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Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers
Content Note for rape and kidnapping, and general rape culture.
They look just like everybody else.
They look just like everybody else.
It’s not an easy thing to keep in your head. Disney movies have taught us that villains look like villains.* But in real life, they look like everybody else.
Once they get caught, and we see a mugshot and they look like they were up all night drinking and then groped a stranger in a parking lot and were driven off by force, it’s easy to see them for what they are. But in the office, before Jeff Krusinski got arrested, he looked like a normal person. Someone gave him the job of heading up sexual assault prevention for the Air Force. In hindsight, it seems like a cruel joke, or a deliberate effort to put the fox in charge of the henhouse. Rather like putting a pedophile in charge of a program for troubled children. And given the massive issues the US armed forces have with sexual assault, it’s not absurd to think there are plenty of people who are more or less outright pro-rape. But just like the proportion of the population that are actually rapists is limited, the proportion of the population that can think both “that guy’s a rapist” and “I’m okay with that” is limited. I don’t have anything quantitative to point to for the size of that population, but experience teaches me that when people are determined to make excuses for a rapist, they first deny he’s** a rapist. Even the rapists don’t say they’re rapists.
Men’s power advocates (the guys who call themselves “men’s rights activists”, which is not a little like calling one’s self a “white rights activist”) get all wound about the term “rape culture,” making really facile arguments like we can’t have a rape culture if rape is a crime. But if you have a crime that perpetrators routinely get away with, where people defend even those duly convicted, then isn’t it a crime the culture offers a lot of support to? I think we’d all agree that we have a culture of corruption in politics, even though every once in a while one of the scoundrels gets hauled off in handcuffs. It’s illegal, but it’s common, it’s both decried and laughed at and to way too large an extent tolerated. Rape culture is like corruption culture: we all know it happens, it’s a crime, it’s sometimes prosecuted; but efforts to stop it are ineffective and lots of people who know about it find ways to make believe it isn’t what it i,s or convince themselves that the people who do it are justified; especially when it’s their friend.
I’m not saying that outright, self-serving human venality isn’t a significant reason that people look the other way. If we look at Sandusky, certainly for some people at some point there’s a more or less conscious thought process: I know what he is, I know what he does, but I’m putting the interest of the program and my self-interest first. If we look at Polanski, some people are simply calculating that supporting him is important in Hollywood and calling him what he is just isn’t in their self-interest. Even someone whose primary public reputation is as a feminist will call a rape a “model sexual negotiation” when necessary to appeal to a target market.
They look just like everybody else.
They look just like everybody else.
It’s not an easy thing to keep in your head. Disney movies have taught us that villains look like villains.* But in real life, they look like everybody else.
Once they get caught, and we see a mugshot and they look like they were up all night drinking and then groped a stranger in a parking lot and were driven off by force, it’s easy to see them for what they are. But in the office, before Jeff Krusinski got arrested, he looked like a normal person. Someone gave him the job of heading up sexual assault prevention for the Air Force. In hindsight, it seems like a cruel joke, or a deliberate effort to put the fox in charge of the henhouse. Rather like putting a pedophile in charge of a program for troubled children. And given the massive issues the US armed forces have with sexual assault, it’s not absurd to think there are plenty of people who are more or less outright pro-rape. But just like the proportion of the population that are actually rapists is limited, the proportion of the population that can think both “that guy’s a rapist” and “I’m okay with that” is limited. I don’t have anything quantitative to point to for the size of that population, but experience teaches me that when people are determined to make excuses for a rapist, they first deny he’s** a rapist. Even the rapists don’t say they’re rapists.
Men’s power advocates (the guys who call themselves “men’s rights activists”, which is not a little like calling one’s self a “white rights activist”) get all wound about the term “rape culture,” making really facile arguments like we can’t have a rape culture if rape is a crime. But if you have a crime that perpetrators routinely get away with, where people defend even those duly convicted, then isn’t it a crime the culture offers a lot of support to? I think we’d all agree that we have a culture of corruption in politics, even though every once in a while one of the scoundrels gets hauled off in handcuffs. It’s illegal, but it’s common, it’s both decried and laughed at and to way too large an extent tolerated. Rape culture is like corruption culture: we all know it happens, it’s a crime, it’s sometimes prosecuted; but efforts to stop it are ineffective and lots of people who know about it find ways to make believe it isn’t what it i,s or convince themselves that the people who do it are justified; especially when it’s their friend.
I’m not saying that outright, self-serving human venality isn’t a significant reason that people look the other way. If we look at Sandusky, certainly for some people at some point there’s a more or less conscious thought process: I know what he is, I know what he does, but I’m putting the interest of the program and my self-interest first. If we look at Polanski, some people are simply calculating that supporting him is important in Hollywood and calling him what he is just isn’t in their self-interest. Even someone whose primary public reputation is as a feminist will call a rape a “model sexual negotiation” when necessary to appeal to a target market.
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/invasion-of-the-bodysnatchers/