re: #89 wrenchwench

Without justifying the ignorant, racist and misogynist backlash, I do thing there’s a fundamental miscommunication going on.

The gist of Zerlina’s argument was that it should be on men and the culture in general to make rape and sexual assault unacceptable rather than on women to arm themselves to not be raped. In other words, don’t put it on her to carry a gun any more than you tell her to dress a particular way or anything else.

Is that what gun rights advocates are doing when they defend the right of women to carry, putting it on them? This seems like a very deliberate method of reversing the actual argument made, one of rights, that women have a right to bear arms if they want, just like they have a right to dress as they want, and casting it as rank paternalism, as just more of male dominated society dictating the rules to women. I don’t see anybody stating that if a woman doesn’t want to be raped that she needs to carry a gun, only that she has a right to. It’s taking a message that is at worst rooted in pragmatic empowerment, that women have equal rights to own guns and can use them to offset the difference in physical strength between them and any male assailant, and turning it into a patronizing explanation for any particular rape, that the woman did something wrong in not owning a gun. That position was neither expressed nor implied.

There’s also a false dilemma at play, in as much as neither approach impinges on the other. What the author presents as an either / or situation, isn’t.

The underlying point of debate was whether rape is just something like murder or robbery — something that will always exist to some, hopefully limited, degree — or something that is bound up in and encouraged or discouraged by our culture. In other words, whether men can be taught not to rape.

Let’s be honest, it takes a special brand of magical thinking to pretend with a straight face that a phenomenon like rape, that predates human society and is present in countless number of our ancestor species is something that is going to simply be “taught” away. Sure culture has a significant influence on how much it is or is not going to be tolerated, but rape is in no way “bound up” in it. It’s dangerous to believe that whatever approach, or blend of approaches we as society end up taking will enlighten human beings to the point where rape simply no longer occurs.