Sexism in language
Jan. 6th, 2025 02:47 pmYeah, it's Monday. I tried calling the VA four times. Didn't get through. Tried logging into my bank. Told me I got the password or username wrong. (As it turns out, I hadn't, but after lots of condescension, I got an admission that they were having issues with the site. ) Two hours later, they still haven't sent the promised email.
In addition, there's that Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively thing. She's a rich white female movie star, but she's not a man. All those attributes make people hate her, but they don't really work against men, because women are subject to being a monolith. Yes, I know she got married on a plantation. Yes, she had a clothing line called, "Antebellum." So she gets to be harassed by some dude? (And there were some pretty nasty accusations, too.) So what's the punishment for the wedding? Dick pics? Porn? Touching? And then the whole, "Antebellum," thing, which---along with the wedding, I just don't......what the fuck? But once you start justifying sexual harassment---and that's what this is---as punishment for misdeeds, you're making rapists in the audience very happy, because you are on their side. You're making it easier for them. This is why I hate prison rape jokes. One, you're saying rape is a justifiable punishment. Oh, really? Who decides? It's mostly men doing it, but a fair number of Cool Girls jump right in, too.
It comes back to Helen Benedict's Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, which really is about nailing the English languages sexism and how before women even begin, they are hamstrung from the start. It means men have less competition and don't have to exert themselves as much.
So here's a refresher course. Look how everything that's praised in men gets attacked in women. Sexism isn't "separate but equal." It's exact opposites. Women are evil, men are good.
Ahem.
I figure this is a good time to publicize this list, which comes from Helen Benedict's Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. This is an excellent book, which while theoretically covering the language of the press has a lot to say about how people who use the same language also embrace the same sexist theories about rape.
These myths are especially relevant today, and they appear to be almost completely unknown, as people have no desire to consider where they might get their opinions about rape. This stuff is fed to us by our culture.
Some myths are so deeply embedded that they need to be exposed before one can adequately discuss rape. These myths are stated in bold; Helen Benedict's comments are in italics.
" Rape is sex.
This is the most powerful myth about rape lies at the root of all the others. It ignores the fact that rape is a physical attack and leads to the mistaken belief that rape does not hurt the victim any more than does sex. The idea that rape is a sexual rather an aggressive act encourages people not to take it seriously as a crime---an attitude frequently revealed in comments by defense attorneys and newspaper columnists.
The assailant is motivated by lust
Because rape is seen as sex, the assailant is assumed to be a hot-blooded male driven beyond self-control by lust. In fact, research has shown that far from being frustrated men with no other sexual outlet, most rapists have normal sex lives at home, and many of them are married. The motivation to rape stems most commonly from anger, the need to dominate, and terrify, or more rarely, from sadism, not from pent-up sexual desire.
My comment? Well, this explains why some people think rape is a compliment. They're wrong, of course, but now you have ammunition.
The assailant is perverted or crazy
Teh image of a rapist as perverted, ugly, seedy, or insane contradicts the preceeding hot-blooded male myth, but it is held in reserve, as it were, for times when the sex crime is extremely grotesque or when the victim cannot easily be pegged as having provoked it. Yet repeated studies have found that rapists usually have normal psychological profiles compared to other criminals. The majority of rapists are known to their victims---they are relatives, boyfriends, husbands, teachers, doctors, neighborhood friends, colleagues, therapists, policemen, bosses----not seedy loners lurking in alleyways.
The assailant is usually black or lower class
This essentially racist perception leads to the widely held misconception that most rapes are committed by black men against white women, or by lower class men against higher class women---a conception bolstered by the press, which tends to give these stories more play than other kinds of rapes. It is true that proportionally more rapes are committed by the urban poor, but the majority of rapes occu between members of the same race and class. According to a U.S. Department of Justice study conducted between 1973 and 1987, 68 percent of white women and 80 percent of black women are raped by men of the same race. The study also found that 57 percent of all rapists are white, 33 percent black, and the rest are either of mixed or other races.
A sexual attack sullies the victim
Because rape is seen as sex rather than violence, and a womans' sexuality is still seen largely as the property of her present or future husband, a rape victim is seen as having been 'spoiled' or 'dirtied' by an assault. Among Muslims, for example, a woman who has been raped is sometimes disowned by her fiance or family for having brought them shame by becoming sullied and thus unmarriageable. St. Vincent's Hospital Rape Crisis Center in New York has had to shelter rape victims from the threat of murder by their families for these reasons. Victims of nonsexual crimes are never seen this way.
Rape is a punishment for past deeds
This myth applies to all sorts of vicitms, both of crime and accidents. It is as ancient as the idea of fate itself, yet plays a living part in people's thinking about tragedy. The myth may be a defense mechanism; if we believe that victims bring on their misfortunes because of past bad behavior, then we can convince ourselves t hat we are immune by virtue of having been 'good.'
