Well, I think the coverage of the Steubenville rape case has had one positive result: it has created a dialogue about the dynamics of rape and gender relationships. Granted, it is not an easy discussion. Buttons are getting pushed and people are getting pissed off. I don't doubt that this post will upset a few people and make plain some of my own backwards ideas. But perhaps those uncomfortable discussions are the best kind. When I start having strong emotional responses to something, I know that I'm getting into important and powerful territory that needs to be explored. The frontiers of change in society are not, and cannot be, a comfortable place.
When I teach any type of self-defense, I advise that rendering yourself helpless in public is a really bad idea. Drunk, stoned, whatever else... this rings true. It remains true, regardless of what gender you happen to be. Men violate women. Men violate men. Women violate men. Women violate women. My experience in the criminal justice system indicates that there's no monopoly there. The gamut of bad things that can happen when you're incapacitated in public is wide and spans both genders.
When I discuss these issues, I walk the razor's edge.
On one hand, I think of the world that ought to be. This is the world of my ideals. In the world that ought to be, anyone should be able to render themselves incapacitated just about anywhere, and the only thing that others would do is offer aid, or at the very least, leave the incapacitated person the hell alone. When I am in a position where I am teaching how human beings ought to act towards one and other, this is what I teach. In that way, I'm fighting the war with my ideas and ideals... this is absolutely necessary. If we want to affect change in how people treat each other, it will be through making contact with their hearts and minds and helping them make deep, fundamental choices about positive treatment of their fellow person.
If our society has failed in the Steubenville rape case, it is because we have not strongly enough taught and reinforced the message of mutual respect and personal sanctity to our young people. We need to look at these two young men and ask ourselves, "What more could we have done to cut these twisted ideas off before these young people started internalizing them?" How profoundly has our teaching of personal sanctity failed that ideas like this were not only allowed to take root, but to blossom into full-blown, despicable action?
It simply is not enough that I respect the sanctity of a woman's everything. It will not be enough, as far as I'm concerned, until all my fellow men do the same. As this won't happen in my lifetime, that means that I've got a moral obligation to teach people to respect the personal sanctity of others for my entire life. (I should be clear that I'm only using the man-woman dynamic here because it is the one being most extensively discussed as a result of Steubenville.)
That idea is important. It means something. Change starts with ideals and passionate hearts. So, the world that ought to be is damned important.
We need to critically and fundamentally re-evaluate how we view genders, and what is acceptable interaction between genders.
For example, I look at things like the rampant objectification of women for purposes like marketing, and realize that the objectification that starts in the market place doesn't end there. The deeply ingrained idea of women as objects doesn't just sell items... I think it pervades all of our thinking (both genders) and screws with our perceptions. I feel confident that it helped create the environment where these young men somehow believed their conduct was acceptable. External references are a huge part of our moral identity. If we see people that are behaving in a way similar to our own, we are much less likely to critically evaluate the morality of what we do.
Is that really worth selling more beers?
On the other hand, when I address these issues, I've got to bow to reality. Reality is that people do horrible and ugly things to each other. The attitudes that resulted in the conduct of the two young men at Steubenville run rampant, and they're perpetuated in thousands of different places in our society. These ideas give rise to thousands of incidents of horrific behavior each and every day. Part of my job in teaching people how to protect themselves is to show them how predators act and teach them how predators think.
If I claim to teach any kind of self-defense, I have a moral obligation to share this information.
Humans, like most apex predators, are opportunistic in nature. We attack targets when we believe the situation makes our success likely. An incapacitated target, be that drunk, stoned, or otherwise altered, is an easy mark.
One of the most basic lessons in self defense is to find effective ways to show would-be predators that you are not an easy mark, and that they need to move on to greener pastures. Simple awareness, the possession of your faculties (no matter how dangerous they may be), drastically increases your safety.
Thus, if you want to be safe, you will not get shitfaced where a bunch of strangers have access to you. Is that fair? Absolutely not. Is it reality? You bet your ass it is.
Where this message gets garbled is an unhealthy idea that is patriarchal and chauvinistic in nature. I think it is important to make it explicit here.
In discussing the Steubenville case, I have heard a lot of arguments that essentially amount to: "Well, that girl shouldn't have gotten drunk like that! She created a scenario where that was going to happen! She had a duty to protect herself! She's at least partly to blame!"
The hell she is.
Looking at my teaching above, it is true that rendering yourself helpless around people you don't know or trust is a bad idea. Perhaps this woman could have avoided what happened if she wasn't as inebriated as she was. We will never know.
That said, a woman's intoxication in NO WAY makes a violation of her person less blameworthy. Ever. For any reason. You would never say that a mugging victim should share blame for getting mugged because she failed to bring a machine gun with her to the grocery store. I do not see how this case is any different. Violation of another's person is wrong. Period. The fact that the person was especially vulnerable when it happened should make it MORE blameworthy, not less. (Ironically, our criminal justice system embraces this... some of the time. For instance, crimes against helpless children and disabled adults are more harshly punished. For some reason, a large portion of our society seems to have decided that if the helplessness stems from something else, it means the victim somehow "had it coming" and the punishment is less.)
Systematic "victim shaming" has been a tool utilized for years by chauvinists to justify a culture of rape. If you ever have the misfortune of dealing with people that commit crimes like this, you'll find that this victim shaming is one of the first lines of defense that these people use to lie to themselves about the vile nature of their own behavior.
Don't buy into it. Even if you aren't someone that commits these crimes, you really debase yourself if you buy into the ideas they use to enable themselves.
The idea that a woman somehow "asks for it" by being intoxicated demeans both men and women. It presumes that men are mindless beasts that will commit rape crimes whenever presented with temptation. It presumes that women are objects to be raped, and must conceal their "wares" in order to have the full gamut of rights we'd afford to anybody else.
Those ideas are entirely ridiculous... but if you look at society, those ideas are widely held. This is where the war for the world that ought to be needs to be fought.
So, if you are going to evaluate these issues, I ask you to do three things:
1. Aspire to a world where we hold each other sacred.
2. Be realistic about the world we live in.
3. Become familiar with how these two concepts relate to each other.
