There, rape activists. We said it. Some decide NOT to let this ugly event define them. Too bad feminist theory teaches women little of value re recovery.
A friend sent me Larissa's essay after I ranted a bit (on my Substack and to her) that I'd come to feel as though a lot of feminism had made "rape culture" worse. I loved that essay, absolutely incredible.
One realization was that the ONLY people who had ever told me that "no one" would believe me re sexual harassment, assaults, rape were feminists ... and I haven't actually had the experience of not being believe when I have said something (I'm lucky I haven't been through something like Larissa Phillips has ... the only sexual assault / rape I experienced that was serious enough for me to consider going to the police, I was so out of it, I think drugged, I didn't think I could correctly identify the guy who did it, and didn't get his license plate despite having the opportunity, showered right away when I got home because that's all I wanted to do, basically did everything wrong, so didn't report ... but honestly, once I realized I didn't get an STI or pregnant I was mostly okay? I figured why be traumatized by something I barely remembered ... Idk but then again I just shared here so maybe I didn't shrug it off as much as I thought!)
Yes, I've wondered whether it's mostly feminists who were saying that. I'd bet it's still a problem outside of feminism, including the legal/justice system, but we really can't say that for sure until we test it more, and not reporting it is Exhibit A in how not-serious about rape feminists are. If there really is a problem with women being believed and getting justice if they *do* do all the right things, then fine, let's deal with it. But the whole 'you won't be believed' thing can be a self-fulfilling prophecy...when you wait a long while to tell your story and have no proof. Yeah, it's harder to believe.
I'm sure it's still a problem, but probably more so within families or close communities when the perpetrator is someone people wish to protect. Whenever I've complained about a guy doing something to me, I've always been believed, a handful of times been pressured to react MORE than I was (by feminist women), which was also not helpful because it made me reluctant to talk openly about experiences because I didn't want a guy to get disproportionately punished for something I'd classify as "annoying" (i.e. weird touching of my lower back at a party, hanging outside my office in a weird way) more than "traumatizing" or "scary".
Another twist ... The most aggressive messaging of "women won't be believed" I've heard has come from women who made accusations and then evidence emerged that they lied, and their feminist allies. It's rare, but some women do lie about rape. And when they get caught in the lie they seem to fall back on and weaponize feminist rhetoric. (I wrote about an example here: https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/rethinking-the-steven-galloway-scandal).
Ignore awkward grammar I'm pre-coffee and pregnant and this topic fries my brain sometimes.
I hear ya about the disproportionate response to minor infractions of etiquette or violation of personal space. I think the hysterics around male 'microaggressions' are just part of the general hysteria that has come to define woke social justice, although you can see the extremist reactions on the other side too (the world is always about to end for the radical right too over something stupid, like a gay person in an ad or a black President :) )
"Women won't be believed" - ya know, ironically, I've run into *several* woman who I suspect pulled a rape out of their butts that never happened, but it wasn't the damaging kind of rape lie you're talking about. When I was younger and my current views on rape (which haven't changed much over the decades) were less popular in the '80s and '90s, women I'd be talking with about this sort of thing would suddenly hiss or snarl, "I've been raped!" to shame me into shutting up. And I did, because who wants to traumatize someone else, right? After it happened often enough - often with women I'd known for awhile and had never mentioned it before - I began to recognize it as a bullying tactic to shut me up (whether it was true or not). So I started saying, "Well I'm sorry to hear that but it doesn't invalidate what I'm saying." That said, I *have* known two women who cried false rape - one did it to two different men. *That's* the sort of rape I condemn, not the woman who might be making it up in conversation but never says it publicly and harms someone who might be innocent. I'e often wondered about the #MeTooers too, when the hash tag was popular some years back. Many of them weren't naming names or harming any but there were *so* many stories I wondered if some just wanted to join the sisterhood and get the attention too, often under perfectly safe anonymous accounts.
I think I may have read your article already - either someone sent it to me or maybe you recommended it at some point. But yeah, I know about the Galloway case.
What bothers me a lot more is the false 'false rape allegations' being made by those who'd prefer not to believe that Hamas could possibly rape anyone, and especially not viciously. So maybe *sometimes* women are lying? I swear to Goddess, some day soon the far left and right will join together and destroy us all. If they can agree on nothing else, they can at least agree to hate women.
Sigh, yes, all of this. I also think there's pressure for women to "round up" negative experiences. I volunteered at a crisis centre for sexual assault victims for two years during my undergrad. One of the things we were taught in training was to be careful *not* to tell women that experiences they'd had, that they WEREN'T thinking of as sexual assault, were actually sexual assault. Apparently that had been an issue. I think like a lot of people I started "peaking" on Me Too right around the time Aziz Ansari got dragged for being an awkward date. At the same time, I do think the movement did good (besides the obvious taking down of legit predators like Harvey Weinstein). I had two guys reach out to me to apologize for past incidents, which I appreciated (though, in one case, the guy thought it was much worse than I did, which was interesting). Heard from a lot of men that they didn't really understand how common sexual harassment was, or how vulnerable many women felt, how small comments that didn't seem like big deals to them could add up over a woman's day etc.
