I’m a man. Which means, by mere virtue of the fact that I
was born, I get to live at the top of the global food chain. Fair? Probably
not. Would I change it if I could? Come on, now. Get real.
As a man I have a natural advantage in business. I have the
biggest say in just about every culture and religion on the planet. I make the
most money. I get to control all the good stuff, sometimes even without knowing
it. I have every chance of getting justice if and when I need it. My voice,
when I whisper, can drown out a female shout, simply because society has given
me that kind of power. Who’d give that up, right?
Sure, I have my fears. We all do. Being a man is also being
human, after all. I avoid certain areas at night, because someone might hold a
knife to my neck and take my money, or, God forbid, shoot me and leave me for
dead. Common sense, really. I’m aware of hijackings and take as much precaution
as I can. I try not to drink and drive, because it’s just plain stupid, and I
secure my house as well as I can, again because of the shooting and stabbing
thing. (Plus I don’t like the thought of my belongings changing address without
my consent). So, I guess a quick audit reveals most of my fears are centered on
some form of crime. This is South Africa and I live in Gangster’s Paradise. I’m not Chuck
Norris, so it’s par for the course.
But being a man is also about the fears I don’t know. The
unfathomable ones. I know they exist, sure, but try as I may, I just can’t ‘feel’
what those fears ‘feel’ like, so they become more or less irrelevant to me. For
example, I can’t imagine how it ‘feels’ to avoid dark places, certain
situations, environments or people, or to live with elevated vigilance every time I've had a few drinks, or to be in a state of near terror when I have to change
a tire at night, all because somebody might violently stick an erect penis into
one or both of my bodily orifices.
No, really, if you’re a guy, stop giggling behind your hand
and thinking ‘haha, he wrote penis’, and give it a shot. Impossible to really
imagine that fear, even for a few seconds, right? The chances of somebody ambushing you in a public restroom,
holding you up at gunpoint, taking your belongings, and then forcing an erect
penis into your body, are zero.
But, if you’re like me, you have family members
and friends, mothers, daughters, nieces, wives, and girlfriends, for whom that
fear is a daily unspoken reality. Even if it’s not always conscious, it is
always there, regulating their behavior to some extent and modifying their
lives in ways they don’t even always recognize.
THAT, my dear friend, is a rape culture. And it exists
everywhere. Any society in which a woman perceives an erect male penis as a
potential threat under any circumstances whatsoever, has an endemic rape
culture.
Now I hear you howling. And rightly so. You’re not a rapist. You've never sexually assaulted anyone. If someone close to you was being sexually
assaulted, you’d offer up your life in noble defense. (So would I). And if you
were too late to stop the act, you’d seek violent revenge. (Again, I’m right
there). God, how is it you’re always thrown in with the rest of the male collective
when rape and rape culture is discussed? How come the feminazis are always
making you a part of the problem when you’re not? You’re tired of it, right?
Well, I am too. It grates me.
But, you see, us men, we control the world. And that’s no joke.
That control was handed to us on a silver platter thousands of years ago, and
boy, have we been screwing up.
Maybe, at this point, I should briefly tell you why I wrote
this post. Last night, in the wee hours, a journalist and writer whom I hold in
the highest esteem, went into the red zone on Twitter. When she does that, it’s
worth taking notice. She’s a vocal defender of freedom of speech. She has a
fluid, wide-open mind and, I dare say, she’s not offended all that easily. She
posted a link, which I followed to an Afrikaans humor site (subsequently taken
down). One of the ‘jokes’ was a lame attempt at funny, about a drunk man using a
date rape close-call as an excuse for getting home late. It’s really not worth
repeating, simply because it’s not really, well, funny. Another page was a
fumbling commentary about a 14-year old girl, allegedly coerced into sexual
intercourse with a well-known SA rugby player. This piece of writing points out
that the man in question limited his sexual activities to oral and anal sex,
because he (attempted humor) was too much of a gentleman to break her virgin.
You still with me? It also had a small insert (again, attempted humor) saying:
If she can sit on the toilet and her feet touch the ground, she’s old enough to
have sex. This is an attempt to find the funny in child sex!
Wow! But here comes the kicker. The site is run by, wait for
it, an advocate and a magazine editor. Yeah, read that again.
As these things go – the journo started making waves on
Twitter, and within minutes the defenses started piling on. Excuses floated
included the usual suspects: context is everything; humor is subjective; the
target of the commentary and joke was drunken men, not victimized women; she missed
the point.
When all is said and done, THIS is the point: A rape culture
is NOT the same as the rape act, just as a mushroom is not the same as the shit
it grows in. You don’t have to promote or commit rape to contribute to a rape
culture. A rape culture thrives in the way we speak and think. A rape culture
is an environment in which the act of rape is made less than the horror it
really is because somehow we believe it’s okay to find the funny in it. A rape
culture is a society where rape is simply accepted as an everyday occurrence. A
rape culture is all about trivializing, denial of justice, victim blaming. It is
a culture where the act of rape is prevalent, yet not properly discussed. It is
a culture where, on the deepest level, men believe they have a God-given right
to have sex with any woman through coercion or force or both. It is a culture
where men couldn't be bothered to understand the absolute, complete, lingering
devastation caused by rape in any form. It is a culture where the best of us
fail to protect the most vulnerable among us against the worst of us.
Civilized? I think not.
Just pretend. For a moment. You’re having a couple of snorts
with a good buddy. The laughs come, as they always do. More booze flows and this
guy gets serious. Tells you he really feels like crap, because he took a
woman/girl home last night, she passed out, he was drunk too and he had sex
with her. What do you think and do? Or he tells you he found out this morning
the girl he had sex with was only fifteen. Or he starts flirting with a
waitress, who’s clearly still in high school, and he tells you she obviously
wants him. In his eyes, you can see he honestly believes that.
This thing has many faces, and unless we start recognizing what
it looks like under the masks it wears, it won’t go away.
I’m not saying we should stop the funny. Or the fun. My sense
of humor is extremely rough around the edges. And the sexual content inside my
head is most certainly NOT fit for publication. I get it. We’re men and there’s
no reason for us not to be. What I am saying, however, is that we’re due for a
rethink, especially about our interaction with society and the women in it. Remember
this: You have a mother, or a wife, or a girlfriend, or a daughter, or a niece,
or a friend who lives with the possibility that someone might think it’s
okay to stick his erect penis into any or all of her orifices without her
consent. And she lives with that possibility because she lives in a rape
culture.
Women can’t change this, because they’re not men. We can. Because
we are.
