[Trigger warning for mention of rape] Shakesville: Rape is not a compliment.

moreapologies:

Still the very best blog post about this issue.

Recently, our new favorite insult-generator, Richard, left this comment, designed to cut me down to size: “No one wants to rape you, Shakes. Sorry to inform you.”

Which, you know, was news to me.

It also put me in mind of one of the most irritating attitudes toward rape that I have repeatedly encountered—that rape is a compliment.

Richard, who also likes to tell me how ugly, fat, and grotesque I am, implies in his latest comment that “no one wants to rape [me]” because rape is only something that happens to attractive women—a sentiment I’ve seen expressed before by other men who inform women they are not attractive enough by suggesting they’re not “rapable.” Appallingly, I’ve seen men go out of their way to physically intimidate a woman on the subway (or bus, or in a parking garage, etc.) only to scoff, “Don’t flatter yourself” if she reacts with the fright he desires. He’s pretending that rape is about sexual attraction, though he knows it’s about control and humiliation—his craving for which he has just satiated by terrorizing and insulting a woman he doesn’t know.

Fetishizing rape, regarding it as primarily about sexual attraction, recasts rapists as sexually frustrated men, or oversexed men, or men who simply can’t control themselves when they see an attractive woman. Rapists are not merely men with heightened libidos; they are men who seek to possess and control, and sex is the weapon they wield—not the ends, but the means. To think that rapists all rape for one universal reason is to think that murderers all murder for a single reason, and to think that rapists all rape because of sexual attraction is to think that murderers who use guns all murder because they like the smell of gun powder. People who like the smell of gun powder go to shooting ranges; murderers who like the smell of gun powder use guns instead of knives. The point isn’t the weapon; the point is someone’s getting dead, and no one really bothers to contemplate the “compliment” of Moe Murderer having used his favorite weapon to do the deed.