Tuesday 30 December 2008

Rape can take different forms

Update (01/04/09): new post here for the follow-up...

Edit:(01/05/2009) As I said in the comment thread to this post, I understand why some people may have felt confused by this post because I was pretty tired & depressed when I'd initially written it and I guess I'd just let my personal thoughts go freely and weirdly without elaborating enough on what I really meant by seduction. I think it is now fair for me to edit my definition of "seduction" so that people can now understand what I really meant by seduction (through developing what I actually meant a little more), partly from personal experience. Now, for the people who keep sending accusatory comments: can you please stop it? I have NEVER said that all intercourse (or all sex) is rape, and neither has Andrea.


No doubt I will go back to all these various topics in future posts, but I just want to write about the different kinds of male sexual exploitation of women I have noticed:


- forcible rape (the most obvious), i.e. literally violating a woman while using threats and violence;

- sexual demand: insisting that she does something, haranguing her about it, carrying on asking for something, e.g. things he says like "If you loved me, you would do this" or "Everybody does it," "Every girl does that" [in the porn he watches, yeah, right]. Some sexual demands may involve blackmail;

- sexual coercion: this may involve grabbing, pushing, hold a woman down tightly, forcing any kind of sex on her, though sexual coercion may take different subtler forms, e.g. closer to sexual demand;

- prostitution: (in the vast majority of cases) when a woman or girl's body is bought and sold to primarily satisfy men's sadist sexual desires in a patriarchy;

- sexual 'duty': when a woman is forced (or sometimes 'forcing herself') to perfom sexual intercourse or any other kind of sex act as if it were somehow 'her duty' to do so, to "satisfy her man," in marriage or in a relationship. Sexual "duty" may even involve set dates as to when sex must take place or some sort of planning such as "Every (so often), we should have sex", for instance;

- sexual pressure: when a woman feels pressured to say "yes" to sex and thus 'consents' under male pressure;

- sexual payments: when a man buys a woman dinner, clothes, presents, etc and expects sex from her in return;

- pornographic coercion: rape of the mind; forcing or persuading a woman or girl to watch pornography so then her resistance to unwanted and uncomfortable sexual activities can be more or less overpowered. Alternatively, pornographic coercion can be forcing or persuading a woman or girl to have herself being photographed or filmed whilst naked or having sex;

- seduction: when a man persuades a woman to have sex with him, often subtly, through being kind, polite, chivalrous, while playing on her feelings, possible vulnerability, or sometimes getting her consent by deceiving her, distracting her, or, sometimes, intoxicating her (with alcohol or drugs) so that he can use her for his own sexual gratification and purpose.

- rape of our souls: when we, women, are not allowed to be ourselves because of having to conform to patriarchal feminine gender 'norms'. Whether we do it to "be liked" or not to be criticized, most of the time, we conform. This culture trains us to conforms and alter our body parts because, in a patriarchy, we are not allowed to Be Ourselves; we are not allowed to be human beings, i.e. we are not allowed to have a full bodily integrity (e.g. we 'have to' shave, wear make-up, etc to conform to male-supremacist feminine norms).


Nearly all women on this earth have had to deal with one or more of these forms of rape in a patriarchy. This is basically feminism 101 reiterated: women, as a class, share a common condition, i.e. what it means to be female in a patriarchy. . .


ETA (01/03/09)= a sidenote: Seduction is a form of male sexual exploitation of women. And I certainly do not condone when men screw women over, whether in an individual case or culturally. I will need to get back to this somehow, sometime: seduction does not feel like rape at all when a woman has fully accepted to submit to the patriarchy; that does not change the fact that patriarchal masochism is a destroyer of inner female energy. I think I should have called seduction 'a form of male sexual exploitation that intends to destroy female energy', but I will surely go back to that in a future post. ;) This actually gave me a great idea... Patriarchy will keep calling you 'crazy', but it is truly speaking to itself in fact: patriarchy blinds most people - especially men, but also including some women - and drives them 'crazy' so they cannot see oppression, exploitation or destruction of someone's human capacity for equality...

WRT to the main subject of this post, to sum up some of my new points: Yes, rape or male sexual exploitation of women can take different forms... That's my personal opinion that having to conform to gender norms is a personal rape of my soul. Most feminists argues that patriarchal gender norms are personally and politically oppressive anyway... I guess I meant 'rape' as male sexual exploitation. I think I like expressing a wider definition of rape (feminists have been looking for wider definitions of rape). In some cases, there are forms of sexual exploitation that a woman does not really want or does not really feel happy or fulfilled when these things have happened to her. Seduction may not be exactly called rape, but it still generally does involve a man fucking a woman over and deceiving her. Damn! I've seen this happen to me and women friends so many times, I'm not crazy: I have heard them complaining about what assholes often men can be... Any form of sexual exploitation (even a subtler one) you don't really want to happen to you or that you feel shitty or depressed about the fact it has happened to you is a form of rape or male sexual exploitation of women somehow. And these kinds of exploitation also make you feel horribly bad and mistreated, as a woman.

[Now there is another interesting subject coming up in my mind: masochism; and I will elaborate on it in a future post, just not in this one. ;) ]

A major point I have made in my comments: Straightforward sexual assault is of course one of the worst things that can happen to you. The guy has literally gotten off on you saying No, or expressing the NO while the tears were flowing down your eyes - like what happened to me, for instance- I think I'm very psychologically damaged by the experience in a way; this hasn't changed in years... Now, the unwanted hostile commenters, do me a favor and run along (!) please, or I'll just keep pushing the "reject" button...

Fucking patriarchy we live in! You cannot even express your own thoughts without the male-supremacist system keeping trying to play with your words and express them in its own way, a way you actually didn't mean your personal thoughts to be expressed in... Damn, I know it is not very happy everyday to be a radical feminist but it sure must suck to be a patriarchist! :P


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Wednesday 24 December 2008

Sexist, Pornified Images in Mainstream Media

It goes on and on... I found this video on YouTube. It truly saddens me. No wonder I don't turn the TV on anymore; I guess I wanna partly protect myself from all this malestream misogynistic mess. Here are some examples of pornographic imagery seeping into malestream advertising and fashion ads:





These images include women in submissive positions, rigidly conforming to stereotypically feminine beauty standards; these women are also being bruised, threatened, attacked, roughly grabbed, tied up, fragmented into body parts, represented & treated as if they were mere pieces of meat. On some of the pictures, it even looks as if they were dead and photographed at murder scenes.

This video is merely one example that demonstrates how the sexualized torture, abuse and murder of women have become "sexy" and commonplace in our culture.

George Bataille once said:
"Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it"
-- Bataille, in Death and Sensuality, p.140.

Beauty is admired in a patriarchy, but only so it can be defiled, debased, violated, tortured, etc.

In this pornified culture, women must be beautiful. They must abandon their humanity through conforming to feminine roles, traits, beauty standards, etc which have been taught to them by male-supremacist culture. And then, once they conform to the system, they must be treated as most men view them: as passive sexual objects.

Of course, that is not to forget that most women find it very hard to conform to all the 'airbrushed' feminine ideals that the advertisement industry sells them everyday. And the price we pay, in a gender-based woman-hating culture that constantly shapes our attitudes, buying habits, viewpoints and the ways we view the world, is high. As this trailer for "Killing Us Softly 3" (a Media Education Foundation film) shows:



A longer version of this MEF film "Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women" can be found if you click here.

A sidenote: Sheila Jeffreys has just released a new book on the ever-expanding sexploitation industry. It is called The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade. You can find an article about it here.

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