A few weeks ago, there were lots of men looking out for the safety of
American women everywhere by wanting to ban transgender women from
using the ladies’ rooms at Target and other public places. We were told
how women were precious, how they needed protected from “men in
dresses.” When the current administration sent out messages to schools
giving guidelines on how to treat transgender students, 11 states sued to make sure that our girls are safe in their locker rooms from transgender girls.
Oh, I heard
them say that it wasn’t REALLY the trans people they were worried about.
Sure, there would be plenty of opportunities to call them freaks and
perverts. Lots of chances to remind us that there are just a few of
them, so why should we bow to their desires. Lots of dismissive language
that told trans men and women that their comfort and mental health
don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
But no, it
wasn’t primarily the trans people (especially trans women) that we
needed to be protected from. It was the the pedophiles and the voyeurs
who would take advantage of the laws. It was the men who would dress up
like a woman so they could prey on women in bathrooms. Those were the
real threat. Those were the men that needed to be dealt with. Violent
men who would do actual harm against women — those were the men that we
needed to be on the lookout for, those were who the men were concerned
about. Keep women safe from men who were violent.
So when Stanford rapist Brock Turner got a mere six-month sentence, I started waiting.
Waiting for all of these men to start posting their outrage at the system that so dramatically failed a young woman.
Waiting for
petitions to receive millions of signatures demanding stricter
sentencing for rapists. Waiting for viral videos of pastors standing
outside of the courthouse, speaking in animated tones about what grave
injustice was taking place behind those walls.
Waiting for men to share the powerful words of the victim as a reminder that rape has lifetime consequences for those who experience it.
Waiting for men to remind other men that the responsibility not to rape lies with them, not with the women who are raped.
Waiting
for these men to prove that their concern for their wives and daughters
wasn’t really just a mask for the transphobia that they carried and
didn’t want to be called on.
Instead, I’ve read a letter from a father saying that his son is being punished too harshly for only ““20 minutes of action,”
where instead of a perpetrator of a violent crime, he is the victim of
alcohol consumption and partying. I’ve read many times about how many
drinks the victim had before she was raped. I’ve read about how we need
to crack down on drinking on college campuses.
I’ve
seen lots and lots of nothing at all from people who just weeks ago were
ready to storm the bathroom stalls to make sure their wives and
daughters were safe.
Where are you?
Where is your outrage when a young woman is penetrated by fingers and
leaves and pine needles behind a dumpster while she is unconscious?
Where is your disgust for a system that slaps a rapist on the wrist and
says, “Well, he probably won’t do THAT again.” Where is your anger at a
culture that has more concern for the impact of jailing a rapist than
the impact of a rape?
Weeks ago, we were told that women needed to be protected.
But apparently not from rapists.
A version of this post originally appeared on Knitting Soul.
Forewarning. This will probably get rambly. Expect it. I’m tired as hell and I got shit I want to say. It might not be worded as poetically as you assholes want, but at this point I’m done caring.
Anyway.
You know. I love how exclusionists automatically
assume just because, yeah, aspecs actually HAVE gone through some shit and
we’ve been harmed for being associated with the queer community, that we’re
trying to push the idea that it’s been to the same extent. Yeah.
Most of the backlash against us from straight people has come from the thought
that “not being het” = “gay”. You’re right there.
And we know. What we go through is not the same
extent. A lot of times (though there are things, and I’ll get to that) it’s not
just because we’re aspec. We’ve said that.
Hear me out here before you start squawking. And for the love of all that’s good left in the world, don’t start up with the slur thing. There’s a dozen other posts on that. You don’t want to be called it? Great. My bi ass will. Cause we fought for that shitty word when there wasn’t anything to call ourselves, and you’ll give it back to those bigots after you pry it from my cold, dead, fingers.
Anyway. There’s this thing that’s called “generalized
prejudice”. AKA, the notion that bigotry can be generalized across similar
groups. Anything
with any suffix of sexual besides hetero is automatically Wrong and Gay and
Unnatural and Dangerous. You’re not straight? You’re not normal.
Parents who would send their gay, bi, pan, and trans
kids send their ace kids to conversation therapy as well. Corrective rape is a
BIG thing. That it does happen shows
that there’s something in the mindset. Due to this, aspecs are, in fact, harmed and
submitted to violence.
I know for myself I certainly didn’t get the best reception
when I told my family. Luckily it wasn’t violent for me, but you know that
thing you guys do with the “I’m sure Christians love you”.
Yeah. No. Because, and I quote here “God made man for
women, and expected them to be with each other. And in marriage be open to each
other’s needs. If you can’t give that to someone you shouldn’t marry. Because
that’d be a sin.”
(First off, asexuality doesn’t mean you can’t have sex,
even though I personally don’t want to have it. It’s just a lack of attraction
(not libido. That’s something else.) Second of all, thanks for letting me know
not to tell you about the bi thing. Don’t worry. Not opening up about this shit
again.)
And there are others who’ve gotten worse. You’re
right. Mine wasn’t as bad as a lot of you get, but can we all just agree it
really hurts and sucks to be told you’re shit for your sexuality? Can we all
agree that attitudes like this tend to cause bigger, more violent problems?
Especially as more people become aware of it being a thing? That this has been
a big issue and fucked up a lot of people?
“You weren’t there like we were in the start. You
don’t deserve to be here after all the shit we went through. It’s because they
think you’re gay, like you said! It’s homophobia, not aphobia!”
First of all we were here. We just weren’t under our
own name, because we didn’t have it. Pansexuals were here as well, and so were
nonbianary people. Most of us, knowing we weren’t straight but only having a
select number of things to align ourselves with, dispersed under other groups.
Lots of us ended up under the bisexual umbrella. Hell. A lot of us still do
before we realize this is a thing.
“Well, I don’t like the opposite gender. So maybe I’m
gay?”
