Fuck Politeness

I woke up tired and sad. It’s been a long week!

So I quickly linked to this here report by the White Ribbon Day organisation earlier in the week. As did Hoyden About Town and Larvatus Prodeo.

So you would think, wouldn’t you, that posting on the fact that a report showed that one in seven boys think it is ok to force a girl to have sex with them if she’s been flirting with them would be uncontroversially accepted as a reasonable post/a concerning statistic?

No no no no no!!! Foolish reader!

First of all these guys eschewed engaging with *that* statistic, as it was one where they could not HIDE the gender specific violence issues. They preferred other stats about the numbers of girls and boys who reported having unwanted sex, so that they could assert that really, it was all pretty much equal. (Without engaging with what boys might consider *unwanted sex* to mean, compared to what *girls* might consider it to mean).

There are men out there lurking in blogland and just WAITING for the opportunity to tell us all how we feminists just want to *control people’s lives* with all this anti-rape talk, that the stats are ALL WRONG (not really, just require close-ish reading), that the entire report is ‘misandrist rubbish’, that *IT DIDN’T ASK IF IT WAS OK TO HIT BOYS* (well no, it was specifically a report on violence against girls/women and did not hide that), that there’s an *AGENDA* at work here!!!! (cos all male-friendly MRA-appeasing info is NEUTRAL UNINTERPRETED FACT), that violence against women/girls is no worse, no different than violence against boys, that we’re all just idiots with ‘suboptimal’ solutions, and finally that it’s JUST PLAIN OFFENSIVE AND INFLAMMATORY and what’s more you’re PICKING ON THE POOR MENS!!!!!

Well firstly, these guys do not WANT to engage with the statistics, they do not WANT reasonable conversations on the problems of sexual assault/gendered violence, they want us all to stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that the stats that one in seven boys thinks it’s ok to force a girl to have sex is somehow a less important figure than the number of girls compared to boys who report having unwanted sex. They are angry because they feel that a 1 in 3 stat is telling them that SOMEONE THEY KNOW is a rapist (and they continue to see rapists as the mentally ill strangers hiding in bushes, not guys with issues with women that are encouraged by society every day). And THAT is confronting and inflammatory!!!

What I can’t figure out is that they went to all this work to say “HEY!! No, it’s WAY more likely to be like 1 in 9 you horrid meany inflammatory FEMINISTS”. Ok. So 1 in 9. Do you have less than 9 friends or male relatives? So…you’re kind of in the same boat right? That statistically you ARE friends with a guy who has forced himself on a woman? I mean that was YOUR logic, YOUR reason for indignance and hostility and tantruming away about how mean we all are and this is bullshit and none of it matters, and NOT MY MATES NO!!!!

Anyway, Kim who posted on the report over at Larvatus, linked to this post. It’s a post I think everyone should read. Again and again and again until it sinks in. You WILL have met them, you WILL have let them joke…

And it is worth noting that the majority of commentors over at LP (well the 70 or so comments I got through before the idiocy of certain jerks was making me depressed) were reasonable, respectful and engaged. But MAN those other jerks are stubborn derailers!

Tags: Hoyden About Town, Larvatus Prodeo, MRAs and rape-denying douchebags, sexual violence naysayers, White Ribbon Day report