Illuyankas, on 04 April 2015 - 12:42 AM, said:
Rape-excusing culture being too many syllables, presumably.
doesn't have the same ring though. It's all about dem buzzwords you see.
worry, on 04 April 2015 - 02:55 AM, said:
dwards cautions that this research is preliminary, because the sample group is very small: 86 men participated in the study, but only 73 were analyzed due to missing data. Because more than 90 percent of the participants were white and all described themselves as heterosexual, the study has demographic limitations. The team hopes to conduct this research on a larger scale, Edwards says. In the meantime, “the No. 1 point is there are people that will say they would force a woman to have sex but would deny they would rape a woman,” Edwards tells Newsweek.
My grasp of statistics is very dated, but i get the feeling a sample of 73 isn't large enough to apply it to all college students (millions if not hundreds of thousands). I get what you're trying to say in regards to a discontinuity of perception however. This might just be my anti scientism side being all, lets not just take these studies at face value.
Apt, on 04 April 2015 - 06:06 AM, said:
So, I took the time to look into a couple of the studies behind these statistics. Namely this one:
http://online.lieber.../vio.2014.0022: Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders. I can't say that I like the methodology of the research at all but on the other hand I am not familiar with the various models they use either. Perhaps their methods are the best they can do but I do find the selection of individuals, the scale they use to indicate willingness to rape and the phrasing of the questions... questionable. This paper does not strike me as being incontrovertible proof of the existence of rape culture as a pervasive social identity inherent to all college age men.
HOWEVER I am of course also approaching this subject from the position of a non-believer. I am seeing flaws where a pro-ponent will see confirmation.
But back to the Art culture argument and lets keep this to an American discussion since the topic Rape Culture originates from America and the studies seem to come from America. Is America an art culture? How many people purchase art? Real art like sculptures, paintings, shit in a can, etc. Not a kitten on a poster from Walmart. How many unique visits do galleries and museums get? Who is visiting these places, etc. And I am not talking about the Block Buster level of exhibitions that attract all levels of society. I'd be willing to guess that very small portion of America's population would identify as being a part of an art culture. In fact some people might scoff at the idea.
For the same reason I find the idea of speaking of America as a whole as a rape culture hysterical. Rape culture is such a wide ranging term, such a nebulous concept, that everything becomes rape. People become guilty of rape by proxy. People become partial to rape simply by buying the wrong product or wearing the wrong clothes or saying the wrong thing. Which cirkles back to the topic of this thread Sexual Objectification.
You can't NOT look at another person's attributes and appraise them. It's a completely natural, subconscious subroutine. But now, when ever we do it, we're suddenly doing a bad thing. We are not just being amoral from some puritanical world view, we are in fact acting out a behavior that leads to the rape of women. What the fuck, I just like that womans butt.
Looking at the things that can constitute rape or a degree of sexual coercion, I feel like people should be signing sexual intercourse contracts in front of an offical representative to ensure that nobody accidentally gets raped and put in jail.
EDIT: I should have ended this post by amending that I am NOT saying that there isn't an inherent cultural flaw in our society, when it comes to rape, slut shaming, treatment, etc. I am not saying that we can't do better and shouldn't try.
I am simply arguing that labels are dangerous and creating an umbrella term like Rape culture that encompasses pretty much every aspect of social relation between the sexes is unnecessarily radical.
I think.
The thing with the rape culture, and my take on term, is that it is a narrative that explain a re-occurence of behaviors. There have been many cases where victims of rape have been met with skepticism as opposed to compassion, and where perpatrators are sympathised with, rather than being condemned. This is despite the fact that these events occur with a degree of repittion, by people who are unrelated. From Nova Soctia to california, we're finding these trends, these recurrent behaviors. As such rape culture refers to these societal events. Now with any sort of meta narrative, you're going to find it manifested in different ways. Sometime it manifests itself in the way steubenville happened. Other times, i recall a piece on rape culture at Canadian universities and one example was at one school, (queens i think) having people chanting these rape songs), or even at my old uni there was some controversy over some guys holding up sings by the side of the road saying "honk if you're dropping off your daughter" during the first year move in.
In the latter scenario, the common reaction, including my own at the time, oh it's just guys being stupid, nothing to see here. But upon closer thought, the steubenville people said the same thing, it's just boys being boys. See where I am getting at? Rape Culture will manifest differently according to circumstance. I'm not saying that people who justified the latter act are rape apologists, rather our society (an amalgamation of behaviors, not specific behaviors) has certain behavior trends that manifest differently. That these behaviors are trends, not outliers is the rape culture.
I'm running out of quote space here, In regards to how do we deal with this sort of thing, the recent reforms in ontario's sex education curriculum is a good start. Part of it, in grades 1 or 2, the idea is introduced that No means No. Given that rape culture is something that lies in the mentality of the society, you gotta change it from the ground up. That means instilling different values in the youth.
This post has been edited by BalrogLord: 15 April 2015 - 02:55 PM
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