“If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”
Most people have heard some variant of that in their lives. Sometimes when people feel they have a point to make they say things they otherwise should not.
Our mouths often get the better of us. When frustrated or angered we lash out to make our point, not caring at all who gets in the way. On the internet, our digital mouths seem to have fewer restraints. Oddly enough, the more people think about something, the more likely their comments are less than civil. There are times when people write things they should have thought twice about.
Paul Elam provides such an example. He wrote recently about the rape hysteria feminists and women’s advocates whip up. However, rather than starting with criticism, he started with this:
I want to have a T-shirt made. “I Survived Rape Hysteria,” it will read. It will come with a special ribbon the color of bullshit that can be pinned on other clothing or put on the bulletin board at your local grocery store. Then I will pass them out to every man, woman and child in the western world.
We’ll have all sorts of fundraisers and political events so we can make more T-shirts and ribbons. We can start with a rape PSA marathon. You can ask donors to pledge a given amount of dollars for every hour you sit tied up in a chair, forced to watch an endless stream of public service announcements designed to spark your outrage at the oh so egregiously violated victims of rape. Perhaps they can pay by the tear, whether you’re crying over the victims or over their screeching and caterwauling.
We’ll make posters and bumper stickers of little baby feminists and caption them with “Rape Hysteria Begins with Her.” And we will appeal to the psychiatric establishment for a new diagnosis, Sexual Assault Whining Empathy Disorder, maybe give it a catchy acronym like SAWED and take that to the media and raise money for the victims of the pernicious and debilitating newfangled disorder.
And then we’ll take every biased, shamelessly politicized study and book on the subject of rape and have us a bonfire. We’ll gather round the flames and chant like Hare Krishna’s. We’ll do shots and howl at the moon; maybe watch a few careers go up in smoke while we are at it.
And then our day of liberation will come. We will turn, as one unified, thundering voice, to every over acting, histrionic, T-shirt slinging rape hysteria retailer and say, “Thanks for sharing, now shut the fuck up.”
“And by the way, take off that stupid T-shirt, you are not a survivor.”
Elam has a point about the inanity that feminists engage in when it comes to sexual violence against women. The perception feminists create is that every female is in constant danger of rape. There is no safe place, no safe men. Every male, from the infant to the quadriplegic, is a potential rapist waiting for his moment to pounce. Feminists claim that sexual violence against women is so prevalent that people exist in a “rape culture,” literally a culture that endorses sexual violence against women and trains males to be rapists.
These views are laughably insane. While sexual violence against women does occur, the majority of females are not sexually assaulted and do not face constant danger. They may be taught that they do, but being paranoid about something happening is not the same as something actually having a high potential of happening.
To that extent, Elam’s sarcastic rant is on point. All he did was take what feminists do and flip it around, making it easy to see how utterly bonkers the feminist position is.
However, he latter comment about survivors is another matter. He went on to state:
And that is the fundamental problem here. We have taken rape, a serious crime among other serious crimes, and elevated the victims to such an exalted status that we have lost our sense of reason, and our priorities.
So let’s start restoring some sanity to this matter with a proclamation to all those survivors of rape.
If your rapist didn’t try to kill you, you didn’t survive anything, you only endured it.
And if your rapist did try to kill you what you survived was a murder attempt, not the rape. So please, get off (and take your advocates with you) your damsel in distress elevator to hell, and quit feeding off the bottomless hog trough of public sympathies.
You are not and never were the only people to be harmed by a crime. And what happened to you is not worth any more attention than things that happen to a lot of other people whom no one else gives a damn about.
While he is correct that no one person’s experiences are more important than anyone else’s, Elam misses the mark with his jab at survivors of sexual violence.
To endure something is to simply get through it. One bears it or tolerates it. To survive something means to move past it or overcome it. While there are plenty of people who do endure sexual violence, many people also survive it. The overcome the trauma done to them, and while they may not be the same person they were before, they do not let that experience define them.
It seems callous and vicious to take that away from them.
Elam attempts to frame this by recounting a horrible robbery and assault committed on him and a friend. They were beaten, stripped naked in the cold, and left there. When they reported the assault, the police treated them as if they were the villains and did next to nothing to actually investigate the crime. The way Elam discusses it makes it seem as if he is essentially over it. However when a commenter named Masque stated:
You tear apart even ‘valid’ (by your definition) rape victims, mock them, and tell them that they don’t have a right to be outraged and hurt by what happened to them. Of course that’s going to draw up anger! Do you know what it’s like to be raped, Mr. Elam? I’m going to assume not (though perhaps that’s unfair). Neither have I. Until that day when you or I have experienced that horror (and I hope neither of us does), how can you say that we have the right to quantify others’ pain, to tell them that they should just get the hell over it, or something? And even after that — if you’d really seen the suffering that rape causes, I don’t think you would be so quick to judge.
You try to compare it to being *mugged*? Rape is not “stolen sex.” It’s depriving the victim of their very autonomy in a horrible and damaging way. I know you’re not going to see it my way, but that’s miles away from a missing wallet. Rape is physical *and* psychological. It’s not being out fifty bucks; it’s about having your personal safety and sense of security violated, a thousand times more intimately than having a physical object taken.
As I said in the article itself, when I was attacked and robbed I was beaten, quite savagely, stripped naked in freezing weather with broken bones, watched my friend get bludgeoned and likewise stripped to nothing. and left helpless on the side of the road. We were both treated like criminals by the police and the other soldiers we served with mocked us for all of it.
And you reduced all of what happened to a “missing wallet,” and only after a lecture on the psychological trauma of what happens to victims whom you obviously think deserve more overall concern than I did.
With all the respect I can possibly muster, fuck that, and fuck you.
Let me say that again. Fuck you.
And fuck the callous disregard you displayed in your comment that was the exact mirror of what I was speaking out against in society in the piece I wrote.
I have a theory: if you endure something, then it will not matter to you if someone minimizes it. After all, it would be a small thing, just something you learned to put up with. However, if you survive something it will matter if someone minimizes it because surviving something means overcoming it. It takes effort, time, and pain to overcome hardship and no one wants those sacrifices and experiences treated in a trivial manner.
The latter seemed to prompt Elam’s response. No matter how much he may have dealt with the aftermath of what happened to him, no matter how much he can put that behind him, at the end of the day he still had to overcome the trauma of what happened and of how he was treated when he reported it, and he does not want that trivialized in any way. That is understandable, however, it makes his post all the more curious since he took offense at someone doing exactly what he did to rape victims.
Elam is correct that female rape victims hold a special status in society not afforded to other victims, including male rape victims. The solution, however, is not to strip female rape victims of their status. Rather, that status should extend to all victims of violent crime. Anyone subjected to a random assault is just as likely to suffer psychological trauma as any rape victim. Someone who gets assaulted by a person they know or love will suffer just as much as a rape victim. Any kind of violation can and often does result in the same emotional harm that rape does. All victims should receive the same kind of support female rape victims get from their advocates.
That may or may not have been Elam’s point. It is not entirely clear because Elam’s comments focus so much on attacking feminists. If it was, then his point was completely lost in his rant. Rather than a pointed commentary on how feminists use hysteria and fear to promote their cause or commentary on how other victims of violent crime do not receive the same support as female rape victims, instead Elam rants and raves against people using a term that makes them feel empowered. The term is overused, but that does not mean anyone should take it away from those who use it.
Well considered piece. If you would like this posted to AVfM, let me know. I think your ideas bear discussion, even if I don’t agree with them.
Cheers,
Paul
“To endure something is to simply get through it. One bears it or tolerates it. To survive something means to move past it or overcome it. While there are plenty of people who do endure sexual violence, many people also survive it. The overcome the trauma done to them, and while they may not be the same person they were before, they do not let that experience define them.”
and
“I have a theory: if you endure something, then it will not matter to you if someone minimizes it. After all, it would be a small thing, just something you learned to put up with. However, if you survive something it will matter if someone minimizes it because surviving something means overcoming it. It takes effort, time, and pain to overcome hardship and no one wants those sacrifices and experiences treated in a trivial manner.”
