Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Rape Discussions...

Which I'm sure my readers are getting bored of me talking about, but it's a subject of interest to me.

As per a QP comment on one of her posts: http://quizzicalpussy.com/dehumanizing/#comments (NSFW site)

"That being said, your question [of what behavior is appropriate in rape discussions] might not be well received on feminist sites generally because it could possibly be interpreted as 'it’s your job to teach me'"

The very fact that this works as a derailment tactic suggests there are serious problems there.  Other communities talk about things like The September That Never Ended, taking for granted there are regular infusions of people who don't understand the mores of the community, that teaching them those mores is part of how the community prospers and grows.

This is a part of every community.  A community which cannot or will not do this is crippled and doomed, which is to say, it -is- their jobs to do this.  This is part of humanity; we keep dying and getting replaced, and training our replacements is a constant job.  We cannot expect that people should "Just know" the right way to behave, we have to teach them that, whether they're twelve, twenty two, or eighty two; openly discussing rape is relatively new, and it isn't even reasonable to expect that everybody automatically know how to appropriately behave, particularly when there are holy wars going on about what exactly the mores should be ("Sometimes what’s acceptable to one survivor isn't to another", although I'd suggest from personal experience that it's rare that what is acceptable to one is acceptable in its entirety to another).

If it's too traumatic to make these explanations, maybe the old timers are right in that rape -shouldn't- be discussed openly.  Which ties to some extent into my previous post (in response to the same OP of QP's) suggesting rape cases be entirely closed-document, closed-court.

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