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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Men's Liberation
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- The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, And Love by bell hooks
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I think men treating women like sex objects happened long before anyone said "All men are rapists" seriously. How does anyone address the historical (and current) context of subjugation and oppression women face under men (who do hold a large majority of positions of power)? I think reducing the conversation to what you said is, frankly, the tactic of the right, and it's really easy to give up on learning that context if one takes a victim complex, like when anyone attacks white people or Christians or straight people or cis people or cops, and ignore everything related to why those groups might have that hate towards them.
How can you address that context if you say "Not all men" and then do nothing to address the original critiques in the first place? If you pretend like the conversation starts and stops at the logical disproving of "All men are rapists," then will you simply ignore that marital rape exists? Will you ignore that women do have higher rates of being sexually assaulted and that we make it hard to do anything about those assaults?
I, sadly, think of "All men are rapists" as a defensive mantra. That we, as a society, have to teach girls and women to fear men because we failed at multiple other points. It isn't true, and it probably isn't a great attitude to take, but I don't know that I can fault anyone for having that view.
False dichotomies and flat truisms don't start conversations tho, they end them. Yes, men have been treating women like sex objects since forever, but men have also NOT been treating women like sex objects - it depends on which men you're talking about. And that sentiment does NOT equal simply ignoring that marital rape exists. The world doesn't consist solely of extremes.
Think if you said getting AIDS was something gay men did. Statistically pretty true - the vast majority of AIDS cases among men are gay man - but do you think that would be a productive way to approach the subject?
But it was an issue before. And it's an issue now. So the phrase isn't really the issue. It's an excuse to do nothing because you aren't the problem, whereas before the excuse to do nothing was that you didn't know about the problem. And if they say "Some men are rapists" to make you feel better, fuck if it isn't an excuse to do nothing because you're not one of them.
It is the responsibility of all people (and thus all men) to stop sexual assaults, and to blame people that are far more likely to be the victims of those assaults for making rhetoric that is extreme in response is to expect a perfect victim that did, does, and will do nothing wrong.
If you would like to use the AIDS epidemic as an example, it would be to treat the gay men as wrong when they said they should seize control of the FDA. It's, technically speaking, not helpful, and there were many working in the public health sector trying their hardest to help those affected by AIDS... But, like, you understand why they said that, right? There were definitely protests before that where nothing happened, where their issues were ignored, and their were people in the government who were to blame.
Yes I understand why people say antagonistic things when they're angry or passionate about something. What I'm saying is that it does no good to turn potential allies into adversaries by hitting their hot buttons. Unless you want your content to only be read by people who are already on your side. Not that echo chambers are all bad - tbh sometimes we need them. The issue before was that there have always been men who treated women like objects. It's also always been true that there have been other men who didn't. The phrasing isn't THE issue but it is AN issue, and it's avoidable by not hanging onto the idea that there's only one conceivable way to say something.