Hating women

(Also posted at Creek Running North.)

This week, bloggers started writing about that poor woman who not only disappeared in Aruba but – insult on injury – had the bad fortune to become the Fox News flavor of the week. And one male blogger who is prominent far beyond any justification his talent provides, and who had recently attracted the mild ire of feminist bloggers over his reaction to KosPieGate, let loose with the assertion that though he certainly didn’t blame the woman for her abduction and probable rape, that it happened because she was stupid enough to go hang out with three guys.

Thank you for not blaming.  
His commenters took it further. As quoted by Amanda Marcotte, one of them put it this way:

Want to talk accountability? I blame:

Amanda noted an omission that some of the guys might have missed:

“I blame someone who didn’t make the list.  I blame the rapist.”

Feminist-leaning bloggers have been hashing this over for the past few days, with that regrettably familiar combination of world-weary fatigue and renewed outrage. Lauren has a good list of some of the blog posts that have been generated as a result. In the comment threads on most of them, the same rhetorical dance played out:

Feminist: “It’s about time people put the responsibility for rape on the shoulders of the rapist.”
Unfeminist: “Yeah, but it’s really stupid for women to just go wandering around where it’s unsafe.”
Feminist: “We know it’s unsafe. We avoid going out. Rape happpens anyway. We’re tired of being blamed for it.”
Unfeminist: “But what if you were walking through the poorest neighborhood in Calcutta covered with cash, carrying a boombox playing ‘We’re In The Money,’ and with a big sack with a dollar sign printed on the outside? And wearing a hat that said ‘Rob Me’? Wouldn’t that be stupid?”
Feminist: “Um, what?”

And so forth. The whole of American society’s response to rape, it seems, runs along the lines of the old bad joke in which the patient says “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”

Society’s response: “So don’t do that.”

“Don’t go out at night. Don’t relax with your friends on vacation. Lock your doors. Don’t be friendly with men you don’t know. Don’t trust the men you do know.” It’s a prescription for a very large prison, one that women are expected to carry around with them every minute of their lives.

And they’re expected to do so while the behavior of rapists is – well, certainly not condoned, but explained away as some regrettable extreme right tail of the normal male sexuality bell curve.

David Neiwert, one of the best writers on prejudice now working in the US, wrote last August:

[H]ate crimes have the fully intended effect of driving away and deterring the presence of any kind of hated minority — racial, religious, or sexual. They are essentially acts of terrorism directed at entire communities of people, and they are message crimes: “Keep out.” … Black people fear stepping foot in Idaho because of the presence of the Aryan Nations in the state’s Panhandle. Gays and lesbians view driving through places like Wyoming and Montana with a palpable anxiety. If you get out a map of the country and put yourself in the shoes of a person of color or another sexual persuasion, and start looking at the places you would feel safe visiting, you’ll suddenly realize that this can be a very small country indeed for people who are not white heterosexuals. This is what Yale hate-crimes expert Donald Green means when he says that hate crimes annually create a “massive dead-weight loss of freedom” for Americans.

Progressive men decry the effects of such crimes, and rightly so. And who among us would lecture a black couple victimized by a hate crime that they should have stayed out of Coeur D’Alene?

Is rape a hate crime? There are a few different definitions of hate crimes floating around. They share a few common features. The crime must be directed at a member or members of a particular social group: for instance an ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, or gender. (Check.)

The crime must be committed out of a feeling of hostility toward said group, with the victim chosen not for her individual characteristics but for her membership in the targeted group. (Check.)

Lastly, the crime must be intended at least in part to promote fear among members of the targeted group. This one’s harder to pin down without direct interviews of rapists. Eldridge Cleaver, the late and unlamented ex-Black Panther who started his adult life as a confessed rapist, wrote in Soul On Ice of his intent to rape in order to spread fear among white women, and whites in general. He described “practicing” on African-American women until he felt ready to “cross the tracks.” Rape is very commonly used as a terrorist tactic in wartime, a way to demoralize women in the civilian population. Can we extrapolate from examples like these to make guesses about the larger intent of the average rapist? Who knows?

But the effect is the same either way: a “massive dead-weight loss of freedom” experienced on a daily basis by more than half our population. And I have reinforced that loss, and you probably have as well. It is a normal and healthy response to encourage the people we love to stay out of danger as much as possible. I’ve done it myself, encouraged Becky and other women I love not to go out for urban walks at night. I’ll probably do it again. So will other men, and other women.

But we do so out of a desire to create a personal solution to a mass problem. That kind of thing rarely works, and when it does in the short term, the unintended consequences are usually massive. With the best of intentions, out of a desire to protect the people we love, we have acted in complicity with the men who commit hate crimes.

What do we do instead?