Thursday, September 27, 2007

Protect Your Valuables, Ladies!

I am so tired of men comparing women's bodies with jewelry or money or cars and whatnot. My vagina is not a fucking car, assholes.

When our houses are burgled, we're hardly more likely than rape victims to see the intruder end up behind bars. So what do we do? We fit locks to our doors and windows. We keep our valuables out of sight.


Why do we still think of rape as a property crime? Yes, a woman's body is her property, but it's not something you can throw in a lock box or something, despite the brilliant suggestion of one Wanda Sykes.

Imagine is someone said that about men's asses. Don't want to get ass-raped, well, you better put a lock on that shit. Keep it out of sight! Don't let anyone know that you have an ass! If people know you have an ass, well, you're gonna get raped and you should have taken more precautions. I mean, people lock up their houses, so you should lock up your asshole, too. Because, you know, you can lock up boy parts.

This is not the 1800s. People really should realize that rape is an ASSAULT. That's why they call it sexual assault, people. It's not a property crime. It's not stealing something from a home. It's assaulting someone. It is violating a person's BODY.

Some of the comments are almost worse.

"Why shouldn't they be advised that to get themselves into a drunken stupor in the company of a frisky male could carry risks?"
Come, come David. It's their right, don't you know. Responsibility is soooo 1950s and misogynist.
Putting different standards on women simply because they have vaginas that men want to put things into without permission of the owner isn't responsibility, at least not on the person who should be held responsible. I'm not one to promote heavy drinking, but if a woman gets drunk, the onus to not be raped is not on her. It never was. Men have the right and the ability to get drunk and go to hotel rooms without the prospect of being raped, so why is it that women have a "responsibility" to adhere to a different standard? Yeah, is it smart? Probably. Is it just? Not at all. Acknowledging one without acknowledging the other is ridiculous, and it IS misogynistic. If men were held more accountable for their actions rather than inhibiting what women are allowed to do without being blamed for being assaulted because of it, perhaps rape as a crime would decrease.

It's just ridiculous. There's nothing responsible about turning rape back into a property crime when it's actually violent assault. And yeah, it is from the fifties to do such a thing. The 1850s.

Comment if you have the patience to deal with these types.

1 comment:

FEMily! said...

"When our houses are burgled, we're hardly more likely than rape victims to see the intruder end up behind bars. So what do we do? We fit locks to our doors and windows. We keep our valuables out of sight."

The problem with this is that people who get robbed don't get blamed like those who are victims of sexual assualt. Stealing is something that everyone thinks is wrong, whether or not you lock your windows and doors. Nobody says "If you didn't want someone breaking into your house and stealing your TV, you should have remembered to lock your door," or at least it's not said to the extent that "Maybe it was what you were wearing" or "You shouldn't have been out after dark. You know what kind of people walk the streets at night" or "What did you think you were going to do after making out with him on the couch/bed/in the car?" is said to victims of sexual assault. That's because people have this notion that stealing someone else's shit is a choice, something that people can help not doing and that if you do steal, you're a bad person. But when it comes to rape, people think that because sex is a biological drive, then it can't be controlled (in men, anyway), that if a guy gets a hard-on, the world has to stop, and if he doesn't come in the nearest female, the world will collapse on itself.