Feminism: Not Just for the Ladies

I only just found out it’s Blog Against Sexual Violence Day, but it was a handy coincidence that Jessica at Feministing linked to this article by Kathleen Parker about rape and sexual harassment in the military.

It’s hard to pick just one mind-boggling quote, but here goes:

Off the record, in dozens of interviews over a period of years, male soldiers and officers have confided that many men resent women because they’ve been forced to pretend that women are equals, and men know they’re not.

The lie breeds contempt, which leads to a simmering rage that sometimes finds expression in aggression toward those deemed responsible.

You read that right: women in the military get raped because men are sick of this whole “equality” pretense, so they just can’t help themselves.

To be charitable–way more charitable than Parker deserves–I’ll acknowledge that she sorta kinda puts the equality question in the context of combat, wherein testosterone does indeed come in handy. But still, having read the whole article, I don’t think quoting those two paragraphs without that acknowledgement would be misrepresenting her too egregiously.

It’s been said many times before by smarter people than me, but once more with feeling: this is why men need feminism, too. Because feminists know that men are not their cocks. We know you are not all at the mercy of impulses that will, at the slightest provocation, turn you into violent criminals. We know you don’t all look at any woman from 1 to 100 and feel that not raping her is a nearly intolerable burden, given the way your male brain is designed. We know that kind of statement is utter bullshit, based on a stereotype that demeans half the human race–i.e., the kind of statement we’re intimately familiar with, going in the other direction.

Feminists talk a lot about men’s responsibility to act right because we know you can. With the exception of a handful on the fringe, it is not feminists propagating the myth that all men are potential rapists–it’s the people who advocate for segregation and inequality spouting these lies about how you’re all too weak-willed to keep from wanting to rape, if not actually doing it. Yeah, there might be something to the argument that men are more prone to instantaneous desires to see strangers naked, but that’s irrelevant here, because feminists know that rape isn’t about sex. We know that when it is about sex, men are fully capable of keeping their thoughts and their hands to themselves. But it’s well documented and well understood–especially by feminists–that sexual violence is actually about power, control, the perverse thrill of eliciting fear. The men I know and love don’t find that thrilling, let alone hot. There’s a big fucking difference between liking boobies and liking rape.

The people who insist on equating sexual violence with sex, who insist that all men are intractable horndogs who–simply by virtue of owning penises–cannot be trusted, are not feminists. For the most part, they’re the people who hate feminists. The people who want to believe in a natural law that dictates sharp gender differences, in black-and-white answers to incredibly complex questions, in biological impulses to treat other people like shit. They’re the people who believe human nature is fundamentally so corrupt that none of us could figure out how to behave decently on our own, without a rule book.

Feminists know people like that are fucked up beyond belief.

And we know that men who aren’t fucked up beyond belief do not feel powerful impulses to rape or harass women. Impulses to have theoretical consensual sex, sure. (Guess what–women have those, too!) But not impulses to humiliate and degrade a woman, to see her cower, to hold her down while she screams. Impulses like that are not normal.

So if you’re a man who’s sick of hearing that they are, you might want to consider hanging out with more feminists. ‘Cause we’re sick of it, too.

Oh, and by the way: