Richard Dawkins is at it again. After all the business with Rebecca Watson and his problems with feminists, he is determined to continue insulting women (or anyone who's been raped) with more inane mansplaining about how he knows for sure, objectively, how to define another person's life-shattering experience. And tough if you disagree, because he's Dawkins and a scientist, has a loyal legion of followers and facts are just facts.
But let's perform a simple thought experiment.
A stranger rape could involve being grabbed out of the darkness by someone you've never even see before. If it was at knifepoint, you'd probably just freeze up and not be able to do anything at all. With a date rape though, you would know the perpetrator, at least to some degree. Your guard would be down, and you may well even have had some feelings for the perpetrator - this would be a massive betrayal in many ways. There is also the chance of more physical violence being involved as well, if no lethal weapon was used to threaten you. At the end of either example, you've still been raped and it's not at all clear to me that the first example "must be objectively worse", as Dawkins claims.
What was he thinking? As a man who's never been raped, in two minutes I can come up with various reasons why actually, it could be entirely possible for any individual case of "date rape" to be worse than "stranger rape". Sometimes Dawkins shows absolutely zero empathy.
Dawkins' comment is an incredibly wrong, damaging and insensitive remark which has no place in our movement.
It's wrong because there are many counter-examples of date-rape being worse than stranger rape. Moreover, date rape is more commonplace and needs to be reduced. Minimising its impact does not help in this regard.
It's insensitive because he is just in no position to make objective claims about experiences he obviously could not hope to understand.
It's damaging because he has no clue about what is going on in the battle against rape culture and has no interest in helping. His comments hinder efforts to point out just how devastating rape is, and plays into the hands of those trying to make out that sometimes rape isn't very bad, and that the victim can be partly responsible: in other words, victim-blaming.
(I was desperately trying to come up with a simple analogy of my main point here to demonstrate what I mean. The best I can do is, it seems to me that Dawkins is saying 1000 +/- 1 is a lower number than 1001 +/- 1.
This is just churlish. Why state that rather than the obvious point that 1000 is a very high number, and there' s no reason to care about the 1 when you have 1000 to deal with! Besides, either one could be larger as 1000+1 is higher than 1001-1.)
Of course, this all brings me back to the recent appalling comments by a British Judge. So if you didn't think that any of this affected actual real life events, think again.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2014/07/08/british-judge-excuses-rapist/
Here the poor excuse for a "Judge" explicitly excuses the perpetrator of being a "classic rapist", whatever the hell that is.
Paraphrasing, he said "You just couldn't resist, but don't worry you're not a classic rapist". This is blatant rape apology, by perpetuating the old canard that there are "levels of severity" of rape. Not necessarily to the victim, there aren't. If you commit one of the "lesser" ones, then "Maybe it's not so bad" is an obvious corollary of this garbage.
Both Dawkins and the Judge, although they are not specifically condoning date rape, are in sense excusing it because they are minimising its impact compared to some other false objective standard they've created.
Addendum:
ReplyDeleteOn separate occasions, Dawkins asserted (or rather put out a “possible quote” which we didn’t know at the time if it just represented his actual opinion, or just his musings of what someone “could” say) that date rape was i) worse, and ii) not worse, than stranger rape.
From that “Are there emotional no-go areas?” blog post of his:
—
‘“Being raped by a stranger is bad. Being raped by a formerly trusted friend is worse.”…
“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse.”…
—
These are both generalisations. I don’t see how the fact that he stated both really helps, because believing either statement in isolation is wrong, and believing both at the same time is called cognitive dissonance.
He needed a third statement, a conjunction of the two, as it wasn’t clear that he held a position that either statement could be true or untrue.
In reality, either could be worse, or more relevantly, the whole question may not be coherent and not even possible to answer (which he didn’t consider, so much for rationality).
We need to look at each individual case from the victim’s perspective. This is not really “emotion”, it’s logic. He’s just playing into that old sexist stereotype that women get all emotional when asked to objectively analyse certain things. I think this is why people get angry at him sometimes.