Women cry rape for revenge
The idea that women like to use accusations of rape as a tactic for revenge has been popular for thousands of years. In Susan Brownmiller's definitive history of rape, Against Our Will, she pointed out
The tendency of women to lie about rape is vastly exaggerated in popular opinion. The FBI finds that 8 percent of reported rapes are unfounded, but other researchers put the figure at only 2 percent.
One function of all these myths, and perhaps the reason they persist to this day, is to protect non victims from feeling vulnerable. If people can blame a crime on the victim, then they can find reasons why that same crime will not happen to them. A way to do this is to subject the victim to a set of old-fashioned moral standards for more rigid than are normally applied in everyday life, so that the victim is bound to fail and look like a 'bad' woman.
Women provoke rape
Because rape is believed to be sex, victims are believed to have enticed their assailants by their looks or sexuality. This belief is so established that not only lawyers, reporters and policemen accept it, but victims and perpetrators do , too. In fact, interviews with rapists have revealed that they barely notice the looks of their victims. The only exception is when a rapist attacks a woman who, in his eyes, represents a race or class he hates, or reminds him of a person on whom he wants revenge.Most commonly, rape is a crime of opportunity: she's there.
Women deserve rape
Because rapists, like all men, are believed to find women irresistible, this myth assumes that women bring on rape by behaving carelessly prior to the crime---it is not the rapist who 'caused' the rape, it was the woman who failed to protect herself from enticing him. The myth is in use every time a police officer asks a victim a question like: "What were you doing out on your own?" The fact that everyone takes risks at times and that acting foolishly does not mean one 'deserves' an attack are often forgotten, as is the fact that a behavior that may have seemed normal can appear dangerously risky in retrospect if it was followed by an attack. This myth makes it particularly difficult for women taking an obvious risk...to escape blame.
Only loose women are victimized
The myth that women invite sexual assault naturally leads to the belief that only overtly sluttish women are raped. This belief denies sex crime victims their innocence, forgetting that they committed no crime. The loose-women idea is also part of a larger, widely-held belief that bad things do not happen to good people---a thought that comforts non-victims, but forces victims to blame themselves. This myth results in a cyclical trap for a sex crime victim; the woman becomes 'bad' by virtue of having been raped because one myth hold s that she would not have been attacked if she had not provoked the assailant with her sexuality, while another myth holds that only 'loose' women are sexual.
These particular myths form the backbone of the way we think about rape. Now comes the way we treat specific victims, and how they are chosen to be good victims---the only kind of victims allowed, or bad victims, which means they're either not victimized at all, or they're intent on attacking men with their accusations. Get it?
From the book:
"Whether any one victim is labeled a 'virgin' or a 'vamp' and which myths are brought into play, depends both on the characteristics of those who are discussing the case and on the circumstances of the crime itself. Going over the vast amount of sociological literature on this subject---studies of how people react to rape scenarios---I have identified eight factors that lead the public, and the press, to blame the victim for the rape, and to push her into the role of 'vamp'.
1. If she knows the assailant. (Victims recieve more sympathy in the assailant is a stranger.)
2. If no weapon is used. (Studies show that the public is more inclined to believe a rape happened if a weapon was used.)
3. If she is of the same race as the assailant. (Victims traditionally attract the most attention if they are white and their assailants are black. Blacks raped by whites tend to receive more attention than black-on-black crime, which receives the least attention of all.)
4. If she is of the same class as the assailant. (She will be blamed less if the assailant is of a lower class than she.)
5. If she is of the same ethnic group as the assailant. (If prejudices to do with ethnicity or nationality can be called in to slur the assailant the victim will benefit.)
6. If she is young. (Older women tend to be seen as less provocative.)
7. If she is 'pretty.' (Studies have found that although people tend to be biased against attractive rape victims, they are biased in favor of attractive assailants. The idea is that an attractive man does not need to rape because he can get all the women he wants, a refection of the 'assailants are motivated by lust' myth. This finding applied tellingly in the Chambers/Levin case.)
8. If she in any way deviated from the traditional female sex role of being at home with family or children. (People blame the victim more if she was in a bar, hitchhiking, at a party, or out on her own anywhere 'good girls' are not supposed to be preceding the attack.)
Copyright 1992 Helen Benedict.
Go out and buy this book. I gave you a link and I simply cannot quote the whole book. It's an excellent reference. Now. Immediately. Get it used if the new price is too much. Period.
One more thing: as this book is not available electronically anywhere, I typed up this myself while propping the book up on a cat who would not move. So any typos are probably not present in the book but the result of my reading stand moving or rolling over or something.
