The kindest reading of what makes people blame the victims of rape is fear. We don’t want to imagine that what happened to this 11-year-old could happen to us or to our daughters, so we rationalize that it couldn’t, that we are not like her. But there’s much more going on. There’s deep-seated fear of and disgust for women and female sexuality. We don’t have the same reaction to a boy getting beat up as we do to a girl getting raped; we don’t tend to wonder what the boy did to provoke the bully.
Here’s the thing: Any attempt to gain emotional distance on rape by transferring just a tiny portion, just one percent, of the blame onto the victim is an absolute moral wrong. It subtracts from the agency of the individual doing the raping. He is completely culpable. It is his crime — or, in the case of 18 young men and boys, it is theirs.”
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Cleveland texas gang rape: The New York Times skips context in its reporting. (via greaterthanlapsed)
Point of disagreement: if a boy gets beat up, most people assume it’s because he’s weak. He’s a sissy, he’s a wuss, he’s a whole host of other derogatory terms. In other words, he deserves it because he wasn’t man enough to stand up for himself. In our society, a man failing to be a man is provocation enough.
Similarly, I think rape gets excused (to some extent) often because sexual aggression is associated with masculinity. A sexually aggressive man is being a man. How many times have we heard the phrase “boys will be boys” when rape happens, and the victim gets blamed? It is expected that that is how a man will behave. A “good” girl won’t end up in that situation.
I think it’s less that we don’t want to believe that the men in our communities are capable of doing those things; it’s that we don’t want to believe that we could have anything in common with the victim that could make us a target of “inevitable” “masculine” sexual aggression.