First, I would quibble over your definition of survive, I think that word (and it is because of feminists) has gotten totally bent out of shape. To survive actually means to “endure” or to live when others didn’t, or to continue to exist while others or other things have perished (like a buiolding survives the bombing).
But setting that aside and using your definitions, it is the person that merely endured that would get the most upset, not the one that as you described has overcome the trauma and not let it define them. A person that is not defined by an event and has overcome it is not going to have the same emotional reaction as someone that trivializes the experience than the one that is defined by that event and has still not overcome the trauma of it.
The very act of of saying I survived something is in fact defining yourself by it.
“I was abused”
is a very different statement than
“I survived abuse”
I would say most self called “survivors” have not actually overcome the abuse.
The very real problem I hav e with the hysteria (which is one side at the moment, it is women that engage in it) is that it utterly trivializes the abuse. It is almost impossible to seperate the wheat (actual abuse) for the chaff (those using it to manipulate others with it).
The hysteria has become nothing more than manipulation.
Ten years ago if some said they were raped or abused, I would believed them and would have felt sympathy.
Now I don’t, I doubt them until shown otherwise and my immediate response now “What does that have to do with anything? So what, bad things happen to everyone.”
I find one of the comments about how they’re saying 98% of people responsible for misandry are men. And that the men’s movement focus will target that population in terms of advocacy a little off-putting.
While I agree about men, there still exists women who display an equal level of misandry and that needs to be addressed as well. Just because court systems and the like are dominated by men doesn’t absolve the women who use them of any responsibilty whatsoever.
Edit: I mean, the women who use them maliciously for their own selfish gain at the expense of the man or men she hurts.
His reaction is consistent if you consider the basis of feminism, as I do, to be a negotiating position that “women have it worse.” Establishing and maintaining that position necessarily requires discounting and trivializing men’s experiences. The counter to that position is asserting, “No. Women do not have it worse.”
In that context, Paul was saying “Rape is no worse than what happened to me and what happens to other victims of non-rape assaults.” The commenter basically came back with, “No. Rape is “a thousand times worse” than what happened to you.”
“Fuck you.” seems like exactly the right response.
Until you successfully remove female’s special status as victims (“Women have it worse”), male victims will remain invisible.
Country Lawyer,
It’s simply not true that “survive” only means avoiding death; the term is commonly used to mean pressing on, continuing to function, showing fortitude, etc. in the face of significant adversity even when there is no mortal danger. Second, even when limited to the narrower sense of “not physically killed or destroyed,” to say that someone “survived” an event does not necessarily imply that other people died; it just means that there was some sort of peril. Saying something like “The car swerved off the road, but fortunately everyone survived” is a perfectly valid, normal usage. Third, even if further limited to cases where others didn’t survive, some people don’t survive the psychological effects of severe trauma.
As to the utility of the term: Many rape and abuse victims try to either rationalize the evil of what happened away or place the blame on themselves, and many people who witness it or hear about it will encourage those same beliefs. There are factors that can make these problems especially pressing for males, since so many people trivialize male pain and women’s violence. One benefit of the saying that an event was “survived” is that it explicitly identifies the event itself as bad and, if caused by human agency, as a moral wrong against the person who survived it.
There’s nothing inherent in the word that implies that a person defines himself by the trauma. It treats the abuse as a big deal, certainly, as something important, but that’s hardly inaccurate whether the person is “over” it or not- which is important to get across in a society where many crimes against men and boys are seen as trivial or not crimes at all.
Gah! That’s what happens when you don’t close a tag. Sorry about that; meant to emphasize the word “don’t,” not make it look like I was bellowing with rage for 2/3rds of my post.
