Victim Blaming... The all american pastime of the US

Victim blaming for both rape and murder...

Americans have so many national passtimes... Baseball, flag obsession, racism, sexism, religious zealotry, appropriating the name "football" from the rest of the world and repurposing it and renaming the original sport bearing that name "soccer", bombing innocent bystanders and failing utterly to actually kill the person they're aiming for, and - at the forefront of my mind today - victim blaming. It's been an interesting year for us living in the amazing US of A. We've had Donald Trump turn from an amusing sideline of the election into an actual threat who could possibly have control over nuclear weapons in the not-so-distant future. We've had rapists left-right-and-center getting ridiculously pathetic short sentences, rape victims being disbelieved and slut-shamed. We have had news reports virtually every week about police shooting people all over the place - usually unarmed black kids and adults, the Black Lives Matter movement gaining incredible momentum - and of course opposition. We've had a football player kneel during the national anthem in protest of police shooting unarmed black people and white people going back to the overt racism we saw when the KKK was a popular club to be in, and then that same football player be called a muslim, a terrorist, received death threats, told he's a communist, should both kill himself and allow others to kill him, etc... 

Pretty much the US is a fucking insanely stupid nation at the moment. It's scary to live here, and i'm a privileged middle-class white girl. If i'm scared, I can only imagine how people who are actually in danger from this shit that's happening feel. I'd be fucking terrified to even leave my house. I'd become a hermit and only come out at like 4 or 5 am when almost everyone is asleep and there's less chance of me becoming a target for someone's racist vendetta. 

The US has an interesting history of blaming people for things they can't help. When the British "discovered" North America, they blamed the Native Americans for defending themselves, and punished them by slaughtering them, scalping them, and killing them (admittedly unknowingly) with diseases. When the Dutch and British started the whole slave trade, white people in the US enslaved Africans simply because they had a different skin colour, language, culture, etc... When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Government rounded up all the Japanese (and even Chinese) immigrants they could and shoved them into what were basically concentration camps without the whole gassing chambers part. For thousands of years, women have been considered "unclean", "stupid", "hysterical", and "too delicate" for pretty much everything except embroidery for the simple fact that we have vaginas and periods.

But we seem to have entered an all new low period in our history when we blame women for being attacked and raped, and black people for being murdered. The girl who was sexually assaulted behind a dumpster "had it coming" to her because she was intoxicated, and therefore we cannot even consider punishing her rapist because "it will affect HIM for the rest of his life..." Never mind that she will have to live with the memory for the rest of her life, knowing that when she was helpless someone took advantage of her and tried to stick his penis inside of her... No, the rapist's life and future are what we have to protect right now, obviously...

When it comes to rape the first question is not, "what the fuck did the parents teach their fucking rapey kid growing up?", it's what was the girl wearing, was she revealing too much cleavage, how short was her skirt, did she flirt with the guy, was she a "tease" or "leading him on", did she consent to kissing or fondling, because if so she was definitely asking for sex too, how much did she have to drink, was she wearing makeup, did she tell him she had a boyfriend, did she have a history of one-night-stands, was she "loose" with her sexuality, did she go to parties often, etc... We don't look at the perpetrator of the rape, the person with the penis who - for some reason - thought it was okay to force himself on a resisting woman. No, we look at the woman and analyse everything about her to decide how much she is at fault for another person attacking her. We give her a score of 9/10 her fault for the rape, and the guy only a 1/10, because he must have just misread the signals. 

Universities don't expel rapists, especially if they're on a sports team. They punish the victim of the rape and force her to go to a school where she sees the person who may have ruined her life, who has given her nightmares, panic attacks, a fear of intimacy with people she cares about, possibly even a fear of hugging her parents or friends, and who knows what other triggers and side effects of being sexually assaulted and abused. Judges give rapey little swimming kids 6 months in prison and then let him out after 3 months because anything else will DAMAGE HIS FUTURE... HIS future, mind you. His father pleads with people to be kind to his kid because 6 months in low-security prison was a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action"... Why not teach your kid to respect women and if he tries to rape any of them turn him in yourself or beat the shit out of him until he understands what apparently 20 years under your tutelage failed to teach him in the first place. 