Wicked interesting observations. I've been working to try and drag back the extremism that has come to infect everything on the social justice front. Everything goes *way* overboard - I wrote not so long ago about social justice movements needing someone holding the reins so they don't veer off into Crazyland. Yes, I didn't like the whole Aziz Ansari thing either and the fact that so many women thought it was a 'traumatizing experience' speaks to how privileged so many of them are. If they think *that's* a bad date they should try a night out with Cosby :(
It definitely did some good, MeToo, and I actually had my own MeToo experience to tell, but it wasn't *horrendous* and I actually didn't want to cause trouble for the guy! It was a boss I had many years ago who sexually harassed me. I handled it...kinda bravely, I thought...kept my job, and he didn't make my life hell. We moved beyond it. I'm still friendly with him although we don't talk much anymore as I live in Canada now and he's in the States. I talked to him last year to see if he wanted to partner with a guy I was running a sales campaign for. He was so happy to hear from me...we were employer/employee on and off for like a dozen years...and the sexual harassment was only a short period of time. I seriously didn't want to make trouble for him because people fuck up, he didn't try to rape me or anything, and I was proud of how I handled it, so I wrote a blog article about it. I probably would have felt differently if he'd done something horrible. (Although he wasn't in a position to do much..his wife was the head of the company :) ) Anyway. Not everything needs to involved lawyers or the Supreme Court.
It's nice that men reached out to you to apologize. I haven't had anyone do that to me but there's no one I'm hoping to hear from. Maybe one guy, who never sexually harassed me, he was just a bastard of a bully in high school. Hit me twice (he hated me) and the second time he learned NEVER to do THAT again (I got a blog post out of that one too...and I didn't out him, it was over forty years ago and I'm over it...I simply wrote it originally to challenge the whiny overprivileged pseudo-feminists on Medium who were all like OH MY GOD A MAN TOLD ME I'M PRETTY! I FELT SO CHEAP AND USED! IT WAS AN EPIC BATTLE WITH THE PATRIARCHY BUT I WON, I RUINED HIS LIFE!
I was like, "My boss sexually harassed me, I dealt with it, we're still friends."
I have, however, attempted to reach out to two people from my distant past I was a major asshole too. I don't know if they ever got my messages, but I really tried. I had my sort of 'Brett Kavanaugh' moment - who had I been an asshole to that I'd forgotten about, but they'd never forgotten about me?
Great piece! If you want more Larissa Phillips, she gave a fantastic interview to the Special Place in Hell pod with Meghan Daum and Sarah Haider March 28.
A friend sent me Larissa's essay after I ranted a bit (on my Substack and to her) that I'd come to feel as though a lot of feminism had made "rape culture" worse. I loved that essay, absolutely incredible.
One realization was that the ONLY people who had ever told me that "no one" would believe me re sexual harassment, assaults, rape were feminists ... and I haven't actually had the experience of not being believe when I have said something (I'm lucky I haven't been through something like Larissa Phillips has ... the only sexual assault / rape I experienced that was serious enough for me to consider going to the police, I was so out of it, I think drugged, I didn't think I could correctly identify the guy who did it, and didn't get his license plate despite having the opportunity, showered right away when I got home because that's all I wanted to do, basically did everything wrong, so didn't report ... but honestly, once I realized I didn't get an STI or pregnant I was mostly okay? I figured why be traumatized by something I barely remembered ... Idk but then again I just shared here so maybe I didn't shrug it off as much as I thought!)
Yes, I've wondered whether it's mostly feminists who were saying that. I'd bet it's still a problem outside of feminism, including the legal/justice system, but we really can't say that for sure until we test it more, and not reporting it is Exhibit A in how not-serious about rape feminists are. If there really is a problem with women being believed and getting justice if they *do* do all the right things, then fine, let's deal with it. But the whole 'you won't be believed' thing can be a self-fulfilling prophecy...when you wait a long while to tell your story and have no proof. Yeah, it's harder to believe.
I'm sure it's still a problem, but probably more so within families or close communities when the perpetrator is someone people wish to protect. Whenever I've complained about a guy doing something to me, I've always been believed, a handful of times been pressured to react MORE than I was (by feminist women), which was also not helpful because it made me reluctant to talk openly about experiences because I didn't want a guy to get disproportionately punished for something I'd classify as "annoying" (i.e. weird touching of my lower back at a party, hanging outside my office in a weird way) more than "traumatizing" or "scary".
Another twist ... The most aggressive messaging of "women won't be believed" I've heard has come from women who made accusations and then evidence emerged that they lied, and their feminist allies. It's rare, but some women do lie about rape. And when they get caught in the lie they seem to fall back on and weaponize feminist rhetoric. (I wrote about an example here: https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/rethinking-the-steven-galloway-scandal).
Ignore awkward grammar I'm pre-coffee and pregnant and this topic fries my brain sometimes.