“Okay, I don’t seem interested in any, but that would
mean…maybe I’m interested in others equally? Am I bisexual or pan?”
Like. Shit. Just the sheer amount of it happening
today where the aspec identities ARE a thing that’s known should give a hint of
how common it would be earlier when it WASN’T known. Plus, we know we were around,
because we were described. Even by some prominent leaders in the community.
A few overall examples. From the article for those who
don’t want to wade through it:
“The earliest use of the word ‘asexual’ which I have
been able to find (up to now), is in a 1896 pamphlet called “Sappho und
Sokrates” by Magnus Hirschfeld, an influential German sexologist and activist
for LGBT emancipation.”
“Ralph Werther – Jennie June was an outspoken
transgender person who wrote extensively about his life and the New York LGBT
scene at the turn of the century. He uses the word ‘anaphrodite‘ to describe
people who are “not suffused with adoration for any type of human” and who
“shudder violently at the very thought of any kind of association grounded on
sex differences”
“Researchers like Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey
did notice and describe asexuality. It is rather remarkable that some of the
most well-known sexologists make mention of asexuality, and yet we have been
woefully understudied over the course of the last 150 years.”
“We are present in the works of LGBT pioneers like
Magnus Hirschfeld and Ralph Werther – Jennie June (see above). It’s worth
investigating how we fit into their circles: turn-of-the-century Berlin and New
York. Then there are phenomena like the Boston marriages – relationships of
which the main features are not just lesbian, but also asexual – and the
description of asexuality as a subcategory of homosexuality in the 1978 study
‘Homosexualities’.”
We were there then. At the start. Right from the
beginning. All of us who knew we weren’t straight, but didn’t have a name.
Maybe we’d label ourselves as gay. Or bi. Or trans. But we were there, even if
we weren’t properly labeled. We fought too. We fought alongside you and died
alongside you, but we didn’t have a group to call our own. We were scattered
and unseen. And because of this we don’t know a lot of our history, or figures
in the movement who could be asexual. We may never know beyond speculation. But
I assure you we were there.
Since then our community keeps growing. Why? If
y'all really knew your history you’d know why, and you’d know just how much
this community has evolved just in the past TEN years. Even less. History isn’t
static. Growth happens. Change happens. It is happening. That’s not a bad
thing.
Anyway, why?
Because these groups that were looked over or lumped
into others are finding each other when before it wasn’t really possible like
it is today, with the internet helping us connect. Because even if things
aren’t as bad, there’s issues and as a community we’re striving towards
equality and getting rid of violence towards non straight sexualities. This
community was founded for resistance. For sanctuary. For solidarity against
violence that we faced every day.
And this opening up has grown the community and our
movement. It’s provided more voices to speak and more information to spread.
We’ve had gatekeeping throughout our history, and every time it’s proved
detrimental. To all of us. Gatekeeping in our community was why and is why many
trans activists have taken longer to be recognized. Why bisexuals are still
EXTREMELY underrepresented in this movement’s history.
Anyway, that article? There’s another for the 21st century. And a few more quotes to make my point, because anyone who knows me can tell you how much I love my quotes. Examples make it a lot easier to get my thoughts together. Very useful…
You say we should get our own community? We have. It still gets invaded, and we haven’t even had it long. Again. We hadn’t been able to.
“The time the first asexual communities appeared was around the start of this century. As the very beginning, you could take the article called “My Life as a Human Amoeba” by Zoe O’Reilly, which was published in 1997. Over the years, the comment section of that article filled with comments of other asexuals, telling their life stories and connection with eachother over their shared asexual experiences for – as far as we know – the very first time.2 From that article and its comment section, we have an extraordinary development into a self-assured, worldwide community that’s present on multiple online platforms as well as offline meeting groups. We are hosting conferences, marching in pride parades and we have successfully lobbied for the depathologization of asexuality in the DSM, one of the leading psychiatric manuals.3
The way we think and talk about asexuality has changed as well. Our identity and the concepts that come with it didn’t plop out of thin air. We come from a place where we had little to no concepts or words to describe our experiences. Aces have done some large-scale worthsmithing and we have come up with new words so we can name our experiences. On top of that we have created a lively discourse to make sense of ourselves and our experiences.4″
I do have to let out a chuckle at that last sentence.
“Oh, but what if they’re heterosexual aros or
heteroromantic aces??? I don’t want our oppressors in this community!”
Tough shit. For many of us we’re already sharing a
community with our oppressors.
Black women put up with all kinds of shit from white
women. Especially when it came to queer feminists.
Transgender have to share a space with us cis people when,
again, they got walked repeatedly over.
(TERFs, I’m not dealing with your shit today. Also, has anyone else noticed how many ace exclusionists are TERFs, and how many nonTERF exclusionists get uncomfortable when this gets pointed out? Yeah. I have too. And it’s bullshit.)
I, a woman, have to share a space with dudes. I,
disabled, have to share a space with the abled who I’ve lived quite a bit of my
life being looked down on from.
Anyone remember that “A stands for Ally” fiasco? I do.
People were wanting straight allies over us. The excuse?
“Well, you see, that’s ACTUALLY there for closeted
individuals to be in the community without outing themselves. ╮(╯▽╰)╭”
Sure. Okay. Yeah. Here’s where I found that funny.
Even if the A didn’t stand for Ally, they could still say they’re allies and,
should they be going to pride or something, say they’re supporting a friend.
Or, if it’s so delicate, not say anything to anyone if they feel unsafe.
Because it’s likely a family that’s bigoted towards the community would hate them
giving their support as well.
“Well…they’re questioning! ╮(╯▽╰)╭”
Great. The Q is for questioning and queer.
“They’re taking our resources! (*´>д
What resources are in such limited supplies that you
have to worry about this shit???????
Asexuals aren’t harming you. The only reason they’re “in
the spotlight” is because you stir up all this shit and put them there.
“But here’s some aces being homophobic and gross and they’re all horrible people who somehow support pedophilia!
