Saturday, February 28, 2015

Sexism and Sexual Assault

I've started to wonder whether rape is worse in our society than it might otherwise be because of how we view sex. So imagine a group of pre-linguistic humans (yes, homo sapiens existed for a very long time without language) who are hunter-gatherers: they have a community and community rules, but fewer ways of enforcing those rules than we do now, and less severe consequences. Actually, you could probably just picture a group of chimps and get more or less the same idea how social dynamics would work in a group of inherently intelligent and social beings who lack language.

Now, let's try to separate out things that are inherently bad about rape from things that are culturally bad about rape. I would imagine that in this group of pre-linguistic humans, rape would still be awful, because it's 1) physical assault, often painful, and 2) could possibly get you pregnant with the child of someone whose baby you did not want. This #2 is almost the same thing as pointing out that you should be able to choose your sexual partners, since birth control did not used to exist, and people choose sexual partners (attractiveness based on pheromones, immune system compatibility, traits that make one a good mate like being able to bring home the bacon, being kind, etc) in very similar ways to how they choose parents for their children. Possibly we could include a 3) Violation of personal choice in a very intimate, traumatizing way, but I would argue that this is probably more cultural and less innate.

What affects cultural attitudes about rape? For one thing, sex is shameful in our Western, puritanical culture. This makes a whole bunch of things more shameful than they might “naturally” be, with such concepts as shaming girls who like to have lots of sex as “sluts,” and, at best, relegating sex to something sacred and only to be shared with serious, long-term significant others, or after marriage. So this makes rape more shameful, too – rape survivors are sometimes seen as dirty or soiled, and there's a stigma against even admitting that one has been a victim of rape.

Why this stigma? I suggest that there are three parts to it: the first part I'll just say is unexplainable and stupid (simply because I think it's more complicated than my other two points alone). Society doesn't stigmatize being the victim of other crimes, so maybe it's just part of our many weird attitudes about sex. Part two is that people (often subconsciously) blame the victim for not standing up for themselves, with a thought processes of roughly “Well, if I were in that situation, I would do everything possible to get out of it, like kicking him in the balls, running away, and calling the police.” This view ignores the fact that most rape is more complicated than that: it is most often not a scary stranger man jumping out of the bushes at night, but is done by friends and boyfriends, people you wouldn't want to hurt or have arrested even if they're being coercive, plying you with drinks, or being oddly aggressive. Maybe the victims would wish after the fact that they had stood up for themselves more, but in the moment few people would have the instinct to kick your good friend in the balls. All I will say about that is I don't think any of us have the right to say how we would act in that situation unless we've actually been there. (By the way, this part of the stigma would explain why even fewer male victims report the crime than women. The fact that I'm primarily talking about women in this post doesn't mean I'm trying to ignore male victims here!)

Part 3 of my explanation for the stigma is that rape victims seem to be required by society to be perfectly pure, virginal, desire-less beings in order for anyone to accept that they did not, in fact, “want it.” (I have some texts from my GWS class I could cite, if anyone is curious.) Rape cases are rarely taken to court, but when they are, victims are questioned along the lines of “But you were kissing him earlier.” “Why did you go to the railroad tracks with him if you didn't want to have sex with him?” “But you said in this facebook correspondence that you 'love bjs' so clearly you like sex. How can you prove you didn't want it?” etc. Essentially, as soon as one admits that a woman has sexuality/desires (not something that our culture does), she loses the right to choose who she wants to have sex with, because clearly if you like sex, all sex is good, right? Logic. So rape victims are generally seen, at least in some – often unspoken – way, as dirty because they “wanted it”.

On a more broad and direct level (okay, I'm adding a part 4), it might be shameful just because of the overall stigma against sex. If sex is taboo and shameful, and people who have sex are dirty or shameful people, then rape victims, prostitutes, “sluts” (see above: this is just a derogatory term for women who like sex, which shouldn't be derogatory at all), and anybody else who has sex before marriage are all grouped into the same category, a very broad and meaningless category one could fall into via very, very different situations.

This stigma probably makes sex seem even more intimate than it already is. Naturally, it is intimate because having sex with someone could result in having their child, so we're programmed to be somewhat selective about it. But there's no inherent reason the organs under our clothes should be so taboo, and I'm fairly certain in any hunter-gatherer culture they would be far less taboo if not completely acceptable. Therefore, if we've made holy temples out of our nether regions, to be shared with only a select few, doesn't that make the invasion of that space even worse than other kinds of assault on less taboo places? Isn't that what separates rape from other kinds of assault and taking without permission, like mugging someone or beating them up? By this reasoning, rape in our pre-linguistic society would still be worse than mugging or being beaten up, because there is some inherent intimacy to sex, but would not be worse by as much as it is today.