"20 minutes" was 20 minutes too much action. Even 5 minutes is too much, 1 minute, 30 seconds... There is no "amount of rape" that is okay. It's not like there's a line of right and wrong, and when you hit the 30 minute marker you've suddenly gone too far. Like, 29 mins and 30 seconds of rape is okay, but 31 minutes earns you a prison sentence... It doesn't work that way. You don't get a free pass because it was a small time period. That's like saying that you get to murder 6 people without any consequences, but if you murder a 7th, OMG, you done fucked up... 

People get taken to court and stripped of their life savings because they bumped the car in front of them and the other driver falsely claims whiplash, when they still have an open cup of water in their cupholder that didn't spill a drop. We can consign a person to bankruptcy and strip them of everything they own because some dude wanted a fat payout by suing, but god help the person who suggests that we legally punish a rapist. That's "cruel and unusual"...

Similarly, all people seem to do these days is blame black people for their own murders at the hands of cops. They don't look at the little kid that was playing in the park with a toy squirt gun, they look at the dude who called it in and said there was a black kid with a gun. The cops didn't investigate what was going on, they just tore up to the park in their cruiser, flew out of it, and shot a little boy dead. No questions, no "put the gun down", no consideration that this was a little kid playing in a park. White people look at a grown man that was shot by the police and they ask "Was he wearing a hoodie? How tall was he? Did he look angry? Did he put his hands up immediately, or ask questions first? Did he resist arrest? Did he follow instructions? Did he have past convictions? Was he doing anything illegal?"... They tell black people to just "follow the law and do what they say and you'll be fine"... Well, obviously not! I'm pretty sure that by now some black people just drop to the ground with their hands out the minute they see a cop, regardless of what they're doing at the time, even if they are just selling girl scout cookies... It's no longer about keeping your nose clean, going about your business, and being safe. It's about assuming you must look like a criminal 24/7, so you have to always assume someone's going to try and shoot you.

And then when it comes to the protesting, the black community can do nothing right. Either they protest by trying to get laws passed to protect themselves, or they go to court to get punishment for the murdering cops, and nothing gets done. Protesting via the court system isn't effective. So they try getting support from the communities and politicians around them. But no one is interested, or even sees that there is a problem. So they get mad and sit down in the middle of roads and conduct peaceful if disruptive protests. They get attacked by white bystanders and the police, even though they are exercising their constitutional right to protest. Next they get really angry and hold violent protests, marches, smash windows, destroy public property, anything to get the attention of the world and highlight the very real problem that their community faces every single day. Discrimination, racism, hate from white people, unequal opportunities, lack of resources and lack of quality education in their communities... The list goes on and on. Even when a single black person protests in a completely non-disruptive, non-violent, not in your face at all way - by taking a knee during the national anthem at a football game - he is held up as an example of a "dangerous, disrespectful black man". Called hateful names like communist, devil, told to go back to where he came from, told to leave the US if he doesn't like the way things are... 

We blame the victims of crime all the time. We blame rape victims for being too provocative. We blame the victims of cop murder for being ex-cons or just looking suspicious (i.e. having darker skin caused by more melanin pigmentation), we blame regular murder victims for pissing the wrong person off, being disrespectful, refusing to do something for someone, not having better house security, etc... We blame pregnant young girls killed by their boyfriends because they wouldn't abort for getting pregnant in the first place. We blame women killed in childbirth for getting pregnant in the first place, even though they tried to have an abortion for their own health and safety. We blame young LGBTQA people who commit suicide for being LGBTQA, and say that if they could only just have tried to be "normal" heterosexuals then they wouldn't have been unhappy enough to kill themselves... 

When horrible things happen to good and innocent people, we blame THEM for it. Not their murders, or their tormentors, not their rapists and their torturers, not the abusive boyfriend or the religious fanatics, not the unfair court systems that pass laws preventing women from terminating pregnancies that threaten their lives... We blame the very people we SHOULD have been helping. We allow this disgusting victim blaming culture to not only perpetuate, but to thrive. 

Why? I have no idea. I cannot comprehend how little compassion a person has to have not to feel the pain of these needless deaths or feel sorrow at how their lives ended.

Boys will be boys...