Here’s links to MORE being cringy and acting like they’re better and pure and shit!
IF
WE LET THEM IN EVERYONE WHO’S ~~QUIRKY~~ WILL WANT IN TOO! KINKS AND FURRIES AND
PEDOPHILES!!!! ヽ(｀Д´)ﾉ”
What. Even. The fuck. And yes. I heard this. More than
once.
Addressing this in chunks:
Okay. Don’t know where that pedophile thing comes
from. At all. I don’t understand it, and I kinda am scared to. I might lose my
last shred of faith in humanity. I THINK, since I’ve heard this much at least,
it has something to do with that:
“We can’t talk to kids about asexuality because then
we’d have to talk to them about SEX. With the others we can just talk about the
romantic aspect, but oh my goodness. The kids will be so messed up!”
Am I the only one seeing the irony in this? First off.
A lot of kids can feel sexual attraction by the age of eight. Most by the age
of ten to eleven. I’m twenty and I’m still getting that “well, maybe you’re a
late bloomer” shit. I’m TWENTY. Almost TWENTY-ONE. Shit. If I realized this
wasn’t normal sooner…well. That would have been really nice.
Homophobic: Most of what I see here are young teens
and preteens screwing up their wording and getting attacked. Or relying on
misinformation, because they’re young. But really. Many of you are grown
adults. Stop attacking kids who clearly misspoke or are ignorant. Shit. Most of
us have been there. Getting death threats in your ask doesn’t help.
And not everyone is nice. Yeah. There’s gonna be some shitty ace people. Just like there’s transphobic community members. And biphobic. And so on and so on and so on. Because sucky people exist everywhere. What a concept.
And no. That’s not comparable to that “gay people can be heterophobic” shit. Please. Stop. Aces are not straight. Heterophobia does not exist. And straight pride month should not be a thing. Did I get that covered? Great.
Also, the asexual community has a high percentage of
autistics, myself included. You know what one common thing is with autistics?
We tend to have trouble getting across our meanings. If you all could just ask “Hey,
is this what you really meant by this? If so that’s kinda messed up. If not,
can you explain?” that’d take out a whole lotta drama. Cause then we can go “Actually,
no. I meant X. Let me make that more clear. Thanks for pointing that out to me!”
So much easier. So. So much easier.
Most of the other offensive shit seems to stem from
tweens in their cringe phase (really. Most of us were there. Stop sending hate
mail to ignorant middle schoolers), parody blogs, or, *gasp*, other
exclusionists making fake blogs to purposefully stir up trouble. Geez. The
sheer amount of those blogs. Find better things to do, damn it.
Then again. These are the same people who flood the
Ace tag with dozens of hate posts about how shitty we are and how the community
doesn’t want us, and do that:
“Boo hoo. Aren’t I so discriminatory? We
get killed, bitch. Stop you’re whining. SOME of us have more to worry about
then claiming to get bullied on Tumblr. Stop being a snowflake.”
It really shouldn’t be that surprising at this point.
And yes, that too is something that’s almost word for word of another post.
Because the discourse is shitty.
Okay. You see, kinks aren’t a sexuality. Pedophilia
isn’t a sexuality and phedos actively pray on children and children can’t give
consent, so they’re fucked up. Furries…yeah. Why? What logic would lead you to
believe letting in asexuals is a gateway for furries?
Please. Stop. I’m tired. This month is supposed to be
about celebrating our history and the people who fought to bring us where we
are. Just for one month can we stop being petty assholes to each other? Just
one month? I mean. I’d LOVE to say forever, but I realize that’s just not
realistic.
A few last notes to cover my ass and make my thoughts
clear about the normal shit storms that usually follow these kinds of posts.
First off. If one more person starts whining about
“having their identity” used as a tactic by inclusionists, I’m gonna lose it.
It’s not a cheap tactic. Inclusionists come from all backgrounds you assholes.
I’m not harboring some inner biphobia for connecting
events from one part of my identity to another. The trans women inclusionist
isn’t transphobic for talking about it. The lesbian inclusionist isn’t a
“traitor” for pointing out how ridiculous you’re being. Stop being assholes. It’s
not just your identity. It’s the identity of people on both sides and you need
to stop trying to shit on people. Yeah, I spoke about more than just bisexual.
Because I’m not the only one saying this. In fact, most of those points I got
from others. Who were trans, and pan, and lesbians. I got followers who talk
about it. It’s not just me talking here and they need to be respected for the
points they’ve made as well.
Two. If I hear anyone talking about that ridiculous
“corrective rape is a lesbian term” you’re going to get a real history lesson
on its origins. Because you’re 100% wrong and I’m tired of uninformed bullshit.
I’m tired of this shitty discourse. Aspecs are not hurting you. Aspecs are not hurting you. Aspecs are not hurting you. Inclusion does not harm the community. Inclusion does give resources to kids who could be in harmful situations.
For one month. Just take a break from being hateful assholes. One month. Just…just one freaking month.
Anyway. Happy pride.
To my lesbians. Your flag looks great. Sorry Tumblr staff forgot you guys. There also isn’t much on Google. Tried to find some variety. :(
To my gay bros. Remember the meaning your colors represent.
To all you pans. Keep being punny, and spread the love. You’re all great.
To my trans friends. Don’t let the TERFs get you down. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. You are not predators. You are not dangerous. You are fully yourself.
To my bi peeps. We’re amazing. You’re not “half straight” or “Half gay”. Doesn’t matter if you’re in a same or opposite sex relationship. You’re still full on bi. Don’t take shit.
To my aces. You’re not straight. You’re not broken. You’re not less. You are always welcome. Exclusionists on Tumblr do not represent the wider belief.
To my aros, I’m sorry people forget about you so much. And remember that there’s many different types of love. You’re not gross for not feeling romantic love. You’re not cold. You’re not predatory for those of you wanting sexual relationships without romance.