I hear ya about the disproportionate response to minor infractions of etiquette or violation of personal space. I think the hysterics around male 'microaggressions' are just part of the general hysteria that has come to define woke social justice, although you can see the extremist reactions on the other side too (the world is always about to end for the radical right too over something stupid, like a gay person in an ad or a black President :) )
"Women won't be believed" - ya know, ironically, I've run into *several* woman who I suspect pulled a rape out of their butts that never happened, but it wasn't the damaging kind of rape lie you're talking about. When I was younger and my current views on rape (which haven't changed much over the decades) were less popular in the '80s and '90s, women I'd be talking with about this sort of thing would suddenly hiss or snarl, "I've been raped!" to shame me into shutting up. And I did, because who wants to traumatize someone else, right? After it happened often enough - often with women I'd known for awhile and had never mentioned it before - I began to recognize it as a bullying tactic to shut me up (whether it was true or not). So I started saying, "Well I'm sorry to hear that but it doesn't invalidate what I'm saying." That said, I *have* known two women who cried false rape - one did it to two different men. *That's* the sort of rape I condemn, not the woman who might be making it up in conversation but never says it publicly and harms someone who might be innocent. I'e often wondered about the #MeTooers too, when the hash tag was popular some years back. Many of them weren't naming names or harming any but there were *so* many stories I wondered if some just wanted to join the sisterhood and get the attention too, often under perfectly safe anonymous accounts.
I think I may have read your article already - either someone sent it to me or maybe you recommended it at some point. But yeah, I know about the Galloway case.
What bothers me a lot more is the false 'false rape allegations' being made by those who'd prefer not to believe that Hamas could possibly rape anyone, and especially not viciously. So maybe *sometimes* women are lying? I swear to Goddess, some day soon the far left and right will join together and destroy us all. If they can agree on nothing else, they can at least agree to hate women.
Sigh, yes, all of this. I also think there's pressure for women to "round up" negative experiences. I volunteered at a crisis centre for sexual assault victims for two years during my undergrad. One of the things we were taught in training was to be careful *not* to tell women that experiences they'd had, that they WEREN'T thinking of as sexual assault, were actually sexual assault. Apparently that had been an issue. I think like a lot of people I started "peaking" on Me Too right around the time Aziz Ansari got dragged for being an awkward date. At the same time, I do think the movement did good (besides the obvious taking down of legit predators like Harvey Weinstein). I had two guys reach out to me to apologize for past incidents, which I appreciated (though, in one case, the guy thought it was much worse than I did, which was interesting). Heard from a lot of men that they didn't really understand how common sexual harassment was, or how vulnerable many women felt, how small comments that didn't seem like big deals to them could add up over a woman's day etc.
Wicked interesting observations. I've been working to try and drag back the extremism that has come to infect everything on the social justice front. Everything goes *way* overboard - I wrote not so long ago about social justice movements needing someone holding the reins so they don't veer off into Crazyland. Yes, I didn't like the whole Aziz Ansari thing either and the fact that so many women thought it was a 'traumatizing experience' speaks to how privileged so many of them are. If they think *that's* a bad date they should try a night out with Cosby :(
It definitely did some good, MeToo, and I actually had my own MeToo experience to tell, but it wasn't *horrendous* and I actually didn't want to cause trouble for the guy! It was a boss I had many years ago who sexually harassed me. I handled it...kinda bravely, I thought...kept my job, and he didn't make my life hell. We moved beyond it. I'm still friendly with him although we don't talk much anymore as I live in Canada now and he's in the States. I talked to him last year to see if he wanted to partner with a guy I was running a sales campaign for. He was so happy to hear from me...we were employer/employee on and off for like a dozen years...and the sexual harassment was only a short period of time. I seriously didn't want to make trouble for him because people fuck up, he didn't try to rape me or anything, and I was proud of how I handled it, so I wrote a blog article about it. I probably would have felt differently if he'd done something horrible. (Although he wasn't in a position to do much..his wife was the head of the company :) ) Anyway. Not everything needs to involved lawyers or the Supreme Court.
It's nice that men reached out to you to apologize. I haven't had anyone do that to me but there's no one I'm hoping to hear from. Maybe one guy, who never sexually harassed me, he was just a bastard of a bully in high school. Hit me twice (he hated me) and the second time he learned NEVER to do THAT again (I got a blog post out of that one too...and I didn't out him, it was over forty years ago and I'm over it...I simply wrote it originally to challenge the whiny overprivileged pseudo-feminists on Medium who were all like OH MY GOD A MAN TOLD ME I'M PRETTY! I FELT SO CHEAP AND USED! IT WAS AN EPIC BATTLE WITH THE PATRIARCHY BUT I WON, I RUINED HIS LIFE!
I was like, "My boss sexually harassed me, I dealt with it, we're still friends."
I have, however, attempted to reach out to two people from my distant past I was a major asshole too. I don't know if they ever got my messages, but I really tried. I had my sort of 'Brett Kavanaugh' moment - who had I been an asshole to that I'd forgotten about, but they'd never forgotten about me?
Great piece! If you want more Larissa Phillips, she gave a fantastic interview to the Special Place in Hell pod with Meghan Daum and Sarah Haider March 28.
I'll look have to look for that one, thank you!