Anti-slut shaming from Courtney Love
“Repeat Rape: How do they get away with it?”, Part 1 of 2. (link to Part 2)
Sources:
- College Men: Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,Lisak and Miller, 2002 [PDF, 12 pages]
- Navy Men: Lisak and Miller’s results were essentially duplicated in an even larger study (2,925 men): Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel, McWhorter, 2009 [PDF, 16 pages]
By dark-side-of-the-room, who writes:
These infogifs are provided RIGHTS-FREE for noncommercial purposes. Repost them anywhere. In fact, repost them EVERYWHERE. No need to credit. Link to the L&M study if possible.
Knowledge is a seed; sow it.
orgasmic tips for girls: How to not be rapey, pt.1: sometimes you will accidentally turn down sex! »
Hey! So you know when you’re getting with someone, usually someone new, and you feel like things are warming up… but there’s also this other conflicting signal that makes you think your partner isn’t so into it, and it’s kind of hard to tell?
Hopefully you already know that a smart thing to do…
TW: Sexual abuseElizabeth Smart became a household name after she was kidnapped from her home in Salt Lake City, UT at the age of 14 and held in captivity for nine months. She was forced into a polygamous marriage, tethered to a metal cable, and raped daily until she was rescued from her captors nine months later. Smart was recovered while she and her kidnappers were walking down a suburban street, leading many Americans who followed her story on the national news to wonder:Why didn’t she just run away as soon as she was brought outside?Speaking to an audience at Johns Hopkins about issues of human trafficking and sexual violence, Smart recently offered an answer to that question. She explained that some human trafficking victims don’t run away because they feel worthless after being raped, particularly if they have been raised in conservative cultures that push abstinence-only education and emphasize sexual purity:
Smart said she “felt so dirty and so filthy” after she was raped by her captor, and she understands why someone wouldn’t run “because of that alone.”
Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, saying she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value,” Smart said. “Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”
Now in her mid-twenties, Smart runs a foundation to help educate children about sexual crimes. She now believes that children should grow up learning that “you will always have value and nothing can change that.”
Social psychologists and sexual abuse counselors agree that comprehensive sex education can help prevent sexual crimes. Teaching children about their bodies gives them the tools to describe acts of abuse without feeling as embarrassed or uncomfortable, and it also helps elevate their self-confidence and sense of bodily autonomy. A shame-based approach to genitalia and sexuality, on the other hand, sends kids the message that they can’t discuss or ask questions about any of those issues.
When I went through abstinence only education they did an activity where they put different activity from holding hands to intercourse around the room and asked everyone how far they would go, and how far their parents would be okay with them going. I refused to do the exercise because I thought it was inappropriate and my parents trusted me to be safe and make decisions for myself. Now that I look back on that I can’t imagine how traumatic that could have been to someone who had been sexually abused. We need to keep this in mind when discussing sex education.
Teaching sexual health and education in a shaming way sends terrible messages to our children and students. And those feelings of shame do not go away even if someone has waited to have sex until their wedding night. You can’t undo years or decades of sex-negative education with a marriage license and a ring.
Those feelings of shame do not help the children who have been sexually abused, like the article above points out, either.
When I was in middle school, I was forced to sit on a blanket in front of my health class. The teacher then had a boy in the class sit next to me to represent us having sex (the added level of humiliation and creepiness that added is beside the point). Then she added another student and another and ended the lesson by demonstrating how many people we could spread diseases to if we had sex with more than one person. I remember her specifically pointing out that even if you wait to have sex until you get engaged, your fiance could die and then no one will want to marry you because you’re “damaged goods” and “dirty”. I remember thinking that if that were true, it would still be the case if you had sex after you were married and were widowed.
But, by far, the message I took away from our sex ed lesson in health class was that I was already damaged goods because I was molested. I had “let” that happen to me and that if someone DID fall in love with me, they were a better person because they were willing to be with someone who is “damaged”.
The sex-negative dialogue is hard to undo and work past. I’m still working through it.
Love,
Rabble
Some boy pulled my hair in Kindergarden, so I turned around and punched him the nose… my dad was so proud.
Off-duty sailor beats the shit out of an attempted rapist
A bus driver who tried to rape a passenger at knifepoint chose the wrong victim, a court heard yesterday.The woman, an off-duty US navy sailor, knocked the knife from his grasp, broke it in two, bit his hand, wrestled him to the ground and put him in a stranglehold between her thighs.
Having beaten him into submission, she left the bus and reported the incident to her commander.
she broke a knife in half
If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.
If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.
If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.
If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.
If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.
Or you could just be honest and say that you don’t want less rape, you want (even) less prosecution of rapists.
When people scoff at the message that we need to teach people not to rape they make the assumption that the lesson goes: “Rape is bad. Don’t do it.” That is not what the lesson looks like. The lesson, once it is adopted, will be that every single person out there, regardless of any defining personal characteristics, is a human being of value, and with a right to make their own decisions about what bodily contact to have with others. There is nothing a person can do that makes them less deserving of that right. Violating any person’s right to control the when, what and who with of their sexual interactions is wrong. Do it and you will be punished, and you will deserve it.
N.B. While not all those who are raped are women, and not all rapists are men, much less rape apologists; rape prevention myths are always targeted at women, and this post reflects this. My language in the final paragraph is very consciously gender-neutral.
