Rape Culture: a constructed narrative

Readers of AVFM will be aware that this site’s criticism of acceptable hatred, of advocated violence, and criticism of the public laziness and stupidity of many writers in mainstream channels often takes the form of sarcasm or satire. Sometimes our parodies of publicly acceptable hatred are seized on by the targets of our criticism as “proof” that this site, its founder and contributors are the violent, sociopathic maniacs emulated in parody. It is a blithe, purposeful ignorance of the purpose of our criticism, and of what we find objectionable in public narrative.

Paul’s “Bash a violent bitch month” springs to mind. An article AVFM’s founder and publisher wrote in response to public gloating by the contributors of Gawker media’s Jezebel.com – who bragged in a Jezebel article about routinely assaulting their spouses and boyfriends. For the stupider children in class today, Paul’s article was satire. A point made clear in the article itself.

However, an article published by TheNation last week is so naked in its purposeful cultivation of hatred, I find myself unable to conceive of satire or sarcasm of adequate pitch to address it. I’m just not witty enough, and the white hot hatred promoted by theNation contributor Walter Moseley against an entire demographic frankly exhausts me.

The piece in question is called “Ten Things to End Rape Culture”.

The term “rape culture” is obviously the gender ideological item of rhetoric referring to an assertion that the culture we all live in is one which normalizes, promotes facilitates and excuses the rape of women.

It happens that law enforcement agencies track the rates of violent criminal victimization. Indeed, according the American Department of Justice Statistics – rape and sexual assault, combined into one category to give a bigger number still comprise the lowest rate of violent criminal victimization of all other types of violent crime. In fact, that rape is a violent crime tends to diminish the claim that it is enabled or facilitated or normalized in our culture. Unless of course you consider the rape of children by clergy, or the rape of children by predominantly female teachers, or the rape of men, by women – a real issue so taboo it’s been legally defined as not actually rape.

Rape Culture™, as propounded by gender ideologues, doesn’t refer to any of those issues. No, its just the male on female identified public narrative of endless perpetration and victimhood. Indeed, it’s worth noting the pedigree of this item of fabricated consciousness. Feminists of the second wave once popularized a claim that “all men are rapists”. This was taken from the writing of Marylin French, who has also asserted that “women’s oppression is an intrinsic part of the male-dominated global culture”.

This is the same global culture in which the casualties of war are overwhelmingly male, where male suicide occurs at 4 times the rate of female suicide, where men die earlier, work the most dangerous and punishing jobs and where despite earning less (from softer, safer employment or non employment) women control the spending of over 80% of disposable income. It is the same global culture even where a modern city is being planned by men in one country for the exclusive use of women; where male gang rape victims in war are specifically excluded from receiving United Nations aid or medical support, and where the significant majority of the electorate in western nations is female.

But returning to Rape Culture™, as an item of rhetoric, it is the direct descendant of “all men are rapists,” that old item of depraved hatred so easily dismissed as false, and too nakedly hateful. In its modernized form the accusation is as hateful as ever but now supplies it’s own phony plausible deniability.

Rape culture is not a culture enabling rape. It’s a narrative telling men and boys they are corrupt, broken, and evil. It’s an ideological narrative excusing and facilitating hatred and marginalization of men and boys. So it exists, certainly, just not as the fictional culture of sex crimes against women it is commonly claimed to be.

The article by Mosley begins with a photo, captioned with the claim: “Women at a SlutWalk protest in Berlin. The walk was held in response to a Toronto police officer who said women shouldn’t dress like “sluts” if they want to avoid being raped.”

Halfway through the body of article, The Nation’s editors have inserted the following appeal.”Please support our journalism.“

What journalism? What Toronto police constable Micheal Sanguinetti said didn’t include a reference to rape. He said: “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

The “journalists” at the Nation, along with slut-walkers world wide imply that a Canadian cop, addressing only 10 people, meant – if you get raped, you were asking for it.

That is very convenient interpretation of Sanguinetti’s statement for anyone wishing to justify false moral outrage, or to excuse bigotry and hatred.