How we raise boys to be sexist
assholes...

Recently, the news feed on my Facebook has blown up with articles and posts about Brock Turner, the Standford student who sexually assaulted a young woman behind a dumpster. The only reason he wasn't convicted as a full-blown rapist is that he was interrupted before he could stick his penis inside an unconscious young woman. Now, people have been saying that it's reprehensible that even though a jury found him guilty of 3 felonies of sexual assault, a judge decided to give him just a 6 month jail sentence, and that this has now been reduced to 3 months is just shy of criminal behaviour in itself... 

All of this I agree with whole-heartedly, but not much more can be said that I have not already read or heard or said myself. The brave young woman he attacked wrote an amazing letter to him which she read in court, detailing the many ways in which his assault has affected her life. She said it better than anyone else could, because she lived through the experience. Anyone who disregards her feelings on the matter does not deserve to breathe the same air as her. 

However, I want this blog post to focus more on an article I read today about how we are taught from a young age the the way boys and men treat us is okay and just part of what makes them boys, something they cannot help and something that is pointless and unnecessary to discourage when they are young.

The author talks about her experiences growing up with her male family members and with strangers and how her parents unknowingly indoctrinated her into a world where women are actively supposed to protect themselves against men and unwanted advances, but boys are not taught to treat women with respect as basic human beings. The article "3 ways my parents unintentionally taught me that my consent didn't matter" discusses three different lessons learned in early childhood that set the stage for how she was supposed to view the world as a woman, and what she should expect from the men and boys around her.

1. 'You're Not Allowed to Say No' - Girls are supposed to be gracious and sweet and acquiescent. We're not supposed to raise our voices, or argue and talk back, or really stand up for ourselves in situations where we feel uncomfortable.
2. 'Boys Will Be Boys' - Boys can pick on girls, force them to play in a certain way, or be cruel little jerks and we just push it aside as exuberance and "the way boys play" without teaching them not to be oversexed monsters.
3. 'This Is What It Means to Be a Girl' - Sexism is just part of the system and we're supposed to get used to it because that's the way it's always been and it's not going to change...

These 3 lessons come into play with how children are raised in the modern world. Boys play exuberantly, like toys that make a lot of noise, destroy stuff, run around crazily ignoring their parents, and mercilessly tease girls (often cruelly). Often times, parents do nothing to curtail this behaviour and teach their male children control, manners, and basic human decency toward one another and the young girls around them. If another parent even suggests that they should discipline or control their male offspring, the parents are likely to get offended, shout about "how dare you tell me how to teach my child", or mutter something about how "boys will be boys" as though there is nothing they can do about their children and/or no need for anything to be done. 

When a girl comes home crying from school telling her parents about how a boy was teasing her, or pinching her, or pulling her hair her parents are likely to tell her that if a boy is mean to her that means he likes her. This sets the stage for years of putting up with abusive and manipulative males in her life because somewhere in her subconscious she thinks that the men in her life just don't know how to express them and that they're not trying to be assholes, just merely shy about telling her how they really feel. The other side of the coin though is that if the parents take the appropriate action and call the boy's parents to talk about how their child hurt or upset the girl. The response is usually "well that's just how boys play", or "he doesn't know how to express himself". This is not an acceptable response form a parent... its a cop out, a lack of responsibility for one's own teachings to their offspring, and does nothing to fix a problem rearing it's head. Instead of making excuses for "that's just how he plays", wouldn't it be nice if they sat their child down and explained to him how his actions affected other people, and that being mean to girls (and boys) wasn't an acceptable way to behave? Might that not solve problems down the line, if he learned how to treat other people in his life with respect?

When a parent ignores a negative action that their child displays early on, that is the same as giving permission to the child to behave in that way. When you teach your child table manners and to say 'please' and 'thank-you', you consistently make sure that they follow the established rules you have set forth. You teach your child to be polite, to chew with their mouths closed, and to show proper respect to adults. What if - and I know this is a crazy idea here - we approached teaching our children to be kind to each other (and for little boys not to be crazy lunatic assholes) the same way, instead of letting them run wild and figure out social interactions with no guidebook. 

