From: tittle@alexandre-dumas.ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle Moore)
Subject: Re: Women's and men's safety
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Date: 23 Jan 93 20:42:36 GMT

In <1job5o$15p@agate.berkeley.edu> uunet!infmx!hartman@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Robert Hartman) writes:

[discussing the difference between male/female safety at night]

>For a man, the risk of going out at night appears to be more like a
>personal train crash.  --Messy and painful, but generally repairable.
>But for a woman, going out alone at night might appear more like a
>personal Chernobyl.  --An utter disaster that cannot be undone.

I'd like to take a closer look at this.  To be fair, I'm going to look
at both men and women that have been raped.  And actually, the instances
of men being raped are probably much higher than we think, for reasons
I'll get into in a moment.

I don't like the notion that for a woman to be raped, her world has
ended.  When a man is raped it is denied, and that's another problem.
As I see it, both are symptomatic of the same basic idea: women are
the sexual property of men.  This translates into an indirect
encouragement for rape in the first place: "overly sexed" men and the
"stupid" women who got in their way.  This also translates into the
supreme importance placed on a woman's virginity, even to a
pickiness/choosiness over having sex.  Conversely for men, this
translates into the expectation that they'll ALWAYS want sex, and
they certainly don't wind up being someone else's sexual property.

So the woman that has been raped finds social approval of her status
has been stripped.  Certainly, this is a "Chernobyl"-like effect, but
is it intrinsic to being raped?  I think not.  Certainly rape is going
to be more traumatic than being mugged since it's more personal, even
though the risk of physical injury is probably about the same.  But
the additional truama of shame, rejection, and self-blaming is
completely uneccessary and has contributed so much pain over the
centuries.

Conversely, the man who has been raped finds no acknowledgement of it
-- this shows up in the quoted paragraph above where female rape was
compared to male mugging instead [I know that there is the point of
sheer numbers for comparison, that's not my point here].  People deny
that it happened, or insinuate that he's not much of a man if it did.
How many men pick up the phone and call the police to tell them he's
just been gang-raped?

Women also tend to be disbelieved, but the disbelief tends to center
around whether or not it was really a rape or didn't she just "ask for
it"?  This is a bit different from the total denial that the man often
experiences (I'm speaking as one who knows two different men who have
told me of their experiences -- not much of a data point, but a lot
more than people who know nothing of this).

Anyway, I got into a bit of verbiage here, but the essential point I'm
trying to make is that I don't like the "end of the world" view of the
raped woman.  Besides all of the above, I think it insults her
personal strength for finding her way out of the trauma.  Certainly
she'll need help.  She'll need to talk to people she trusts.  But she
can recover and barring stupid social conventions, she will.

Some social conventions are useful.  Others are stupid and sometimes
even lethal...

--Cindy

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