel on some hot chick as she unguardedly slides by him in a public place.  Capable of taking advantage of privilege and certain knowledge that there are no consequences for those actions.  Capable of doing all of these things without once thinking that he is committing an act of rape.

And perhaps, by my definition, the number for women experiencing sexual assault is more like 1 in 3, or 1 in 2, or damn near every one of us.

Because the point that I'm getting at, again, is that each and every one of us on the planet carries the cultural heritage of both the victim and perpetrator.  In my own family, both my grandmother and my grandfather.

In the Buddhist and Hindu religions, reincarnation is believed to be a journey on the way to enlightenment.  And on that journey, the one soul lives many different lives, sometimes as a criminal, sometimes as a victim, sometimes wealthy and comfortable, living each life with a specific lesson to be learned.  But if we take each of those souls, on each of their individual journeys, and we weave them into the tapestry of collective consciousness, collective knowing... then maybe there is a unified journey, across the planet, towards a shift... towards a world community of balanced energy.  Balanced between male and female, balanced between spiritual and physical, balanced human interaction with our environment and fellow creatures on the earth...

A more scientific explanation, as we connect more and more with population and technology, the computing power of our collective consciousness grows greater and greater.  The computer of human thought and connection gains more neurons every day.  And as our knowledge grows, our understanding of our place in the world and how to preserve ourselves, how to live truly free lives...

Anyways.  What we have right now is a world-wide culture of patriarchy and male privilege.  It is starting to shift, slowly, but it would shift a lot faster if men would start jumping ship... if we realize that the spark of consciousness needed to make the shift is in each and every one of us, and it begins with healing the wounds inside ourselves.  It begins with people in positions of privilege to begin to recognize their privilege and take responsibility for shifting the power balance.

It also begins with empowering people in oppressed positions... women, people of color, indigenous groups, those in poverty... empower those people to stand up for themselves and assert their rights, and to hold those in power accountable.

And love and compassion.  That just makes everything work better.