In schools, you often hear about how teachers spend a disproportionate amount of time helping boys with their studies, or how boys are more likely to have ADHD, a short attention span, and an inability to focus. Are boys really more likely to have ADHD than girls? I don't know the real answer to this, but I think it is very unlikely that only boys can have ADHD. The difference is that girls are taught early on not to run around crazily, to sit down and pay attention, and to be polite. More time is spent teaching girls to have good manners because that indicates good breeding and will make her attractive later in life. Boys on the other hand are supposed to be "macho" and "manly" and "authoritative", so they are allowed to act like little hooligans rather than be taught self control and manners and to sit still and pay attention in class. So it is likely that just as many little girls have ADHD, but were taught manners and self control, and therefore pay attention in class. If teachers didn't spend so much time trying to control their male pupils, maybe they would have more time to teach the girls too, and the boys would learn like normal people and not take extra attention. 

Teaching boys and girls different sets of manners does no good in the long run. Girls are supposed to be maleable, soft, polite, quiet, intelligent, unobtrusive, and above all things not provoke aggression from boys and not display herself to 'tempt them'. Boys are supposed to be strong, authoritative, manly, unemotional, protective, assertive, and be the 'man of the household' the 'provider', the loudest voice in the room. 

Pictures like this do so much unintended damage, reinforcing that little girls and women are supposed to be happy and pretty all the time, are supposed to make the people around them feel good about themselves. While boys are not supposed to cry, and if they do then it must be something really serious and important and everyone needs to pay attention immediately. If a girl cries it's no big deal because they must do it all the time anyway, they must be super emotional and unable to control themselves... But if a boy does it we must call the fire brigade immediately. 

This is supposed to be sweet and touching and make girls feel special, but it does so much more harm than good, teaching them that boys expressed feelings are more important than those of girls. Why are the boy's tears more valid and important than the girl's?

These types of quotes are meant to show how much a girl means to a boy if she willingly expressed feelings, but just diminish the validity of a girl's feelings and physical demonstration of emotions. They add colours and cutsie fonts and hearts that are supposed to give us warm and fuzzy feelings inside, but are really just part of a culture teaching girls from a young age that it's okay for boys to be mean to them, and that if a boy cries its time to drop everything and treat him as though he's made of gold, and that when she cries it isn't nearly as important and doesn't mean as much.

And even things like this, sweet in theory but harmful in practice. Teaching your boys to beat someone up (although it is good to teach your son to look after his little sister) is less effective than teaching your daughter to stand up for herself and do the beating on her own. If a boy hurts her feelings, she shouldn't have to wait around for her brother or her father to come to her rescue. She should be taught that she has self-worth and that if someone if mean to her, she can stand up for herself and give them a piece of her mind. Instead of dissolving into tears as her only option, why not teach her that she is allowed to get mad?

What is it in our culture that reviles strong women who can take care of themselves? Now don't get me wrong, it is important to show our emotions, to cry (therapeutic even). But that's not our only option as females. However, so often when we do stand up for ourselves, shout, throw things - act the way men do when they get angry - we are called "crazy", "bitch", and told we must be "on our periods", as though it's unthinkable that we might have real human emotions and express them violently too, just the way boys and men do. 

We women need to stand up for our daughters, sisters, friends, and even strangers we do not know. We need to move beyond the age where girls are pretty little flowers and can't do anything for themselves. We need to teach girls to stand up to the men in their lives. We need to teach boys from an early age to respect women and girls, and change the way we raise our boys so that they grow up to be decent, patient, kind men. Things need to change and that starts with parenting. 

And more than that, men need to learn to stand up for us too. Feminism isn't just for women, and it's not about only giving rights to women, or putting men down. It's about giving women the same rights as men around them and equaling the sexes. Its about equal pay for equal work, and it's about teaching your boys that they're allowed to cry when they're upset. It's about deciding who gets child custody based on the good of the child, not the gender of the parent. Its about believing women when they say they were raped and letting them decide if they want to bring an unplanned for child into the world. It's about supporting men who decide to pursue typically female career paths like nursing and standing up for them when others laugh. Feminism isn't some dirty word to be pushed around and hidden from. It just means treating people with fairness and human decency, regardless of gender. How is that a bad thing?