glass bull in a china shop
I'm a little late to this rage party, but I thought it was worth showing up anyway. The party started with an 18-year old American girl on a graduation trip to the Caribbean. She left a club with three boys three weeks ago, and has never been seen again. The next step was that Atrios noticed one of the directions in which CNN took this story. But what made people angry was that Steve Gilliard, in response to that, decided that Ms. Holloway has been raped and probably murdered, and posted about who he believes is responsible for this crime: Ms. Holloway for drinking, her parents for not teaching her about sex, Scandinavian women - inexplicably - for sleeping with his friends, and, of course, the media. But not a word about the men who he believes raped and killed her.

So then Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon took up the fight, on her own page and in conjunction with Pseudo-Adrienne at Alas, a Blog; making some excellent points, some of which I will now steal here, in case you don't feel like clicking. One was in response to Gilliard's flight back to the '50s - the 1750s: "Now, I've always been confused as to why a girl would go off with three guys. Was she going to pull a train? Or did she have two spare sex organs for them to use? Because otherwise, that sounds like a really bad decision." Me, the last time I went off with three guys, it was because me and some co-workers went out for lunch. Yes, this involved walking down an empty street with three guys. No, I did not bring enough vaginas for everybody. Because THAT IS NOT MY JOB.

The assumption that it is, that I must not be alone with a man, or men, unless I'm prepared to fuck them all, comes out of the attitude that men are slaves to the dick and cannot be held responsible for their actions: I must be responsible for stopping them. This takes rape out of the category of things like war: things caused by human agency, things that happen because at some point, someone had a choice of possible courses of action, and he made the decision to fuck someone - over. The "men are just like that & nothing can be done to stop it & women must just be careful" reasoning says rape is more like a grizzly attack in Yellowstone. You can't educate the bears. They're going to do what they want to do. It's your responsibility to protect yourself.

People who want to convince us all of this would do well to think about what happens when a grizzly bear attacks someone in Yellowstone - what happens when rangers even think that a grizzly is spending too much time with people and is likely to attack someone. What happens is that rangers find the grizzly and shoot it. There is no due process. There is no reasonable doubt. You cannot educate a grizzly; it's just going to do what it wants to do. So you have to shoot a grizzly that attacks humans, because it's just too dangerous to leave it walking around. Something to keep in mind when you're thinking about whether to embrace the human or the animal paradigm of behavior. An animal cannot be expected to act "unnaturally", to go against its instincts. An animal has no rights.

This is why some people who get all frothy at the mouth about radical feminist statements that men are essentially rapists and not to be trusted are so calm in the face of men's statements that men are essentially rapists and not to be trusted: the good ol' boy take on it is that men are not to be trusted and women should learn to cope, whereas the radical feminist take is that men are not to be trusted and must be controlled to prevent rape. I'm not so into the universals, so my take is that being a man doesn't mean that you know shit about All Men; but when a man tells me that men are not to be trusted, I know that he himself is so deeply not to be trusted that he literally can not conceive of someone of his own gender who is trustworthy. And I keep that in mind.

The other thing pointed out on Pandagon and at Alas is that those guys who push the "never go out alone" theory of female responsibility don't seem to think about how much it makes life suck. Pinko Feminist Hellcat tells us how when she does do the self-protective thing and refuses to stay with male strangers, the reaction is "Jesus, what's her problem?" And it makes life suck for guys too. Guys: would you say your lives are better because you don't have to bring along an elderly female relative every time you want to talk to a woman you're not related to? Would you say your lives are better because sometimes women will be alone with you; because sometimes women will fool around with you even if they're not 100% sure yet whether or not they want to fuck you? The Hellcat saith: "My first date with a previous boyfriend ended with a peck on the cheek at the front door of my building. Some people I knew asked why I didn't invite him in, and I said it was because I didn't know him that well. "Well, you don't want to be paranoid," they said, and they're right, I don't. Problem is, I didn't know if he was an okay guy or if he was just a good actor. If he was just a good actor, people would have asked what the hell I was doing letting him into my house when I barely knew him. If we had a drink or two, it would have gotten worse--what was I thinking? Didn't I know enough to be safe? I'd get both the slut charge and the stupid charge, all in one setting."

Ahh, it sucks so much. I don't live by the "never go out alone" rule because I refuse to impoverish my life that way. But I do things like go up to a hotel room to hang out with a guy I don't know very well, with the full understanding that I may be taking my life in my hands. ratontheroad, did you know that when I was hanging out with you that morning at Kublacon, I was having a good time, and I was also, from time to time, calculating the possibilities of stabbing you in the eye with my keys? You're a big guy. I don't know you very well. You seem nice. That doesn't prove much. I think it improves all of our lives when women as well as men are willing to talk to people they don't already know and make new friends. But the smart thing, the safe thing, would have been for me not to go.

And then Ms. Marcotte, who is a gracious goddess, after working through her rage, moved on to what people can do to stop rape. Seriously - if you click on one link in my LJ ever, click on this link right here. Read her post and the comments. Because most rape doesn't involve somebody disappearing among those crazy furriners, far away from home. It involves people like the guy in the comments who had the courage to tell the story of how a woman once had to tell him "no" more than once and push him away, and how he realizes that he came quite close to being a rapist. It involves not understanding that sex is fucking someone who is fucking you back - and if that's not happening, it's not sex but rape. God, I read this stuff and I want to cry, because I've been 18, I've been stupid, I've been careless with other people. I have behaved as though what I wanted was the only important thing. It is easy. It is tempting. Listen: a friend of mine says the trouble with people who decide they don't like you is that you have to conclude either that they are making a rational decision, in which case you are unlikeable, or that they are making an irrational decision, in which case there's not much reason to respect that decision. And who wants to conclude that they're unlikeable? It's a dangerous, dangerous attitude. I have already lost one friend in part because he was getting so angry that his friends would fuck other people, they would even sometimes fuck each other, these people that he liked, but none of them wanted to fuck him. It looked far too much to me like he was close to concluding that our decision not to fuck him was an irrational decision, that he didn't have much reason to respect.

That's grizzly behavior. I can't be friends with a grizzly. I can only leave him alone or shoot him.

Please be careful. Please think about what you're doing. Please don't leave scars that last for years on the people you like, maybe even the people you love. It's easy to do. We're strong enough to destroy each other and we are so easily broken.