For those who are both aro and ace, you’re not devoid of emotion. You’re not subhuman. You’re individuals and love can be expressed in so many ways. If you’re in the grey area, that’s fine too.
I love all of you. I couldn’t really find much for nonbianary and genderfluid, but you all rock as well.
We are a community, and we need to hold each other up if we want to continue moving forward. Division hurts us all.
Also, for my friends who are also black, muslim, disabled, female, Native American, Hispanic and in other groups that are struggling with additional fear this year with all the shit going on. Keep your head up. Keep fighting.
Holy shit @shadowkat678, I officially dub this the most awesome and prideful pride 2017 post I’ve seen yet!! What an amazing and well written journey, thank you so much.
Everyone, please signal boost this far and wide!!
I just wanna add that as I was reading this I was literally chatting with OP and sending them my thoughts and opinions about nearly each paragraph. It was a serious emotional journey because I can identify with almost all of it. However, I don’t have it in me to repeat all those thoughts and I don’t think you all wanna read it anyway bc this is a long enough post as it is.
But as a phd student and criminologist (& cis, panromantic, demisexual), I would like to just provide a short-ish quote that explains fairly well how “generalized prejudice” works, and does in fact lead to aphobia:
Our findings are in keeping with Herek’s (2010) “differences as deficits” model of sexual orientation, where sexual minorities deviating from the norm are considered substandard and deserving of negativity by the majority. This model is gradually becoming less applicable to homosexuals and bisexuals with changes in societal norms (Herek, 2010), consistent with our findings that homosexuals (and in some cases bisexuals) were viewed as equally or more human than the heterosexual ingroup. However, we posit that asexuals fit well within the “differences as deficits” framework. Asexuals are the sexual minority that is most clearly considered “deficient” by heterosexuals. In keeping with this interpretation, themes relevant to maintaining the status quo and group dominance (RWA and SDO, respectively) proved consistently important in predicting antiasexual attitudes, whereas concerns with positive ingroup identity and religious fundamentalism were less uniquely important.
Although antiasexual bias is a clear component of sexual minority prejudice, it is also unique in that it was repeatedly stronger than bias toward other sexual minorities. Most disturbingly, asexuals are viewed as less human, especially lacking in terms of human nature. This confirms that sexual desire is considered a key component of human nature, and those lacking it are viewed as relatively deficient, less human, and disliked. It appears that asexuals do not “fit” the typical definition of human and as such are viewed as less human or even nonhuman, rendering them an extreme sexual orientation outgroup and very strong targets of bias. Future research can address the mechanisms underlying this tendency. [emphasis mine]
And while this study definitely has its problems (e.g., it compares asexuality & sapiosexuality and defines asexuality wrong, which i argue is more evidence of anti-ace bias bc society and those studying us can’t even get a handle on “what” we are…) it’s still important bc it shows us that there is in FACT a systematically enforced anti-ace bias. Bc if it wasn’t systemic it wouldn’t be an identifiable & measurable social pattern!!!
Plus, ppl willing to discriminate is literally a large part of how discrimination and oppression work. When people literally say how and why they would hypothetically discriminate against a whole category of “different” people, you need to take that clearly stated BIGOTRY seriously and stop talking down to & over us, and telling us to just shut up about it.
this stuff is harrasment/ bullying, if you do this you are breaking the law in quiet a few countries and breaking tumblr rules of service, not only is it uncalled for and disgusting you are commiting a crime/breaking terms and conditions
if you see ANYONE (gay,straight,trans cis,black,white doesn’t matter) telling ANYONE to go die report it Immediately because it is crossing a line
This shit is absolutely disgusting. What sorry excuses of human beings willingly go out of their way to harass people because of their sexuality…….oh wait
And it’s still not over either. Check out some of this new and truly disgusting aphobic bullshit:
Apparently, being against telling ANYONE to go die or kill themselves is being pro-terf… (ughhhhh!!! i’m also against the death penalty, does that make me a super terf then?!?! like honestly, go read a book)
Oh and this:
So, hearing about the corrective rape experiences of aces is “annoying” bc “aces aren’t lgbt” according to the above aphobe, and so we all just need to shut up about it. JOY
Maybe the above is not a death threat or anything like that, but dehumanization like this is the exact type of shit that rationalizes and reinforces all this aphobic violence.
And of course, here’s more aphobic hell (including racism & more death/suicide baiting):
What “exactly” is it that we have supposedly collectively done to deserve this kind of seething, violent hate?!?!?!???? Read those tags on the last one, it’s the things of nightmares!!
But yeah, no, of course,
I mean, it’s not as if wishing to deny us aspecs our right to life (often in very violent ways) just because we’re aspec isn’t invalidating in any way…. /s
Exclusionists: *ignore the people saying that asexuals should die so they can keep calling us bigots*
exclusionist-against-aphobes
Who’s saying they should die?
im-glad-i-crashed-the-wedding
I would give you sources and I must apologise, you’re being a lot more civil than the other exclusionists I’ve been arguing with, but I hope you understand that my patience is worn thin and I’m not ready to continue this right now
exclusionist-against-aphobes
It’s okay! A couple of people have linked me to sobercommunist who I already have blocked, which I think is part of the reason why I haven’t seen anyone seeing aces should die. I definitely believed you when you said it, I just wasn’t sure who in particular you were referring to. but like I said, others are linking me to sources now, so you don’t have to find anything if you don’t want to.
Hiya, just dropping in with some additional receipts posts for you. Some of these blogs still exist, but I think most don’t. That’s not to say the ppl running them have left the discourse, but most of the blogs are different now. Anyway… tw death threats, suicide baiting, rape threats, rape apologism, corrective rape, racism, etc etc, (so pls view with care!) - x, x, x, & there’s some repeats here but still also some newer stuff x
This has honestly gotta stop, from both “””sides””” of this cursed “”””discourse”””””.
im-glad-i-crashed-the-wedding
Thanks for this addition! This stuff truly does need to stop.
