Hollywood has been a hotbed of nastiness and perversion for years. According to one article, as early as 1939, Louis B. Mayer had managed to take a beautiful, innocent, only somewhat damaged young Judy Garland and turn her into a habitually sexually molested, pill-popping wasteoid in two years’ time. Whether the Hollywood tradition of sinking to man’s lowest level started there, I don’t know, but it certainly continues up to the present day.
In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in which multiple actors came forward as having been a victim of that filthy man’s methods of gratifying himself, we common peons began to come forward with tales of our own, hashtagging all manner of social media with #metoo, in a show of solidarity with our fellow sufferers.
By the peak of the phenomenon, over 12 million people had identified themselves on Facebook as someone who had felt the sting of sexual harassment or molestation. Someone even decided to open a page just for personal metoo confessions, be they just the hashtag, or a full-blown account. The stories ranged from some creepy office guy ogling a woman’s breasts to the most horrific rapes I’ve ever read about.
One ubiquitous thread ran through a great majority of those posts, though. Even though a few men came forward as victims, and many women showed the appropriate sympathy, most of the women held their ground that while the occasional male might be sexually abused here and there, it’s far and away a problem of the rape culture in which we live, where men victimize women helter-skelter, and no woman is safe, and we just have to “teach our sons not to rape.”
Oh, is that the problem? Boys are so stupid and prone to raping things that we have to actually sit them down and explain, “Now, Jimmy, I know you want to rape all the girls and animals and walls and whatnot at school, but Jimmy mustn’t do that.” Maybe while we’re at it we should teach our daughters not to believe such bigoted, misandrist twaddle.
I had a story of my own, so I felt a kinship with these women. I tried to share statistics from the National Center for Victims of Crime that showed that while 1 in 5 girls are molested as children, 1 in 20 boys are, which means that roughly 20% of all molested children are boys. I tried to tell them that the Bureau of Justice Statistics found in a survey of 40,000 homes that 38% of all rape and sexual violence victims are men. And I mentioned that such a figure cannot be merely dismissed as a tiny minority, but they would have none of it. In the end, most kept right on womansplaining that the figures were wrong and that I should maybe just shut my big, fat man-mouth.
Maybe if I had told them that I identify as dragonfolk… Nah.
I wanted to say more, but I didn’t. After all, these women had been traumatized by a man, and as a man, I didn’t feel that it was my place to add even more…
No, I’m kidding. I simply decide when and where to wage my battles and that was neither the time nor place.
But this is, so brace yourself.
I’m not going to ever say, “She asked for it.” That is unless she actually did ask for it, in which case we’re talking about something besides rape. Even I, a battle-scarred and terribly frightful purple dragon, believe that no one ever deserves to be raped. It’s cruel. It’s evil. The protector of all that’s righteous and holy in me wants to literally slay every rapist that has ever acted out his or her disgusting fantasy.
That said, although “she” may not have asked for it, sometimes “she” was, shall we say, less than her own best advocate for self-preservation.
Obviously, in many, many instances of sexual violence, there was nothing that the person could have done to avoid the situation.
But we don’t have any trouble blaming the guy killed because he was standing in the path of a train. Drunk, high, or sober as a judge, when we hear about some fool dancing on the tracks who was smeared across two miles, we don’t say, “Don’t you DARE judge that man! Train accidents are never the fault of the victim!” Yet that’s the cacophonous retaliation we get if we suggest that a rape victim might have been able to prevent the crime. We don’t live in a “rape culture,” but just as there are railroad tracks, there is evil in the world.
One of the stories I read on that Facebook page went something like this: A year ago when I was fifteen years old and young and stupid, I went over to my (male) friend Bob’s house. As I lay there on the couch with my head in the lap of his 27-year-old cousin, my friend’s mother said, “You look cold,” and covered me with a blanket. After that, the pervert started rubbing my breasts as he continued talking to the other family members still in the room. I didn’t really mind, but when he started rubbing my more private bits, I was a little uncomfortable. What did he think he was doing? Still, I didn’t want to get up and cause a scene, embarrassing my friend and his mother. When his mom asked where I was going to spend the night, I said, “In the basement with Bob, I guess.” That pervert cousin said he thought he would sleep down there, too! So I actually just spent the night with Bob in his bedroom, where there was room for only two. When I called my boyfriend and told him about the pervert, boy was he mad!
Um, yeah.
So where should we begin detailing where this girl’s mistake was? Sticking her head in a man’s lap? Letting him molest her in two ways? Spending the night at some guy’s house and in his room? Valuing her friend’s lack of embarrassment over her own well-being?
In any event, the cousin is a pedophilic predator, and he should be shot to death. The girl had every right to not be abused. A woman should be granted the freedom to say “no” at whatever point she first feels uncomfortable. But for the love of all that’s rational, what did she think would happen?
It’s funny: The same people who think I’m a misogynistic pig for expressing this vaccinate their children against disease. They don’t let them leap naked into the middle of a leper colony. They keep them out of traffic. These same people lock their doors. They password protect their data. Yet, if I dare to suggest that this girl should have made some better choices, all Hell breaks loose.
I’d like to say I don’t get it, but I do. Some people want to live in a ’60s hippie utopia where we all get baked out of our minds, get everything we ever wanted for free but only to our exact specifications, have sex with everyone, and never have to worry about crime or greed or evil.
Other people are realists.