Let's all agree that rape is inherently bad and should be avoided by all costs because it's very damaging to a lot of people for some natural reasons and some cultural reasons. (This is the sentence I will direct you to if anyone starts screaming about how I don't understand how horrible rape is and how could I possibly say any of this.) Now that that's been said, doesn't it seem like ending slut-shaming and being a sex-positive culture would actually help rape victims immensely, even if it doesn't stop rape? This is not a very conventional way to link these two different feminist issues, but I think they're incredibly related and that gives us even more cause to fight for both at the same time. And as one last side-note in a post riddled with parenthetical clauses, increasing sex-positivity would likely decrease rates of rape, because girls are pressured into denying wanting sex, which might make some men pay less attention to explicit consent. Essentially, because it's hard for girls to say “yes” since they aren't supposed to want sex, that makes consent seem fuzzier, and sometimes “no” is interpreted as playing hard to get, or being coy “like women do”. If we manage to be more sex-positive as a culture, and educate people openly about their choices instead of treating it as a shameful taboo, then I hypothesize that it would not only be awesome in many other ways, but would also decrease rates of rape and sexual assault AND make the experience (specifically, the aftermath) of rape less horrible and traumatizing for women. Naturally, I would much rather stop rape entirely – but just because one hopes to find a cure for cancer doesn't mean we should stop trying to find ways to manage and treat it.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Growing Up

I've always hated it when people talk about childhood or the teenage years as this utopia of carefree, responsibility-less playtime. “Oh, I miss the good old days when I didn't have to worry about job security, taxes, rent...” they say wistfully, gazing off into the distance, presumably imagining running naked through a field of daises as a happy 9-year-old. But I've always wanted to be older, wanted to have responsibilities and be treated like I knew what I was talking about, wanted the freedom to choose what to do with myself, to choose what to study and where to travel and live by my own rules. I think I knew the word “patronize” by the time I was 7 and would tell adults not to patronize me if they crouched down and talked to me like... well, like one usually talks to a 7-year-old. So I longed to be bigger, older, wiser and more respected. (Not yet knowing, of course, that small blonde women have trouble being listened to throughout their entire lives.)

In middle school I wanted nothing more than to be out of middle school. A reasonable desire. I still would, if I were there. Let's not linger on those years. In high school, things were starting to look up, but I still wanted to get out – away from my school, from home, from my state, my country even. I wanted to see the world and be independent. I got my wish, in some ways, by going abroad, though I wasn't given as much independence as I had had in my parents' household. And now college. The fledgling eagle stage, where I can leave the nest and fly, but still rely on my parents and am not quite a “real adult”, whatever that means.

Fledgling eagles are ugly birds

The things we worry about change as we age. I'm happier now than I've ever been, and dHappiness/dt seems to be a large positive number, at least as far as I know from t 19. (For those of you who just cringed, that was indeed the first way I thought of to say that happiness seems to increase over time.) That being said, I can understand why people think that to be young is to be carefree. Worrying about work, taxes, rent, insurance, etc. IS really stressful sometimes, and people forget the different pressures that they had when they were younger (figuring out social situations, grades, parental expectations, different worries about the future like college/student loans/asking that girl to prom, driver's tests, etc etc). Maybe they forget because they blocked it out – I know I blocked out large portions of my middle school experience! But legitimately, the much patronized youth have no way of understanding the different stresses their parents and other adults are under, and that's what I think adults are trying to say when they claim that the youth have it easy. They're trying to point out how much pressure they themselves are under, and so they do that by belittling the pressures of others. Just like how some people try to boost themselves up socially by putting others down (not a recommended strategy, by the way).

Slight tangent alert (it will all come full-circle, I promise). Anxieties that keep you up at night aren't always rational. Some of my brain's favorite things to do have at various times included: 1) Worrying about the fact that I wouldn't know right away if one of my close family members or friends died while I'm lying there in bed, 2) Worrying about every single conversation I've had during the day, and how I or the other person(s) involved could have misinterpreted the things that were said, 3) Worrying that there's something very important I needed to do that day, that I forgot to do, 4) Worrying that my excessive tendency to worry about things at night will keep me from getting enough sleep, causing me to perform poorly in classes, sports, and social events (talk about ironic), 5) Worrying about the future, and what I want to be doing 5 years from now, and a great many more. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that other people also have this experience from time to time, and that I'm not just exposing myself as a horribly neurotic and anxious individual.