Happy to help. In part bc I’ve put in so much work collecting & posting these nasty receipts, but even more so bc I think more ppl need to face this reality and help stop it.
People have called me aggressive for hating pedophiles.
For hating the people who supported the person who molested me.
Who support that person being around other children, and for consuming child pornography.
People call me aggressive because I say they are disgusting, for being proud of their “attraction”, proud of putting children at risk, and proud of their community for not being incarcerated even though they are a threat to society.
People call me aggressive because I refuse to accept my molester and rapist, and because I refuse to accept others like him.
If that what makes me aggressive, then fuck yes I am aggressive. I will aggressively and loudly hate pedophiles until I die. They don’t deserve positivity for dragging actual mentally ill people into their arguments, for calling their attraction a sexuality. They are disgusting.
False allegations are a myth. True or false? It’s both. False, because when we call something a myth we really mean that it doesn’t exist. When we say that mermaids are mythical, we aren’t saying that we know there are a few mermaids in the ocean but the majority of sightings aren’t genuine: we’re saying fully that mermaids aren’t real. Calling false rape allegations a myth implies that they never occur, and as much as we might wish that were true, that is not the case.
On the other hand, it is literally true that false rape allegations are a myth, in the sense that mythology is populated with them, and thus the idea that women might falsely accuse men of rape for malicious reasons is deeply held in our cultural consciousness. There are frequently-cited examples in both Genesis and Greek mythology.
The standard narrative has changed since in the past few millennia. Potiphar’s wife and Phaedra (and others) accused men of rape because the men refused to have sex with them, but now we have new motivations: women falsely accuse men of rape because they want fame or money, people say—or they regret a sexual encounter, so they try to make it seem nonconsensual. Or they’re just psycho. People sometimes point to literary and mythical examples—especially Phaedra, who gives her name to the “Phaedra syndrome”—to legitimate the idea that this behavior is an essential part of female psychology, as though these ancient stories show that women have always lied about rape when it suits them.
Perhaps my favourite part:
The long history of examining the false rape allegation is further complicated by the fact that no one can agree on what the term exactly means. “False” can have a surprisingly broad array of meanings. Is a rape allegation false only if it’s made with malicious intent by someone who knows that a rape didn’t really occur? Is it false if the victim is confused about what happened to her, or him, and unknowingly gives misleading or incorrect information? Some even call any unverified or unverifiable rape allegations “false.” This last usage implies that anybody who is found not guilty of rape has had a false allegation made against them, eliding the (often significant) distance between truth and what is tangibly provable.
Even without these definitional concerns, our knowledge about false allegations is extremely spotty. In a June 5 article in Bloomberg View beginning with the declaration “Rape statistics are a mess,” Megan McArdle concluded, paraphrasing Socrates: “Until we get mind-reading machines, the only thing we can know about the actual prevalence of false rape reports is that we don’t know it.” Not everyone is quite as Socratic as McArdle, however. The most commonly accepted statistic is that 2-8 percent of rape allegations are false.
To be absolutely clear: that means 2-8 percent of the reports made to the police are later proven to have been made by somebody who knew that the person they were accusing was innocent. And when you consider that many victims choose not to go to the police at all, the ratio of people who have actually experienced sexual assault to people who have falsely claimed to have experienced sexual assault gets—one presumes—even larger. The number of false rape allegations is small: it’s not zero, but it’s small. The amount of fear and worry and hand-wringing about these false allegations is disproportionate to their actual prevalence.
Acknowledging their rarity, however, shouldn’t minimize the tremendous damage that the (extremely uncommon) false rape allegations do to the lives and reputations of the falsely accused. Part of the reason why the myth of Phaedra is such a commonly cited “rape myth” may be that its results are so gruesome: a young man literally gets ripped apart, and his father holds part of the blame.
Euripides, anyway, seems to have had something of an obsession with false rape allegation stories. In addition to the existing Hippolytus, he also wrote another, lost version of the same story, featuring a much more sexually aggressive Phaedra. He told similar stories in at least two other lost plays about other young heroes who had the misfortune of catching the eyes of older women. These plays fit into a bigger thematic group of Euripides’ tragedies, includingMedea and Andromache, that all tell stories of how dangerous women can be when you deny them sex.
A certain kind of scholar (the 19th century British kind) would try to spin this trend into a story about how Euripides was falsely accused of rape in his youth and then spent 15 years trying to work out his issues through playwriting. But scholarship of that sort isn’t in vogue anymore. A claim like that is completely unprovable—and, even worse, not very interesting. That kind of analysis looks at these stories as the product of one man’s experience rather than as products of a fascinatingly alien and yet familiar society that handled rape very, very badly.
And of course, there isn’t a one-to-one equivalency in the definitions of rape in ancient Greece and today. There isn’t even a clear consensus about what rape means among Americans living in 2015. Regardless, if people are going to use Phaedra as evidence that women have been using false rape allegations to get revenge on men for thousands of years, they have to acknowledge what rape meant in Athens 2500 years ago. And what it meant—fair warning—was disturbing.
In spite of the omnipresence of sexual assault in Greek myth and literature, the Greeks had no precise word for “rape.” Having sex with an unwilling woman (or man)—while a defined problem in certain contexts—wasn’t an inherently criminal act. They had several words that approximated the meaning: harpagē,biazō, hybris. The first of these words means something like “robbery” or “abduction”—so, if you stole a woman from her husband or father, the criminal act was the theft (regardless of whether sexual assault took place). The latter two terms refer to violence. None of the words has an exclusively sexual meaning, and there was also no word for “rapist” as an identifier that you could use to describe someone.
