Via MemeGenerator
Women are all, like, mysterious and shit, you know?
At any rate, there is a lot of money to be made in perpetuating the notion that women are inscrutable, even to themselves, and it tends to sell a lot of products to people who don’t know the meaning of the word “inscrutable.”
Allow me to speak for a moment from my perspective as a guy who spent most of his life thinking that women were mysterious, practically evanescent figures of wonder, because I think this notion colors the perspectives of far too many people. I cannot in any way speak from the perspective of a woman, or even hope to represent women’s views or interests, but I can address the concerns of male idiots.
(Trigger warning for discussions of rape rhetoric from here on.)
(Also, I admit this post really only addresses gender binary male-female relations. There is a much wider array of experiences and perspectives out there.)
For men who don’t know anything about women (and can’t be bothered to learn), perhaps nothing is scarier than the spectre of the False Rape Accusation. This is a potentially life-destroying threat that any man who attempts physical intimacy with any woman must face. It is, of course, bullshit, but many, many dudes can’t see beyond the tips of their own dongs to realize that.
Believe it or not, this was actually the LEAST offensive “rape meme” I could find. The internet is a dark, dark place. Via KnowYourMeme.com
The belief goes a bit like this: at any point during the course of a relationship, a woman can seize control by threatening to make, or actually making, a false threat of rape against the guy. A corollary of this fear is that a man will somehow misconstrue signs of sexual interest and later find himself the victim of a rape accusation. An even more severe corollary is the woman who enthusiastically consents to sex, then later decides it must have been rape. In all of these scenarios, it is the woman’s word against the man’s, and in the fevered imagination of the prototypical douchebag, society at large always sides with the woman.
Of course, each of these scenarios have actually happened at some point in human history. The notion that the legal system will jump to defend the woman and vilify the man in every instance is, however, utter fantasy. It also falls prey to various logical fallacies based on taking individual anecdotes and generalizing them to 50% of the human race. To summarize what I just said, it’s bullshit.
The reality is that only a small percentage of rapes ever get reported. Of that number, only a small percentage get investigated or prosecuted. Of that number, only a small percentage result in convictions. Women who report rapes routinely face harassment, threats, repeats of the same trauma, and even further trauma. There have undoubtedly been cases of women making false accusations of rape, but they are nearly impossible to quantify. Besides that, it is a foolish venture from a cost-benefit standpoint (to say nothing of the moral concerns of lying and risking the ruination of an innocent person.) Of course, adherents of the False Rape Accusation ideology may be less likely to view women as having a rational view of things.
From what I can tell, people who think this way have two basic approaches to dealing with women: avoidance, or “just go for it.” By that, I mean that if a person does not believe that a woman will reliably give an accurate statement of consent, well, I don’t much care to follow that thought where it goes. Suffice it to say, it’s ugly.
Actual false rape accusations are indefensible, obviously, and they hurt both the objects of the false accusation and the actual rape victims who are disbelieved. That’s the key, though: the existence of some small percentage of accusations that are false is used to wrongly discredit the ones that are true. This is the problem, not some phantom horde of women seeking to spread ignominy.
The reason I bring all of this up is a news item regarding a freshman Republican U.S. representative from Wisconsin, who said some things that ought to make people cringe:
A state representative is drawing heat for saying that his father had told him when he was young that “some girls rape easy” as a way to warn him that a woman could agree to sex but then later claim that it wasn’t consensual.
Freshman Rep. Roger Rivard (R-Rice Lake) in December discussed a case with the Chetek Alert newspaper in which a 17-year-old high school senior was charged with sexual assault for having sex with an underage girl in the school’s band room.
The newspaper quoted him as saying his father warned him, “Some girls rape easy” – meaning that after the fact they can change what they say about whether sex was consensual. On Wednesday, Rivard told the Journal Sentinel that the article did not provide full context of his comments and that his father’s exact words had been slightly different from how they appeared in the Chetek Alert.
He told the Journal Sentinel that his father had advised him not to have premarital sex, and he took that seriously.
I have a few words of advice for young men who share the views espoused by Rep. Rivard: if this is truly what you believe, then you should probably err on the side of caution. If a girl could change her mind, or use changed circumstances to change her story about consent, you are probably better off avoiding girls and women altogether. It’s just not worth the trouble, and the women of this world are better off not having to deal with people like you. So just stop talking to them or associating with them, and maybe consider moving somewhere where you don’t have to see them all the time.
I know this is asking a lot of you, but I assure you that your sacrifice is for the greater good. For the sake of the continued existence of this great nation and our species, just go away.