In addition, there's that Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively thing. She's a rich white female movie star, but she's not a man. All those attributes make people hate her, but they don't really work against men, because women are subject to being a monolith. Yes, I know she got married on a plantation. Yes, she had a clothing line called, "Antebellum." So she gets to be harassed by some dude? (And there were some pretty nasty accusations, too.) So what's the punishment for the wedding? Dick pics? Porn? Touching? And then the whole, "Antebellum," thing, which---along with the wedding, I just don't......what the fuck? But once you start justifying sexual harassment---and that's what this is---as punishment for misdeeds, you're making rapists in the audience very happy, because you are on their side. You're making it easier for them. This is why I hate prison rape jokes. One, you're saying rape is a justifiable punishment. Oh, really? Who decides? It's mostly men doing it, but a fair number of Cool Girls jump right in, too.
It comes back to Helen Benedict's Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, which really is about nailing the English languages sexism and how before women even begin, they are hamstrung from the start. It means men have less competition and don't have to exert themselves as much.
So here's a refresher course. Look how everything that's praised in men gets attacked in women. Sexism isn't "separate but equal." It's exact opposites. Women are evil, men are good.
Ahem.
I figure this is a good time to publicize this list, which comes from Helen Benedict's Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. This is an excellent book, which while theoretically covering the language of the press has a lot to say about how people who use the same language also embrace the same sexist theories about rape.
These myths are especially relevant today, and they appear to be almost completely unknown, as people have no desire to consider where they might get their opinions about rape. This stuff is fed to us by our culture.
Some myths are so deeply embedded that they need to be exposed before one can adequately discuss rape. These myths are stated in bold; Helen Benedict's comments are in italics.
" Rape is sex.
This is the most powerful myth about rape lies at the root of all the others. It ignores the fact that rape is a physical attack and leads to the mistaken belief that rape does not hurt the victim any more than does sex. The idea that rape is a sexual rather an aggressive act encourages people not to take it seriously as a crime---an attitude frequently revealed in comments by defense attorneys and newspaper columnists.
The assailant is motivated by lust
Because rape is seen as sex, the assailant is assumed to be a hot-blooded male driven beyond self-control by lust. In fact, research has shown that far from being frustrated men with no other sexual outlet, most rapists have normal sex lives at home, and many of them are married. The motivation to rape stems most commonly from anger, the need to dominate, and terrify, or more rarely, from sadism, not from pent-up sexual desire.
My comment? Well, this explains why some people think rape is a compliment. They're wrong, of course, but now you have ammunition.
The assailant is perverted or crazy
Teh image of a rapist as perverted, ugly, seedy, or insane contradicts the preceeding hot-blooded male myth, but it is held in reserve, as it were, for times when the sex crime is extremely grotesque or when the victim cannot easily be pegged as having provoked it. Yet repeated studies have found that rapists usually have normal psychological profiles compared to other criminals. The majority of rapists are known to their victims---they are relatives, boyfriends, husbands, teachers, doctors, neighborhood friends, colleagues, therapists, policemen, bosses----not seedy loners lurking in alleyways.
The assailant is usually black or lower class
This essentially racist perception leads to the widely held misconception that most rapes are committed by black men against white women, or by lower class men against higher class women---a conception bolstered by the press, which tends to give these stories more play than other kinds of rapes. It is true that proportionally more rapes are committed by the urban poor, but the majority of rapes occu between members of the same race and class. According to a U.S. Department of Justice study conducted between 1973 and 1987, 68 percent of white women and 80 percent of black women are raped by men of the same race. The study also found that 57 percent of all rapists are white, 33 percent black, and the rest are either of mixed or other races.
A sexual attack sullies the victim
Because rape is seen as sex rather than violence, and a womans' sexuality is still seen largely as the property of her present or future husband, a rape victim is seen as having been 'spoiled' or 'dirtied' by an assault. Among Muslims, for example, a woman who has been raped is sometimes disowned by her fiance or family for having brought them shame by becoming sullied and thus unmarriageable. St. Vincent's Hospital Rape Crisis Center in New York has had to shelter rape victims from the threat of murder by their families for these reasons. Victims of nonsexual crimes are never seen this way.
Rape is a punishment for past deeds
This myth applies to all sorts of vicitms, both of crime and accidents. It is as ancient as the idea of fate itself, yet plays a living part in people's thinking about tragedy. The myth may be a defense mechanism; if we believe that victims bring on their misfortunes because of past bad behavior, then we can convince ourselves t hat we are immune by virtue of having been 'good.'