“I find one of the comments about how they’re saying 98% of people responsible for misandry are men. And that the men’s movement focus will target that population in terms of advocacy a little off-putting.”
I absolutely agree. While I respect Mr. Elam and enjoy most of his work, the idea that men are mostly responsible for misandry and that men are the “real enemy” is disturbing. It’s all too reminiscent of feminists and traditional conservatives advocating zero female accountability or responsibility.
ZOMG forweg– don’t you realize that women ARE, in fact, ZERO-PERCENT accountable for their own (bad) behavior while men are ONE HUNDRED-PERCENT accountable for THEIR (bad) behavior????
Get with the program, you eeevil rape-o-centric mehnz!!!11!
I am going have to go with Type5 on this one as for far too long that same story is repeated, ad nauseum. Claiming that any action against a “wommin” is greater than any equivalent action against any male is some how elevated is just ridiculous as well as sexist. More males are raped than women, where is the feminist argument concerning that ?
Promptly ignored as usual..
Paul, you are welcome to post my response on AVfM if you like.
Yet that was not his counter position. His counter position was to assert that rape victims are not survivors of rape, just people who endured it. It may not have been his intent, but such a statement may come across to rape victims as “What happened to you wasn’t that bad,” hence some of the responses Elam received.
To the extent that Elam was justifiably angry over Masque’s response, I would agree. However, all Masque did was exactly what Elam did. Elam wrote about a pilot who was captured by enemy forces and sexually assaulted, tortured, and had her life threaten. He specifically noted that the woman regarded the sexual violence as “insignificant.” The impression that leaves is that this is Elam’s position on rape. That is not the most helpful way of discussing sexual violence, and not just because of the potential harm such comments can have on rape victims. It is also because people will cite that comment as an example of what people in the men’s movement think. In that sense he is shooting himself in the foot.
I dunno… I mean, when I first read it I was thinking “this guy is nuts, he’s taking the ‘rape is complained about too much’ thought to way too far an extreme”, but when I re-read it… he didn’t actually put down rape victims, only the non-victims who turn rape into the worst crime in humanity. The only comment that’s close is the “this problem is not worse than everyone else’s problems”.
Exception being the “survivor” comment. Buuut that’s complaining about (what he feels to be) a mis-use of a definition, much like your post about privilege, and not so much about the actual people who call themselves survivors.
It’s very… bluntly written and gives a bad impression, but ultimately I can’t really fault it.
From what I have seen of Paul’s style that is exactly his intent. He is deliberately provocative. He is willing to leave a bad impression of himself in order to provoke thought. You’ve probably made him very happy!
It came across exacty that way to me, so I’m willing to posit that that was his intent. I also read him as clearly stating that he was NOT saying “What happened to you was not bad.” Are you telling me that there is something about rape that impairs victims’ reading comprehension or, perhaps, that rape victims need to hear that their experience is worse and more traumatic than other types of victimization?
Again, one only comes away with that impression if one lacks reading comprehension. It is clear in the text that the pilot considered the sexual assaults insignificant compared to other experiences she suffered at the hands of her captors and explained her reasons for that.
TS, I understand that your concern is that readers will generally only come away from Paul’s article with impressions formed from hot-button phrases he uses. Maybe so, but it stills sparks productive discussions which make clear those who are actually reading and thinking and those whose knees are jerking like crazy. I see that as the point.
I do not think back end caveats help when making an argument, particularly not ones that come at the tail end of an argument. The phrasing he used could make some victims feel that he belittled their experiences. By objecting to the use of “survivor” Elam is in effect arguing that rape victims were not as harmed by what happened to them as they claim. Stating that you do not mean to say that what happened to them was not bad does not take away the sting of telling a person that they are essentially playing up their pain.
I understand that. However, Elam’s post was about rape in and of itself, so that comment could be read as stating rape is kind of insignificant. That is part of the problem with provocative language and tone. I do not disagree necessarily with what Elam stated, just the way he did it.