In our society, rape is defined by lack of consent or inability to consent. But for Athenian men, as Edward Harris has shown, consent wasn’t the main issue at stake. (Harris has gone on to say that we shouldn’t even use the word “rape” to describe sexual violence in Athens, which seem to me to go too far: although consent may not have been an important consideration legally, it was clearly important to the victims, as Sharon James has pointed out. If it hadn’t been, Phaedra could have written a note saying that she committed suicide out of guilt because she’d had consensual sex with Hippolytus, and theoretically Theseus would have gotten equally angry.)
So, if an incident of non-marital sex occurred between freeborn people (slaves didn’t count), the only considerations were: what was the state of mind or intent of the aggressor, and what impact did the act have on the honor of the victim? If the aggressor was in love with his victim, that could be a mitigating factor. And if the woman bore the child of a god, for instance, or if the assailant offered to marry her, the honor that either of those circumstances would bring her disqualifies the act as a rape. This situation occurs frequently in New Comedy, and it’s always difficult for students (and professors!) to accept.
Within this legal framework, victims could only very rarely get anything like what we would consider “justice.” The system was heavily weighted in favor of rapists. And yet, there was still a tremendous fear of false allegations—a fear great enough that Euripides could write four plays about them. In our system, likewise, only a very small number of rape allegations lead to conviction, but the idea of false allegations still dominates the discourse—even though, both in Athens and today, men were more likely to be raped than to be falsely accused of it.
False allegations are a myth. True or false? It’s both. False, because when we call something a myth we really mean that it doesn’t exist. When we say that mermaids are mythical, we aren’t saying that we know there are a few mermaids in the ocean but the majority of sightings aren’t genuine: we’re saying fully that mermaids aren’t real. Calling false rape allegations a myth implies that they never occur, and as much as we might wish that were true, that is not the case.
On the other hand, it is literally true that false rape allegations are a myth, in the sense that mythology is populated with them, and thus the idea that women might falsely accuse men of rape for malicious reasons is deeply held in our cultural consciousness. There are frequently-cited examples in both Genesis and Greek mythology.
The standard narrative has changed since in the past few millennia. Potiphar’s wife and Phaedra (and others) accused men of rape because the men refused to have sex with them, but now we have new motivations: women falsely accuse men of rape because they want fame or money, people say—or they regret a sexual encounter, so they try to make it seem nonconsensual. Or they’re just psycho. People sometimes point to literary and mythical examples—especially Phaedra, who gives her name to the “Phaedra syndrome”—to legitimate the idea that this behavior is an essential part of female psychology, as though these ancient stories show that women have always lied about rape when it suits them.
Perhaps my favourite part:
The long history of examining the false rape allegation is further complicated by the fact that no one can agree on what the term exactly means. “False” can have a surprisingly broad array of meanings. Is a rape allegation false only if it’s made with malicious intent by someone who knows that a rape didn’t really occur? Is it false if the victim is confused about what happened to her, or him, and unknowingly gives misleading or incorrect information? Some even call any unverified or unverifiable rape allegations “false.” This last usage implies that anybody who is found not guilty of rape has had a false allegation made against them, eliding the (often significant) distance between truth and what is tangibly provable.
Even without these definitional concerns, our knowledge about false allegations is extremely spotty. In a June 5 article in Bloomberg View beginning with the declaration “Rape statistics are a mess,” Megan McArdle concluded, paraphrasing Socrates: “Until we get mind-reading machines, the only thing we can know about the actual prevalence of false rape reports is that we don’t know it.” Not everyone is quite as Socratic as McArdle, however. The most commonly accepted statistic is that 2-8 percent of rape allegations are false.
To be absolutely clear: that means 2-8 percent of the reports made to the police are later proven to have been made by somebody who knew that the person they were accusing was innocent. And when you consider that many victims choose not to go to the police at all, the ratio of people who have actually experienced sexual assault to people who have falsely claimed to have experienced sexual assault gets—one presumes—even larger. The number of false rape allegations is small: it’s not zero, but it’s small. The amount of fear and worry and hand-wringing about these false allegations is disproportionate to their actual prevalence.
Acknowledging their rarity, however, shouldn’t minimize the tremendous damage that the (extremely uncommon) false rape allegations do to the lives and reputations of the falsely accused. Part of the reason why the myth of Phaedra is such a commonly cited “rape myth” may be that its results are so gruesome: a young man literally gets ripped apart, and his father holds part of the blame.
Euripides, anyway, seems to have had something of an obsession with false rape allegation stories. In addition to the existing Hippolytus, he also wrote another, lost version of the same story, featuring a much more sexually aggressive Phaedra. He told similar stories in at least two other lost plays about other young heroes who had the misfortune of catching the eyes of older women. These plays fit into a bigger thematic group of Euripides’ tragedies, includingMedea and Andromache, that all tell stories of how dangerous women can be when you deny them sex.
A certain kind of scholar (the 19th century British kind) would try to spin this trend into a story about how Euripides was falsely accused of rape in his youth and then spent 15 years trying to work out his issues through playwriting. But scholarship of that sort isn’t in vogue anymore. A claim like that is completely unprovable—and, even worse, not very interesting. That kind of analysis looks at these stories as the product of one man’s experience rather than as products of a fascinatingly alien and yet familiar society that handled rape very, very badly.
And of course, there isn’t a one-to-one equivalency in the definitions of rape in ancient Greece and today. There isn’t even a clear consensus about what rape means among Americans living in 2015. Regardless, if people are going to use Phaedra as evidence that women have been using false rape allegations to get revenge on men for thousands of years, they have to acknowledge what rape meant in Athens 2500 years ago. And what it meant—fair warning—was disturbing.
In spite of the omnipresence of sexual assault in Greek myth and literature, the Greeks had no precise word for “rape.” Having sex with an unwilling woman (or man)—while a defined problem in certain contexts—wasn’t an inherently criminal act. They had several words that approximated the meaning: harpagē,biazō, hybris. The first of these words means something like “robbery” or “abduction”—so, if you stole a woman from her husband or father, the criminal act was the theft (regardless of whether sexual assault took place). The latter two terms refer to violence. None of the words has an exclusively sexual meaning, and there was also no word for “rapist” as an identifier that you could use to describe someone.
