Someone You Love Was Raped

One in every four women is raped.

(This statistic comes from two sources: Cunt by Inga Muscio and The Second Rape by someone whose name I forgot. I also checked this statistic out at the national statistics website, which I also can't remember now. Sorry.)

This means that if you love more than four women (mother, sisters, aunts, friends, wife, daughters, etc) then at least one of them has been or will be raped. In fact, I'm betting the number is actually higher than the statistics reflect because so many rapes go unreported.

Can you imagine what would happen if one in every four straight white men were ass-raped by gay men? How long would it be before every gay man in the country was rounded up and lynched? I'm thinkin' New York Minute.

But nobody seems particularly outraged by rape of women in our society. I have a theory about why. Actually the theory came from The Second Rape but it makes a lot of sense to me.

The problem is that neither men nor women want to believe it is happening. Everyone desperately wants to imagine that something else actually happened. They imagine that women who cry rape are either lying or confused about what really happened.

Why men do it

When humans learned to use metal to craft tools and weapons, men figured out that they could quite easily go over to villages near and far, defeat the other people there, take all their stuff and rule their land. In order to do this most effectively, men developed a team spirit. "Them" vs. "Us" Men on the same team learned to stick up for one another, watch out for one another, defend each other.

This brotherhood-of-man tendency is still alive today. Every man thinks of rapists as "them" and not "us." A rapist is a big black ex-convict who breaks into a defenseless white woman's house and has his way with her. Or he's a freaky bearded lunatic hiding in the bushes waiting to abduct some unsespecting girl on her way home.

So when a normal, clean cut white man is accused of the crime, men instinctively resist the idea. Oh no, not one of us, it can't be. She must have lied. So the teammate gets the benefit of the doubt and it is the woman who must be scrutinized and judged.

I think men are afraid to admit that men like themselves can commit rape because it suggests that any man could.

Why Women do it

With the advent of patriarchy, women did not develop a similar team spirit. The quality of a woman's life depended on how pleasing she could be to the male gender and a spirit of competition emerged among women. They benefitted more from betraying than from supporting one another. They became catty and critical of each other.

They knew where their bread was buttered and there was more to be gained by believing a lie told by a man than in believing the truth told by a woman.

Not to mention, women are afraid to admit that women like themselves can become victims of rape because it suggests that any woman could.

How do we change this? How about giving every woman who alleges that she was raped the same benefit of the doubt you would give to your own mother or daughter if she alleged the same thing? How about teaching our sons that sex is not their birthright as a male and that no woman is obligated to give him an orgasm just because he got hard while in her presence? How about teaching our daughters more about the importance of feminine bonding and setting firm boundaries and self-respect and less about being cute, sexy, flirtatious and how to please a man?