Another interpretation of his words: “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” is that women should take some personal responsibility for their own safety, just as every other adult must do, even in a city with low crime rates and a strong, well organized, and trained municipal police force.

The body of Mosley’s article is a recycling of feminist rhetoric which has circulated online for several years. The 10-ways to stop rape trope. A list of execrable accusations of malice, stupidity and subhuman violence against every person of male identity online and off. When challenged on the naked malice of that old internet meme – the flimsy excuse of humor has always been the go-to for anyone propagating such hate. Now of course, the flimsy cover of “just a joke” is stripped away as America’s oldest weekly news magazine, and one of the most widely read magazines in the world gets in on selling ad space through populist bigotry and hatred.

We are witnessing the real time purposeful cultivation of the normality of atavistic hatred of an entire sexual demographic from the echo chambers of online bigots into mainstream acceptance.

 

Name the real problems: Violent masculinity and victim blaming.

This is a recent innovation in gender ideological rhetoric. The attachment of an element of the identity of a group of people to violence, criminality or evil. Violence doesn’t have a sex. A list of examples is so easy to find using Google that listing any here would simply be tedious.

Victim blaming, is another item of created narrative, and it refers to any examination of self actualization or decision making on the part of a (female) victim; re-characterizing examinations of cause and effect as a wholly malicious attack on the victim. Without self reflection and examination of volition by a “victim”, the transitory status of victimhood becomes long term identity. This may well be the point for gender ideologues. Shiny-armored knights on white chargers would find no employment without victims to rescue and succor.

However, more indicting of the Nation is the persistence through the article of attachment of victim to female pronouns and predator to male. “What made him think this [sexual violence] is acceptable?”

Lying by omission. Moseley next links to a Huffpo article listing “facts” about domestic violence, assembled by another gender ideologue. Nowhere in the list is the fact that most domestic violence is reciprocal, nor that in the minority of DV which is non-reciprocal, women are the majority of the offenders. Nowhere in the list is the fact that the majority of children abused receive that abuse from their mothers. Nowhere in the list is the fact that mention of the victimization of one half of a group while omitting any mention of victimization of the other half is a lie of omission.

It is a list crafted to present the popular fiction that men are violent, and that women are their eternal victims. And this narrative, this half-telling of the truth has two practical purposes. It makes the money flow, and it prevents any effort at stopping such violence from succeeding. And that too, keeps the money coming for the professionals in the sexual violence grievance industry.

Imagine trying to fight a structure fire by pouring water on only the north and east facing walls, and letting the south and west walls burn freely. Imagine a fire department whose funding was tied directly to presenting a picturesque and ongoing narrative of burned out buildings.

Quoting Mosley again :

 

[T]he likelihood that a woman will die a violent death increases 270% once a gun is present in the home.

Because bullets don’t penetrate the bodies of male family members, right? Only women are victims? So when I was 16 and my step-mother got her hands on a .44 magnum, crept down to the basement and pointed it at me, I was perfectly safe, because I’m male. Well, that’s a fucking relief after all these years.

Mosley’s second bullet item:

 

Re-examine and re-imagine masculinity

That would be the project underway already, right? Re-defining men as violent?

If I am to believe what’s fed to me by almost every channel of our mainstream media, My identity, my masculinity is – pathological, predatory, depraved and broken.

So I share no brotherhood with the conceptual father of modern computing; Alan Turing. I am not of the same sex as the coiner of the term “meme” and the great humanitarian and scientist and educator Richard Dawkins. I share no legacy with Cicero, whose question “who benefits” still informs our basic principals of inquiry into human behavior. I am not a member of the sex who invents, creates, builds and investigates? Nope, I’m just a testosterone poisoned woman, and I should hate myself for the actions of a few criminals.

Mosley again :

 

Once we name violent masculinity as a root cause of violence against women..

Wait! Wait, let me guess! We line them all up against the wall and shoot them? Maybe put all the menz into camps to perform menial labor, starve to death, and we can render their corpses down for soap and lampshades? Right?

Oh, no, apparently I’m skipping ahead. According to Mosley:

 

[W]e have to ask: Is masculinity inherently violent?