In our society, rape is defined by lack of consent or inability to consent. But for Athenian men, as Edward Harris has shown, consent wasn’t the main issue at stake. (Harris has gone on to say that we shouldn’t even use the word “rape” to describe sexual violence in Athens, which seem to me to go too far: although consent may not have been an important consideration legally, it was clearly important to the victims, as Sharon James has pointed out. If it hadn’t been, Phaedra could have written a note saying that she committed suicide out of guilt because she’d had consensual sex with Hippolytus, and theoretically Theseus would have gotten equally angry.)
So, if an incident of non-marital sex occurred between freeborn people (slaves didn’t count), the only considerations were: what was the state of mind or intent of the aggressor, and what impact did the act have on the honor of the victim? If the aggressor was in love with his victim, that could be a mitigating factor. And if the woman bore the child of a god, for instance, or if the assailant offered to marry her, the honor that either of those circumstances would bring her disqualifies the act as a rape. This situation occurs frequently in New Comedy, and it’s always difficult for students (and professors!) to accept.
Within this legal framework, victims could only very rarely get anything like what we would consider “justice.” The system was heavily weighted in favor of rapists. And yet, there was still a tremendous fear of false allegations—a fear great enough that Euripides could write four plays about them. In our system, likewise, only a very small number of rape allegations lead to conviction, but the idea of false allegations still dominates the discourse—even though, both in Athens and today, men were more likely to be raped than to be falsely accused of it.
False allegations are a myth. True or false? It’s both. False, because when we call something a myth we really mean that it doesn’t exist. When we say that mermaids are mythical, we aren’t saying that we know there are a few mermaids in the ocean but the majority of sightings aren’t genuine: we’re saying fully that mermaids aren’t real. Calling false rape allegations a myth implies that they never occur, and as much as we might wish that were true, that is not the case.
On the other hand, it is literally true that false rape allegations are a myth, in the sense that mythology is populated with them, and thus the idea that women might falsely accuse men of rape for malicious reasons is deeply held in our cultural consciousness. There are frequently-cited examples in both Genesis and Greek mythology.
The standard narrative has changed since in the past few millennia. Potiphar’s wife and Phaedra (and others) accused men of rape because the men refused to have sex with them, but now we have new motivations: women falsely accuse men of rape because they want fame or money, people say—or they regret a sexual encounter, so they try to make it seem nonconsensual. Or they’re just psycho. People sometimes point to literary and mythical examples—especially Phaedra, who gives her name to the “Phaedra syndrome”—to legitimate the idea that this behavior is an essential part of female psychology, as though these ancient stories show that women have always lied about rape when it suits them.
Perhaps my favourite part:
The long history of examining the false rape allegation is further complicated by the fact that no one can agree on what the term exactly means. “False” can have a surprisingly broad array of meanings. Is a rape allegation false only if it’s made with malicious intent by someone who knows that a rape didn’t really occur? Is it false if the victim is confused about what happened to her, or him, and unknowingly gives misleading or incorrect information? Some even call any unverified or unverifiable rape allegations “false.” This last usage implies that anybody who is found not guilty of rape has had a false allegation made against them, eliding the (often significant) distance between truth and what is tangibly provable.
Even without these definitional concerns, our knowledge about false allegations is extremely spotty. In a June 5 article in Bloomberg View beginning with the declaration “Rape statistics are a mess,” Megan McArdle concluded, paraphrasing Socrates: “Until we get mind-reading machines, the only thing we can know about the actual prevalence of false rape reports is that we don’t know it.” Not everyone is quite as Socratic as McArdle, however. The most commonly accepted statistic is that 2-8 percent of rape allegations are false.
To be absolutely clear: that means 2-8 percent of the reports made to the police are later proven to have been made by somebody who knew that the person they were accusing was innocent. And when you consider that many victims choose not to go to the police at all, the ratio of people who have actually experienced sexual assault to people who have falsely claimed to have experienced sexual assault gets—one presumes—even larger. The number of false rape allegations is small: it’s not zero, but it’s small. The amount of fear and worry and hand-wringing about these false allegations is disproportionate to their actual prevalence.
Acknowledging their rarity, however, shouldn’t minimize the tremendous damage that the (extremely uncommon) false rape allegations do to the lives and reputations of the falsely accused. Part of the reason why the myth of Phaedra is such a commonly cited “rape myth” may be that its results are so gruesome: a young man literally gets ripped apart, and his father holds part of the blame.
Euripides, anyway, seems to have had something of an obsession with false rape allegation stories. In addition to the existing Hippolytus, he also wrote another, lost version of the same story, featuring a much more sexually aggressive Phaedra. He told similar stories in at least two other lost plays about other young heroes who had the misfortune of catching the eyes of older women. These plays fit into a bigger thematic group of Euripides’ tragedies, includingMedea and Andromache, that all tell stories of how dangerous women can be when you deny them sex.
A certain kind of scholar (the 19th century British kind) would try to spin this trend into a story about how Euripides was falsely accused of rape in his youth and then spent 15 years trying to work out his issues through playwriting. But scholarship of that sort isn’t in vogue anymore. A claim like that is completely unprovable—and, even worse, not very interesting. That kind of analysis looks at these stories as the product of one man’s experience rather than as products of a fascinatingly alien and yet familiar society that handled rape very, very badly.
And of course, there isn’t a one-to-one equivalency in the definitions of rape in ancient Greece and today. There isn’t even a clear consensus about what rape means among Americans living in 2015. Regardless, if people are going to use Phaedra as evidence that women have been using false rape allegations to get revenge on men for thousands of years, they have to acknowledge what rape meant in Athens 2500 years ago. And what it meant—fair warning—was disturbing.