I had a very strange experience a few nights ago which actually inspired me to write a little about this. I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about my insurance, which I have taken upon myself to be responsible for. Now that I'm out-of-state and not on my parents' plan, I had to apply for insurance (thanks, Obamacare!) with all the convoluted paperwork involved, and it was generally not a fun experience, and one of those things that makes adults complain about how easy kids have it. In any case, it did actually work, so I should get my “Almost a Real Adult” card in the mail any day now. But I was up worrying because I realized I didn't actually know how it worked. If I got a spinal injury playing frisbee and went to the hospital, which hospital should I go to? Does it matter? Am I sure that all my paperwork is good to go, and I wouldn't be stuck with some ridiculous $40k hospital bill, because the US medical system is STUPID? Do I have copays? Holy crap, there's so many things I don't know and that's scary! (Don't worry, I have since taken it upon myself to find the answers to all of these things.) Point is, insurance is never something I would have stayed up thinking about a few years ago. So yes, there is some validity to adults' complaints.

But that got me thinking. What did I worry about in elementary, middle, or even high school that I don't worry about now? What kept me up at night then? Easy enough to answer: When you're very young, you worry about monsters in the closet, or if you're morbid like me, you worried about what would happen if Mommy and Daddy were killed by the monsters in the closet, or died for some other reason, and you were left all alone. In middle school, I worried about being sad and not knowing why I was sad, being more socially anxious than I am now, wondering why I felt so different and if things would ever change. Worrying about all the crazy changes happening to your pubescent body, and the unbalanced levels of hormones in your brain. And maybe the occasional worry about what a particular boy thought of me, worrying about my appearance and whether I was likeable and whether anyone would ever “like like” me. In high school, I worried about grades and college applications and what I wanted to do with my life, if I would ever have all the necessary skills to live on my own, not to mention many of the same worries from middle school (boys, girls, friends, relationships, appearances, and the inevitable social hierarchy of schools). There are very few of these that I still worry about now, and for that, I am grateful beyond words!

So I hope by now you're all convinced that people of all ages have stress. What else plays a role? Well, the things that younger people are stressed about aren't things they can change easily. They have little to no choice in school, rapid and awkward changes in their bodies, the social hierarchy, who they live with, how they spend their time, and really most other aspects of their lives. Being a kid sucks because for the most part, kids are powerless.

Adults don't always have free choice either. You need a job to pay rent, buy food, and have money, you need to finish education to get a job, and you need money to get an education, which is circular and difficult. Let's not even talk about if you're married and have kids, in which case you have far more obligations and I rest my case entirely. But you do still have a lot more say. You get to decide what you want to study and what job you want to have. Not all jobs make the same amount of money, but you get to decide that too: how important is money to you? If it's very important, you can be a programmer, a lawyer, a dentist or a doctor, an engineer, or many other things – you still have a wide range of choices for things that satisfy that value. If money is a lower priority, maybe a passion like art is a higher one, and you'd rather become a graphic designer knowing that you might have to live with roommates, travel less, and watch your expenses more closely. You get to choose your job, where to live, who to live with and spend time with, and so so many other things! You lucky adult you, on your path to the life of your own choosing. People forget how much say they have in their lives. And often people lose track of their priorities, and they work hard to get through med school because they think the prestige of being a doctor is a top value for them, and eventually they realize prestige won't make them happy and they have to re-evaluate what they want out of life and work towards a new goal. That happens. And it's unfortunate that we feel the pressure of other people's expectations so highly that we study for jobs we don't actually want, but in the end, it's on us to do a little soul-searching and figure out what we really want to be doing with our lives, because lucky us! We have the power to make those decisions! Wow, that's awesome!


Despite spending a full page talking about my various neuroses, I'm a fairly optimistic person, and the point of this whole meandering post is really just to say: look, you're an adult and you have responsibilities that are sometimes stressful, but you have a lot to be thankful for. And would you really rather be 13? No, I didn't think so. So stop telling people younger than you that they have it so good, and start appreciating what you have now that you didn't have before! I believe my father when he says that every year is better than the last, and every wrinkle is earned and not regretted, and that is how I want to live my life.