Freakin' awesome post about rape.

[knitter4democracy]

http://www.notitles.com/?p=148

I have to say that I entirely agree.

[goddess40]

1. That is one of the best statements about rape that I've ever read

It's sad that more people don't "get it".

[DangerDave921]

2. Nice message

I assume her position also applies to "prison rape" jokes. Because the raping of men is still ripe for many many jokes on t.v.

Just like no one would ever make a joke about a woman's breasts being cut off, but it's still OK to make Lorena Bobbit jokes.

[knitter4democracy]

3. I would assume that it would.

I had a friend in college who was raped in the men's dorm because he was gay, so male rape isn't funny to me at all. I saw how that changed him and how nothing happened to the rapists, and that's not funny.

I think Lorena Bobbit jokes are more about a woman scorned getting the ultimate payback. I don't think it's funny, but considering that it wasn't all that long ago when we were property and could be locked up in insane asylums to be forcefed, raped, and chained to walls just because our husbands wanted wife 2.0, I think that's where some of the anger behind the "jokes" is coming from.

[DangerDave921]

4. maybe i don't know my history

but when were women locked up in insane asylums, force-fed, raped, and chained to walls?

That sounds like some freaky serial killer rapist, not general society.

[WildClarySage]

5. You don't apparently know your history.

Google is your friend. While rape was not a common occurrence in asylums, forcible restraint including chaining to beds, walls, chairs and eventually the use of straight jackets was common, and sexual assault was not unheard of. An occupation of controlling people "for their own good" attracts often a certain type of personality and you can practically guarantee sexual assault will occur.

[knitter4democracy]

8. Think late 1800s and earlier.

Women could be beaten legally by their husbands up to the 1900s, and the first child abuse case to be won was decided based on animal abuse laws on the books.

In England, it wasn't unusual for women to be starved and beaten if they refused to marry whom their families chose for them. If they still refused, they were put in insane asylums and left there to die. Nellie Blye, if I remember right, was the muckracker to expose what was going on behind stone walls and write a column and book on what she saw when she got herself admitted.

An interesting short story that exposes some of the ways women were treated as property is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a fictionalized account of what happened to her.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. Yes, and in those 19th century novels, the young men are eager to

marry heiresses. It wasn't only that a man could live a lavish lifestyle if his wife had inherited £50,000 a year. It was that as her husband, he had sole control over her property. If he wanted to keep his wife in rags and lavish money on other women or fritter it away gambling, there was nothing she could do. He could also divorce her and throw her out of the house with "nothing but the clothes she stands up in," as the saying went. He automatically retained control of all her property and any children they might have had.

In fact, the Seneca Falls Conference of 1847 was originally NOT about voting rights but about the rights of women to retain control of property they brought into the marriage and the right to retain contact with minor children in the event of a divorce.

[Warpy]

11. I worked in a state mental hospital in the mid 60s

and fully a quarter of the patients were women that men didn't want any more. They weren't force fed or chained, but they were drugged to the point that they were shuffling shadows of human beings.

An enlightened doc came in for six months and took those women off the drugs. They were all completely normal, although understandably angry about the years of life they had missed. None went home, though, because of the sanctity of marriage. Their husbands didn't want them and their families said they belonged to the husband.

The enlightened doc moved on, the women were drugged again, and I left.

Don't kid yourself. It happened and it happened very recently.

[lightningandsnow]

6. Awesome post, indeed.

I hate rape jokes too. Like when people write on my (or other people's) facebook wall, and are like "Haha! RAPED YOUR WALL!" Not cool.

[varelse]

7. I wish I'd seen this in time to recommend it

This is one of the best posts I've seen on the subject.

[WildClarySage]

10. I play World of Warcraft and hate seeing people say they got 'raped'.

Every time I see it, I think to myself, no, unless someone just physically assaulted you in a sexual way, you did not. Your character got killed. You did not get raped. Having been raped, I know the difference.

I also hate when I see an article or story about rape where it describes the incident as "had sex"... um, again, NO, sex is consensual, non-consensual sexual contact is rape. Call it what it is. Don't be afraid to. And they say feminists think all sex is rape. It seems to me that anti-feminists think all rape is really just sex. :eyes:

[Name removed]

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