In spite of the omnipresence of sexual assault in Greek myth and literature, the Greeks had no precise word for “rape.” Having sex with an unwilling woman (or man)—while a defined problem in certain contexts—wasn’t an inherently criminal act. They had several words that approximated the meaning: harpagē,biazō, hybris. The first of these words means something like “robbery” or “abduction”—so, if you stole a woman from her husband or father, the criminal act was the theft (regardless of whether sexual assault took place). The latter two terms refer to violence. None of the words has an exclusively sexual meaning, and there was also no word for “rapist” as an identifier that you could use to describe someone.
In our society, rape is defined by lack of consent or inability to consent. But for Athenian men, as Edward Harris has shown, consent wasn’t the main issue at stake. (Harris has gone on to say that we shouldn’t even use the word “rape” to describe sexual violence in Athens, which seem to me to go too far: although consent may not have been an important consideration legally, it was clearly important to the victims, as Sharon James has pointed out. If it hadn’t been, Phaedra could have written a note saying that she committed suicide out of guilt because she’d had consensual sex with Hippolytus, and theoretically Theseus would have gotten equally angry.)
So, if an incident of non-marital sex occurred between freeborn people (slaves didn’t count), the only considerations were: what was the state of mind or intent of the aggressor, and what impact did the act have on the honor of the victim? If the aggressor was in love with his victim, that could be a mitigating factor. And if the woman bore the child of a god, for instance, or if the assailant offered to marry her, the honor that either of those circumstances would bring her disqualifies the act as a rape. This situation occurs frequently in New Comedy, and it’s always difficult for students (and professors!) to accept.
Within this legal framework, victims could only very rarely get anything like what we would consider “justice.” The system was heavily weighted in favor of rapists. And yet, there was still a tremendous fear of false allegations—a fear great enough that Euripides could write four plays about them. In our system, likewise, only a very small number of rape allegations lead to conviction, but the idea of false allegations still dominates the discourse—even though, both in Athens and today, men were more likely to be raped than to be falsely accused of it.
I actually saw with my own two eye balls someone say on this hellsite that asexuals cannot use the term “corrective rape” because it was coined by a lesbian.
That we were culturally appropriating the term and could not use it to describe the corrective rape we experience by aphobes.
Like… for real?????
R u gonna be THAT petty and horrible?!?!
I mean…. why do you even WANT to keep corrective rape as a “lesbian thing” anyway, I honestly don’t get it at all….
But hey, sure, you don’t hate us.
graylesbianglitter
Corrective rape is defined as ‘a hate crime in which one or more people are raped because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. The common intended consequence of the rape, as seen by the perpetrator, is to turn the person heterosexual or to enforce conformity with gender stereotypes.’
Asexuals can be corrective raped. People have raped asexuals to try to turn them hetero. There are aphobes in the world. Just because one group coined the word doesn’t mean it’s exclusive to them
I’m lesbian and I know for a fact that asexuals do experience corrective rape. Corrective rape is a horrible, disgusting thing but it isn’t exclusive to lesbians.
Sorry, I normally dont get this angry or worked up about things I see on this website but that fact that people believe that only lesbians can experience corrective rape just fucking pisses me off
Exclusionists: *ignore the people saying that asexuals should die so they can keep calling us bigots*
exclusionist-against-aphobes
Who’s saying they should die?
im-glad-i-crashed-the-wedding
I would give you sources and I must apologise, you’re being a lot more civil than the other exclusionists I’ve been arguing with, but I hope you understand that my patience is worn thin and I’m not ready to continue this right now
exclusionist-against-aphobes
It’s okay! A couple of people have linked me to sobercommunist who I already have blocked, which I think is part of the reason why I haven’t seen anyone seeing aces should die. I definitely believed you when you said it, I just wasn’t sure who in particular you were referring to. but like I said, others are linking me to sources now, so you don’t have to find anything if you don’t want to.
Hiya, just dropping in with some additional receipts posts for you. Some of these blogs still exist, but I think most don’t. That’s not to say the ppl running them have left the discourse, but most of the blogs are different now. Anyway… tw death threats, suicide baiting, rape threats, rape apologism, corrective rape, racism, etc etc, (so pls view with care!) - x, x, x, & there’s some repeats here but still also some newer stuff x
This has honestly gotta stop, from both “””sides””” of this cursed “”””discourse”””””.
im-glad-i-crashed-the-wedding
Thanks for this addition! This stuff truly does need to stop.
Happy to help. In part bc I’ve put in so much work collecting & posting these nasty receipts, but even more so bc I think more ppl need to face this reality and help stop it.
Everyone needs to block the-aeternal-thinker, they spam rape threats. I mean you shouldn’t need anything else they literally spam get r/ped to multiple blogs
Everyone needs to block the-aeternal-thinker, they spam rape threats. I mean you shouldn’t need anything else they literally spam get r/ped to multiple blogs
Inb4 people write their little thinkpieces about how bad *intentional* plagiarism is, YES it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as rape. students are literally expelled for accidental instances of plagiarism while rape cases get swept under the carpet so that the institution’s reputation won’t be tarnished with. people can get mad at this all they want, but plagiarism will NEVER be as bad as rape.
Pocahontas was a victim of child rape. Explain why you thinking wearing this real person as a costume is okay. You think dressing up as a rape victim somehow makes you not trash?
…how is this relevant, sorry? Just confused. You shouldn’t dress as other cultures because cultural appropriation. The child rape victim mention sounds like it’s just there to use as leverage, which seems dishonest, unnecessary, and just…shitty rhetoric.
Seems important to ensure people are aware. Cultural appropriation, yes, which has been discussed a lot in posts shared about her. Leverage? Dishonest (a factual statement is dishonest)? Unnecessary? I took the lead from other Indigeous people on social media who are making sure people who justify the “costume” are aware of what she really went through. If that is “unnecessary,” please speak with them about it. I do not debate the position, and words, held and used by her tribe and other Indigenous groups and peoples.