He follows this with:

 

Understand that rape is not a normal or natural masculine urge.

This stunning bit of Captain Obvious is actually not an answer in Mosley’s narrative.

The question was actually asked to suggest that, “yes, masculinity is inherently violent.” This is a trick I use in my own writing, too, although never quite as clumsily as this. Get the reader to supply the answer in their own mind.

Mosley is assuming the ignorance and gullibility of the reader to say that masculinity is inherently violent.

There is no polite rebuttal to this vile lie.

However, I will offer some insight into why a man would go to such effort to vilify every other male human being.

He is one of the “good” men. That is to say he is the equivalent of some African Americans in 1960 that would not get all uppity while being pushed around and forced into back doors away from “decent” society; who would actually admonish other African Americans to Uncle Tom their way through life with open acceptance of their inferiority.

In that respect, Mosley is not like other men, you know, the bad ones. Dem dat don’t mind they place.

It is also a path to perceived sexual approval, and on some level, desirability.

What we see in the TheNation article is a little dog balancing biscuits on his nose, hoping to hear a “good boy!” and to get acknowledgment as one of the only “proper human beings” in the conversation; appealing to the people with the social power to confer the public identity of  a “good man.”

He is simply begging women’s approval, sniffing for pussy at the expense of men collectively.

The photo posted at the top of the Mosley’s article depicts a slut-walk participants holding up a sign which read, “No Excuses” for rape and violence. Yet, every mention of violence in his article includes the limiting clause “against women.”

Women are the LEAST affected demographic of violent criminal activity.

Indeed as you examine the women in the photo, they bear the smiling mugs of power shoppers on a mall excursion vs. expressions resembling outraged and concerned victims walking in protest against a horrific violent crime. Oh, well, perhaps they were just caught up in a moment of levity.

♦♦♦

Expressio unius est exclusio alterius. This is a Latin dictum expressing a principal of western thought that the expressed mention of one thing implicitly excludes all others. Exclusion is the hallmark of gender ideologues.

In addition, if no excuses for violence and rape are to be tolerated, why is female-perpetrated violence and female perpetrated rape always excused by feminists?

Simple. Because violence is not their concern. Cultivating hatred is. Indeed, for professional ideologues like Jessica Valenti – and wannabes like Mosley — maintaining a narrative in which violence thrives serves their purpose beautifully. Valenti, who has long advocated the elimination of basic principals of due process and justice for men – likely wants women to be subject to ever greater violence, because continued and escalating female victimization serves their narrative.

Mosley concludes with a paragraph places him snugly on Valenti’s back porch, where she may open the door and let him in:

 

It is not enough to bring individual perpetrators of rape and sexual violence to justice.”

 

Left unstated is the emotional urge to both ignore female perpetrated abuse (don’t look at the research, just listen to pundits) and to preemptively criminalize an entire sexual identity.

Since the problem lies in a culture that is entertained by degrading acts and images of women:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_IxFbDVkq7a0/SM8ks4UjDOI/AAAAAAAAAGY/jmE3VIio7bs/s1600/voodoo_01.jpg

http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/photo/woman-walking-a-man-on-a-leash-high-res-stock-photography/aog67894?Language=en-US

http://www.ministryoftofu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/feminism01_thumb.jpg

 

[T]he solution is to look at the individual acts as a symptom of rape culture and solve it holistically.

We all have a part to play in allowing rape culture to exist—so, we can all do something to eradicate it.

And, Walter Moseley, in your case the opportunistic self-loathing and bigotry is nothing more than approval seeking from the leisure class, and the validation of their “I’m one of the good men” cards.

Newsflash: You’re not good man. You’re an obsequious, lying, asshole begging for fetid scraps of social approval from bigoted ideologues.

What you’ve really earned is your own shame, and entirely deserved public contempt, but don’t let your treat fall to the floor when they toss it to you. Catch it in your teeth like smart little puppy.

Moseley is right about one thing. Rape Culture™ is real. It’s a highly popular and openly promoted narrative. Indeed, it’s a sickening manifestation of increasingly acceptable hatred of men and boys, and it has got to go.

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