This Eats At Me
I’ve been stewing on this for a couple of days now, and have decided that there is no non-offensive way to say this, so here we go.
Tumblr all rallied together and got (very correctly) offended at ignition point for her “men cannot be raped” ideology. And I was very happy to see this. But this got me thinking.
Go through the rape tag and look at what is being said there. You’ll find stories of people who have been raped, protests as to why rape is bad, and plenty of scary statistics about rape. But most of those are about women. And the few posts that later involve men, or discuss men are called: “distracting”, “going on a tangent” and “detrimental to the conversation”.
If tumblr is such a place that so many believe that men can be raped, if we are so imbedded with the idea that rape is wrong, why is half of the human population being ignored?
I have to wonder, what’s worse? Saying something so ludicrous that everyone objects and starts the conversation, or ignoring it and shunning it like there is no conversation to be had?
Usually because the conversation is ‘what can we do about x problem affecting women’, and someone rushes in like MEN CAN BE RAPED TOO D8< And yes. Yes, we know this, and it’s a problem o.o The patriarchy - which is what’s telling men that they’re so tough how could they possibly be raped what - is a huge problem and it fucking sucks. It needs addressing. That’s what the men’s rights movement (if it were legitimate and not generally used as an excuse to hate women) should be addressing, and it’s what feminism (if not always in it’s occasionally wtfish tumblr form) is trying to stop.
But it’s not - in that context - what we’re talking about right now, and it’s not helpful to bring it up in a conversation about ‘what can we do about x problem affecting women’. People get fed up of this being used as a derailing tactic, hence the backlash to ‘omg what about teh menz’ - men have spaces to talk about themselves/their issues/their problems everywhere. Right here and now, we’re talking about this problem that affects women.
Acting like rape is a problem that only affects women is how feminism deals with men being raped…
Gosh, I wonder why people are saying your movement is no longer about equality, if it ever was.
acting like (everything) is a problem that only affects women is how feminism deals with (everything).
Notice how it’s phrased as “men can be raped”, not “men get raped” or “men are raped’. At no point does MasterPrinter address the reality of men being raped, merely the possibility. Bit of a Freudian slip, I think.
I also like how they admit that patriarchy erases male rape victims, then says that men have safe spaces everywhere. The patriarchy doesn’t just say that men can’t be raped, it says that it’s not really rape when it happens to a man or is done by a woman, often on a legal level.
I’ve seen feminists who were actually talking about male rape accuse people of “derailing” when they started presenting uncomfortable facts. Derailing, in these contexts, doesn’t mean “off-topic”, it means “we don’t want to talk about it”.
Of course, MRAs talk about male rape and its erasure all the time.
To quote anonguy11; if your discussion about rape can be derailed by talking about rape, you weren’t talking about rape.
Reblogging because this is a topic very close to home with me.
