Newsgroups: soc.women
Subject: Re: more thoughts on a new slant to rape stats
From: rivero@mdcbbs.com
Date: 6 Apr 92 12:13:45 GMT
Organization: M&E (Division of EDS), Cypress CA
Nntp-Posting-User: rivero

In article <1992Apr2.171937.10395@acsu.buffalo.edu>, camurphy@acsu.buffalo.edu (Cindy) writes:
> rivero@mdcbbs.com writes:
> 
>>  The comment was meant to address the attitude exprssed by Susan
>>Brownmiller,"All men are potential rapists, and that's ALL they are",
>>a statement roughly equivilent to saying all blacks are lazy, all chicanos
>>steal, all jews are greedy, all polish people are stupid or all women are
>>whores.
> 
>>  Who, among you, believes these lies?
> 
> 
> i happen to believe that most men don't rape, and that they believe they
> are anti-rape for whatever reason (moral, feminist, etcetera).  however,
> a woman cannot, out of a sense of fairness, trust each and every man.

  Out of fairness, we should give each and every human the benefit of the
doubt! 

> all men are POTENTIAL rapists.....................

  All humans are potential murderers, yourself included. Darci Kaleen Pierce
wanted Cindy Lynn Ray's new baby (a problem that goes back to the time of King
Solomon), and removed the unborn baby from Cindy's body using the victims car
keys to perform a Ceasarian section on Cindy's body. By your logic above,
I should keep ALL women away from my pregnant wife (should I ever be so
lucky).

  Hardly!

  Neither can I point at the streetwalker and accuse all womrn of being
potential whores.

  Both crass asuumptions totally dismiss the idea that the greater majority of
women are decient peple whom are WORTHY of being truested, and the same holds
true for the majority of men.

  Think of rapists, not as advocates of the politicalization of patriarchy, but
as a form of domestic terrorists. If you alter your life in response to
their threat, if you cease normal contact with males out of the fear
that you may be raped (especially if those fears have been greatly exaggerated
in the media), then the terrorists have won. The male rapists
(and the females who exploit their existance for political gain) have taken
control of your life, isolated you from your own species, and made you
even more susceptible to further manipulations.


 men are not being "treat like dirt" by   
> society on a large scale, nor are gangs of roving manhaters grabbing
> random men and castrating them because they might rape. 

  You haven't been following Dworkin's speeches of late, I take it.



 you can't blame
> women for fearing, even feeling hostile towards, men, when so many men
> are not just rapists but perhaps merely willing to treat women as though
> they are not quite human.

  No, but I can (and DO) blame women who have exaggerated the degree of
rape merely to fuel their oen political careers. Feminism has become
dependant on sexual stories to maintan a place in the public media.
And to kee that media exposure, the rates of claims that such and such sexual
crimes are taking place have been elevated to mythical proprtions. The
women who profit from instilling fear in their fellow women have terrified
many more women than the real rapists ever did. The price is that is is now
acceptible (I believe your phrase was "fairness") to assume all
men as potentially guilty and to treat them accordingly, even those
who are guilty of no crime. And, inso doing, you orphan yourself
even further from the possabilility of discovering that the guy over
there (right next to the newspaper rack) is a preatty neat guy who has never
raped anyone, or even beaten his dog. But, since yu decide not to vouchsafe
him the tme of day, you never attain the experience that contradicts
the media portrayal of men (which is of course, what the promotors of
anti-male media hype hope for).



  it is a huge male responsibility to stop behaving
> as though they have some god-given privelege of all women being required
> to be "nice" to them, and learn that women were not put here for male
> enjoyment. 

  It is the female responsibility to stop responding to inaccurate portrayals
of men.

 And incidentally, your comment about men expecting women to be nice to
them is roughly equivilent to the demand for women to stop behaving as 
if men were merely cash objects, suitable only for female enjoyment.


 you can't blame women for the so-called "war between the
> sexes" and compare the "feminist oppression" (bullshit) of men to the
> oppression of marginalized "races" and "ethnic" groups.  it just
> does not compare.

 On the contrary, the tactics of media misrepresentation and the "big lie"
are identical in all of them. None of the basic premises on which any
of the above discriminations are based is vaid. Not all blacks are
lazy, not all Chicanos theives, nor all men rapists.


  that is what Mary Daly (not a particular flawless 
> heroine of mine but a writer worth looking into) would call a "patriarchal
> reversal" of logic, like the reversal that blames women for being raped
> by men in the first place, for example.

