So, the woman that makes ten rape reports a year should be taken as seriously as a TRUE VICTIM?
Buyer’s remorse, the guilt after making a bad decision isn’t rape. Getting so stoned that one makes a bad choice and wakes up going, “What did I do?!” isn’t rape.
There are women that will report rape to “get even” with someone, and then he is labelled a sex offender because she was mad at him and manipulated the system. Prostitutes that do not get paid report that they were raped.
I heard of a woman reported a rape retroactively just so she could get a free abortion.
Many of these so-called hapless marginalized victims sure know how to manipulate the system when the purpose serves them.
The people who try and do manipulate the system take away valuable resources from the people that actually need them~THE TRUE VICTIMS~ and in doing so punish all of the victims by creating an air of skepticism. I wish some of these “marginalized” persons would put their creative energies towards something constructive and contribute to society instead of seeing how much they can take and how much they can get over on the system.

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AnimalLover2 commenting on Rape Crisis Center leader says victims need others to believe them

One thing is certain about Plain Dealer commenters, and that is that they never fail to bring the bullshit. Misogyny, xenophobia, racism, classism, etc included as applicable.

See, if you rape a child who looks like a child, the problem is you. If you rape a child who looks like a woman, the problem is that women are just so damn sexy! It’s just a natural attraction that you didn’t regulate, you wicked thing. We don’t condone it, tsk-tsk and all that — but really, did you see the cans on her? What were you supposed to do?

— Have you tried not being so sexy? [via]

The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape, for instance, privileges at the same time men and ignorance: inasmuch as it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which male sexuality receives careful education).

— Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Tendencies pp 23-24 [via]

Here’s the thing: If you’re old enough to be having sex, you’re old enough to be using Plan B. Clinical trials have shown that it’s actually extremely safe, and there are absolutely no health reasons for restricting it to women 17 and older, or 18 and older. There simply aren’t. There are only political reasons and moral reasons.

And those moral reasons aren’t coherent. Because if a 15-year-old woman is freely consenting to sex, and there is some kind of mishap that leads her to need plan B, she should be able to get it. And if a 15-year-old isn’t freely consenting to sex, but a man is raping her, then she needs plan B even more. Why does the government think that possibly being saddled with a pregnancy will make men stop raping women? It hasn’t worked before. Men still find ways to rape women, even when the threat of pregnancy is there. Men still found ways to rape women before there was birth control.

— Plan Be

Rape revenge narratives traditionally rely on class divisions to create tension. They become a sort of “us” against “them” narrative in which the educated cultured bourgeoisie is violated by the most primal act of violation (rape) by lower uneducated “trash.” …At their best, these kinds of films can interrogate class structures that create derogatory divisions like “white trash.” At their worst, they can perpetuate the vilification of poor white people. Even though they expose the cultured class for being as capable of primal violence as anyone else, ultimately the “bad guys” remain the lower classes.

— Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

Do other societies use words like rape and murder metaphorically? Have we always done so? Must we? Or are there alternatives that may be more sensitive to people who lost loved ones in the Holocaust, were raped, or knew someone who was murdered?

— VIOLENT METAPHORS

In general, we fear strangers much more than we should. Consider a few supporting pieces of evidence:
+ In the U.S., the proportion of murder victims who knew their assailants to victims killed by strangers is about 3-to-1. (Source: U.S. Department of Justice.)
+ Sixty-four percent of women who are raped know their attackers; and 61 percent of female victims of aggravated assault know their attackers. (Men, on the other hand, are more likely to be assaulted by a stranger.) (Source: D.O.J.)
+ How about child abduction? Isn’t that the classic stranger crime? This 2007 Slate article explains that of the missing children in one recent year, “203,900 were family abductions, 58,200 were nonfamily abductions, and only 115 were ‘stereotypical kidnappings,’ defined in one study as ‘a nonfamily abduction perpetrated by a slight acquaintance or stranger in which a child is detained overnight, transported at least 50 miles, held for ransom, or abducted with the intent to keep the child permanently, or killed.’”
+ And if you’re really concerned about mass murder — which, given its rarity, you really shouldn’t be — you’d probably do well to look around your neighborhood instead of focusing on strangers, or foreigners, or people who look like they might, maybe, possibly be foreigners. A study of mass murderers between 1976 and 1995 found that 63 percent of them were white, 33 percent were black, and just 3 percent all other ethnicities.

— The Cost of Fearing Strangers [via]

a lot of people compare the degeneration of the word “rape” to the word “kill,” see: “i’m going to kill you,” and ask why, if we can threaten to take the life of another, why can’t we threaten to sexually violate them in the same offhand manner?
because rape is already not accorded a universal understanding of its horror.  murder is universally loathed, rape is paid lip-service as a travesty and then institutionally ignored.  killers are hunted down, rapists are (generally) not.  dead bodies are taken seriously—sexually assaulted bodies are not.

— onesong (via [via]

Evolutionary psychologists tell us we have fear embedded in our DNA. From the start, Darwinian selection favored the humans who were cautious — the ones who did not eat the pretty berries right away, the ones who did not blunder into the dark caves. It really was a jungle out there, a jungle where the reckless died, while the fearful survived to pass on their genes.
The risk-taking impulse did not entirely disappear, otherwise we’d have a hard time explaining bungee jumping and online dating. But fear has the definite edge in our collective psyche.
Fear protects us from threats. But fear is such a powerful, primal response, it appears even when no dark cave is at hand.

— Partners in crime, allies in courage — Beyond Rape: A Survivor’s Journey, Part 4

Criminals aren’t sent to prison so they can learn to live outside of prison; they’re sent to prison to get what they deserve. And that paves the way for the acceptance of all manners of brutal abuses. It’s not that we condone prison rape per se, but it doesn’t exactly concern us, and occasionally, as in the comments made by Lockyer, we take a perverse satisfaction in its existence.

— There’s nothing funny about prison rape

And he thought he could penetrate her until she surrendered her lesbianism and shrieked full of gratefulness after each incremental thrust. And he thought he could sodomize her until she recaptured her lost blackness once buried in the in-betweens of her sexual confusion. And he thought he could torture her into proper womanhood; the kind of womanhood that knows no voice and better yet knows no self. And he thought her murder would be his (re)birth.

— Kameelah Rashid, from “Tomboys” who “wanted to be raped,” and are often killed