Women cry rape for revenge
The idea that women like to use accusations of rape as a tactic for revenge has been popular for thousands of years. In Susan Brownmiller's definitive history of rape, Against Our Will, she pointed out
"The most bitter irony of rape, I think, has been the historic masculine fear of false accusation, a fear that has found expression in male folklore since the Biblical days of Joseph the Israelite and Potphar's wife, that was given new life and meaning in the psychoanalytic doctrines of Sigmund Freud and his followers, and that has formed the crux of the legal defense against a rape charge, aided and abetted by by the set of evidenciary standards (consent, resistance, chastity, and corroboration) designed with one collective purpose in mind: to protect the male against the scheming, lying, vindictive woman."
The tendency of women to lie about rape is vastly exaggerated in popular opinion. The FBI finds that 8 percent of reported rapes are unfounded, but other researchers put the figure at only 2 percent.
One function of all these myths, and perhaps the reason they persist to this day, is to protect non victims from feeling vulnerable. If people can blame a crime on the victim, then they can find reasons why that same crime will not happen to them. A way to do this is to subject the victim to a set of old-fashioned moral standards for more rigid than are normally applied in everyday life, so that the victim is bound to fail and look like a 'bad' woman.
Women provoke rape
Because rape is believed to be sex, victims are believed to have enticed their assailants by their looks or sexuality. This belief is so established that not only lawyers, reporters and policemen accept it, but victims and perpetrators do , too. In fact, interviews with rapists have revealed that they barely notice the looks of their victims. The only exception is when a rapist attacks a woman who, in his eyes, represents a race or class he hates, or reminds him of a person on whom he wants revenge.Most commonly, rape is a crime of opportunity: she's there.
Women deserve rape
Because rapists, like all men, are believed to find women irresistible, this myth assumes that women bring on rape by behaving carelessly prior to the crime---it is not the rapist who 'caused' the rape, it was the woman who failed to protect herself from enticing him. The myth is in use every time a police officer asks a victim a question like: "What were you doing out on your own?" The fact that everyone takes risks at times and that acting foolishly does not mean one 'deserves' an attack are often forgotten, as is the fact that a behavior that may have seemed normal can appear dangerously risky in retrospect if it was followed by an attack. This myth makes it particularly difficult for women taking an obvious risk...to escape blame.
Only loose women are victimized
The myth that women invite sexual assault naturally leads to the belief that only overtly sluttish women are raped. This belief denies sex crime victims their innocence, forgetting that they committed no crime. The loose-women idea is also part of a larger, widely-held belief that bad things do not happen to good people---a thought that comforts non-victims, but forces victims to blame themselves. This myth results in a cyclical trap for a sex crime victim; the woman becomes 'bad' by virtue of having been raped because one myth hold s that she would not have been attacked if she had not provoked the assailant with her sexuality, while another myth holds that only 'loose' women are sexual.
These particular myths form the backbone of the way we think about rape. Now comes the way we treat specific victims, and how they are chosen to be good victims---the only kind of victims allowed, or bad victims, which means they're either not victimized at all, or they're intent on attacking men with their accusations. Get it?
From the book:
"Whether any one victim is labeled a 'virgin' or a 'vamp' and which myths are brought into play, depends both on the characteristics of those who are discussing the case and on the circumstances of the crime itself. Going over the vast amount of sociological literature on this subject---studies of how people react to rape scenarios---I have identified eight factors that lead the public, and the press, to blame the victim for the rape, and to push her into the role of 'vamp'.
1. If she knows the assailant. (Victims recieve more sympathy in the assailant is a stranger.)
2. If no weapon is used. (Studies show that the public is more inclined to believe a rape happened if a weapon was used.)
3. If she is of the same race as the assailant. (Victims traditionally attract the most attention if they are white and their assailants are black. Blacks raped by whites tend to receive more attention than black-on-black crime, which receives the least attention of all.)
4. If she is of the same class as the assailant. (She will be blamed less if the assailant is of a lower class than she.)
5. If she is of the same ethnic group as the assailant. (If prejudices to do with ethnicity or nationality can be called in to slur the assailant the victim will benefit.)
6. If she is young. (Older women tend to be seen as less provocative.)
7. If she is 'pretty.' (Studies have found that although people tend to be biased against attractive rape victims, they are biased in favor of attractive assailants. The idea is that an attractive man does not need to rape because he can get all the women he wants, a refection of the 'assailants are motivated by lust' myth. This finding applied tellingly in the Chambers/Levin case.)
8. If she in any way deviated from the traditional female sex role of being at home with family or children. (People blame the victim more if she was in a bar, hitchhiking, at a party, or out on her own anywhere 'good girls' are not supposed to be preceding the attack.)
Copyright 1992 Helen Benedict.
Go out and buy this book. I gave you a link and I simply cannot quote the whole book. It's an excellent reference. Now. Immediately. Get it used if the new price is too much. Period.
One more thing: as this book is not available electronically anywhere, I typed up this myself while propping the book up on a cat who would not move. So any typos are probably not present in the book but the result of my reading stand moving or rolling over or something.