  That's a bit of a leap. I have never tried to blame a woman who got raped. 
And I do not deny there are real rapists who should go to jail (or worse)
for their crimes.

  What I take issue with is the extreme exaggerations used to "sell"
rape as a political issue; to create the bogus epidemic to motivate
women at the expense of the social image of the average man.


> 
> if i distrust a particular male because of his sexism, or a woman makes a
> true statement about women having to consider all men as POTENTIAL
> rapists, that does not translate to "oh all the poor men are being treat
> like dirt by those manhating feminists who should be nice and barefoot
> and pregnant while they're at it."  

  You know something? I have not heard a man use the phrase "barefoot
and pregnant" that I can recall. I hear lots of feminists use it, though.
It's true I wanted my wife to  be pregnant (that's why I married her), but
never barefoot! She had the very best and most expensive shoes available! :)



> female anger does not need to be
> punished by misogyny.........

  But if the anger is directed at a man who has committed no crime, then
he has a right to feel anger in return! That's not misogyny, that's
just standing up for his rights as a human.



 women's anger and fear and distrust are perfectly
> justified.  

  No, they are not. It is prejudice, based on gender, criminalizing an entire
class for the actions of a few.




> the rapist mentality and the conceptualization of women as commodities
> or children who had "better be nice" is a poisonous way to view
> relations between members of the human race. 

  Where do you get the "better be nice" crap? Who have you been hanging out
with? Nobody talks like that anymore, except in cheap 3rd rate movies from
the 50's!

 women don't have to sleep
> with men, don't have to 'be nice', and don't even have to like men.

  I think your hangup about rape has clouded your ability to even attempt to
interact with men on a non-sexual level, and you've therefore gotten into
a cycle of reinforcing your own preconceptions. Despite what you
may see on "Oprah" and "Geraldo", most men have had their consciousness
raised during the early years of feminism, and even more so, don't WANT to
sleep with you until they know you well enough to ask for a blood test.



> not in this world.  ddon't make me sick. 
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  Too late!  (Just a joke).




 i have put more trust into
> more undeserving men, and i know it works the other way around too,
> but there has to be an evaluation based on reality as well as soome
> hope for us all being "nice" TO EACH OTHER.  i have found a precious
> few men -- people, even --- deserving of my trust, and part of that
> has been having to take sexism into account, not just as a loveable
> quirk but as a deadly potential poison to my well-being; physical,
> mental and emotional.  telling women to "be nicee" is a convenient
> way to trash all feminism and efforts to redefine what women owe
> themselves.  

  What humans owe to each other and themselves is, as you say, reality.
 But feminism has made much political gain over the use of inaccuracies and
outright lies which foster such blind mistrust as you appear to exhibit.
That is part of the backlash against feminism. Even it's ardent
adherents and supporters (which I used to be) view any organization
that exists on misrepresentations as destructive of society as a whole.

Maybe this confusion is why very NON-traditional methods of interaction, 
free of feminist expectations and political games are catching on. If you
meet someone at a nightclub or disco, you see the same distrust and
prejudice as you display in your post. In contrast, it has been refreshingly
easy to find hiking, hunting and sailing partners of the opposite gender,
and that holds promise for a fun summer. I don't try and tell them to be
"nice", and they don't treat me like a criminal (After all, we're both
carrying high powered rifles). So far, it's working pretty damned good.


women can't bear the burden of healing imaginary slights
> against male privelege and still take their (women's) own rights.

  But they can bear the burder of imaginary slights against women?
There's a problem there, I fear.

> 
> 
> this isn't my manifesto, just a few relevant points.  don't type me as
> the archetypal feminist  and don't expect me to be insulted by the
> phrase "manhating hairy lesbian."

  I think possibly you confuse me with someone else. "manhating hairy lesbian"
is not a phrase I use or even tolerate in my presence. I find it highly
offensive, for reasons related to the above thoughts.


  but i see a lot of childish, parasitic
> assumptions being made here about what "women OWE men."

  What women "owe" men is what men "owe" women. Mutual respect and the
opportunity to demomstrate that we can be nice civilized human beings.
This is terrifying to those politicians who build their careers
on mutual fear and distrust, but that's their problem, not mine.



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|  Michael Rivero rivero@mdcbbs.com Homo Cyberneticus-Computational Man  |
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