A particular sound of heartbreak

[deepad]

It's funny how in a whole bazaar of inhumane and outrageous things, sometimes just one ordinary, seemingly small item can jump out at you and pierce your heart.

Nivedita Menon recently posted Gender Just, Gender Sensitive, NOT Gender Neutral Rape Laws on Kafila, which is a statement signed by so many people whose feminist work I admire.

And I am terrified that these, the voices of some of the most publicly liberal and radical feminists who represent my interests, so stridently argue against one of the core realities of rape culture:

Woman can be rapists.

Female-identified people can sexually assault and sexually coerce and sexually violate another person. Their victims can be child or adult, male or female.

And this is not even touching the appalling lack of acknowledgement of transgendered and transexual identities, which are even more vulnerable to sexualised violences by status as marginalised and oppression minority.

This is not even about becoming the thing you are fighting by taking a push-back against patriarchy so far.

This is about wanting to take away protection from rape survivors, and denying them the legal ability to name the experience they went through with a term that states it to be as non-consensual, as violent, and as obscene as the actions a male rapist perpetrates.

Rape is sexualised violence, and violence can be perpetrated by any human being regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. Female caregivers who have power over children or the elderly or the infirm, female prison wardens and policewomen and armed forces officers, female teachers and professors, these are all in positions of power that can be abused. Women who have sex with women can be abused. Men in heterosexual marriages can be abused.

There is so much these women have fought for, so long and so hard, that I am so grateful for: these endless battles against the patriarchy, against casteism, against communalism, against homophobia, against classism and capitalism and every other form of bigotry and systemic oppression that warps the world I live in. I have such a sense of solidarity and empathy and admiration for most of their words.

It hurts so much to be so divisively excluded from their cause right now.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

It reads like a radfem proposal in that it assumes that women (read cis women) are only victims, and have no power in patriarchal society. And that only penetrative sex with a penis is rape. In the comments they agree that men can be victims (and especially boys), but there's no apparent correlation to the idea that women can be perpetrators.

[aris_tgd]

I'm sorry that you're feeling so cut off from a lot of people who should know better. Thank you for speaking so powerfully about this. Would you mind if I linked this elsewhere?

[aris_tgd]

And just to add my own thoughts, *flail* yes, the conception that women "can't" rape or that men "can't" be raped is so rape culture, it's so bound up with the idea that there is only one kind of sex which counts, and that men always want it, and thus it's not their fault that they're so desperate for sex they can't help themselves AND that they wouldn't ever turn it down. Everyone deserves protection from sexualized violence, everyone deserves safety, everyone deserves the ability to name their own experiences and their own boundaries.

(And as you said, the way this erases other identities is appalling.)

While there are some good points buried in there--the point on marital rape is well taken--the deliberate dismissal of the stigma and burden put on victims of sexual assault when the perpetrator isn't male is really troubling.

[sqbr]

Oh. My. God. I came across your post via my network and I am just...speechless. How can anyone think this is ok? I was going to say "What do they think the rape of a man by a woman should be prosecuted as then, sexual harassment?" but then I reread and realised that no, even that is apparently Not A Thing when a woman does it to another adult of any gender.

[kate_nepveu]

Owww. Sympathies.

[laurashapiro]

I'd read something of this, and was as appalled then as I am now. The gender essentialism of radical feminists of a certain stripe is the primary reason why I can never be fully aligned with them. This kind of thing just seals the deal.

Sorry for your pain over this. It hurts not to be able to follow your heroes and sisters; how much worse to stand against them. But you're doing the right thing.

[glass_icarus]

D: ♥ ♥

[ironed_orchid]

I hope that some of these women that you admire(d) will come around to see that this is not helping rape victims and not even adequately addressing the complexities of gender injustice.