On Topic Of Rape: As Men We Mostly Don’t Know What We’re Talking About

January 23, 2013 Written by Current Events , Violence Against Women , Women

It really didn’t have to come to this, but now that we’re here: why are we men suddenly so intent to make asses of ourselves in conversations about rape?

I’m an American man — like many other American men, I was raised to believe my opinion has inherent value. Like other American men, I feel entitled to be heard when I have my opinion, regardless of the extent of my expertise on the subject. I like to think I’m usually right, but sometimes after I open my mouth it turns out I was dead wrong. I know I’m not alone in talking out of my ass, and I know it’s nothing new for men. We get ourselves in trouble all the time! Take this guy for instance. And this guy.

But when we mess up, we own up. Right? It’s not a big deal. Just fess up, correct the mistake and move on.

Look at radio DJ Howard Stern — last week, he coughed up this gem about witnessing Girls series creator Lena Dunham nude in the season premier of her show:

“It’s a little fat girl who kinda looks like Jonah Hill and she keeps taking her clothes off and it kind of feels like rape…It’s like, I don’t want to see that.”

To Howard’s credit, he did apologize – although in his usual sarcastic backhanded way. It kind of begs the question, though: why did he feel ok comparing television nudity to rape? He’s just the latest in an epidemic. Last year, Republican senate candidate Todd Akin got his entire party in trouble for spouting off falsehoods about rape. And now GOP Rep. Phil Gingrey is in on the action. Both of them have apologized, too. But why is this happening in the first place??

akin

Most American men don’t know anything about rape — we don’t know what it feels like and we don’t live in fear of it. Lack of expertise shouldn’t preclude us from forming opinions and having discussions, of course. We just have to approach the subject with humility.

As an example of how not to go about it, take The Good Men Project. The Good Men Project was started by Tom Matlak as a community for men to discuss gender issues. In the “about” section of their site, the Good Men Project defines itself as such: “We are fostering a national discussion centered around modern manhood and the question, ‘What does it mean to be a good man’?”

It’s an admirable goal, and the community around the site shows real promise. However, I’d like to address how Matlak handled his first major test of character: discussion about rape. In the name of open discussion, over the last several months the Good Men Project has been publishing articles by unrepentant rapists and allowing threatening misogynists to run rampant over their comment sections — in short, they have made their site a very unwelcoming and unsafe place for people to hold a “national discussion around modern manhood.” Mary Elizabeth Williams has a good rundown at Salon of what the Good Man Project has done wrong.

Again: not a big deal. Building a new community centered around freewheeling discussion of gender issues is a difficult task, and one that is certain to create controversy. Luckily for Matlak and the Good Men Project, there are experienced writers who have been debating these issues and their pitfalls for years — a group of potential mentors for young entrepreneurs who’ve been through it all before.

Right? Wrong. When a few gender writers gently pointed out that the Good Men Project’s status as a safe place for gender discussion was in jeopardy, Matlak responded defensively and doubled down on ignorance, which empowered a hateful mob to make gender-based attacks on those offering thoughtful criticism that could have helped his site continue to grow. In the end, it’s all up to Matlak to save his nascent reputation and his growing community. If he doesn’t take action, Matlak’s Good Men Project will end up as nothing more than a haven for anti-feminists and rape-apologists. Or as they’re known to most people, not “good men.”

Todd Akin admitted he was wrong.

Phil Gingrey admitted he was wrong.

Even Howard Stern admitted he was wrong.

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but why can’t Tom Matlak follow Todd Akin and Howard Stern’s lead on gender issues? Or better yet, why can’t he correct his website’s policies to make it a safe place for a real discussion on rape? The first step is admitting that when it comes to sexual assault, those of us who aren’t experts have to listen and learn before we speak.

Good luck to Tom Matlak, who as far as I can tell is sincere in his desire to create a real community for discussion around gender. I think he’s going to need it.

 

 

Photo credit: KOMUnews via photopin cc.

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  • http://twitter.com/iproposethis joanna schroeder

    Hi Sam. Thanks for the compliment about our project and our writers over at GMP. We certainly knew going into this project that there would be controversy, and we knew we wouldn’t always get it right. It’s a scary thing to try to do something different, knowing that sometimes you’re going to do it wrong – or at the very least, that people will think you’re doing them wrong.

    Almost daily I’m told via comments or Twitter or other sources that something we’re doing is wrong. That publishing feminist writers is wrong, or that talking about sexual assault upon men is wrong, or that we’re not publishing enough feminist content, or that Tom Matlack is a (insert insult here).

    The fact is, we work our asses off to try to do the best work we can, to help the world as best we can, to most represent men’s voices and men’s issues. Again, we’ll never be perfect, and when I meet people who think they are, I’m certain they are probably the most imperfect of all.

    All that being said, I want to clarify one fact for you. With the exception of the anonymous addict/rapist who talked about party culture, we have never published an unrepentant rapist. So that is one, not multiple rapists. And we absolutely did make a mistake there – at least one – in that at the least we should have framed that man’s words better. Actually, we should have framed them a hell of a lot better. I wrote a reaction piece that went up at the same moment as the rapist’s story, because I wanted to contextualize that this person IS a rapist, and that he needs immediate help. In my opinion, what I should have done differently, at the very least, was to have written my piece and put his quotes within a harsher critique, so that there could have been no way of mistaking that we, the editors of GMP, did NOT condone this behavior.

    Our main objective there was to highlight a frighteningly common mindset inside the “party culture” that we believe puts people in danger. And if we messed that up, then I apologize. It wasn’t exclusively my editorial decision to run the piece, but I take responsibility for the part I played in the way it was published. The editorial staff (you can meet us on our masthead) was incredibly upset about the reaction, and we did a lot of soul-searching in that process.

    We’re happy to say that we’re moving forward with what we’ve learned, and I highly recommend Fem2pt0 readers go check out our front page. See the good work there right now, and what’s been up for months (and years). Certainly there have been missteps, but the vast, vast majority of what is on The Good Men Project is work I stand by, and that I’m proud of.

    Ultimately, you’re right. I think it’s a shame when people buy into propaganda and dismiss an entire body of work. But I know that our work will stand the test of time, and we will only get better.

    As far as comments go, our site gets way too many comments to be able to delete any words we disagree with. Look at other sites with our traffic and greater, you will find hateful and ridiculous comments everywhere. We do our very best to delete what we can, but we are still a startup and simply cannot lay eyeballs on everything. We encourage our readers to email us if there’s something in particularly that we’ve missed.

    Beyond that, we’ve seen some AMAZING things happen in our comments section through dialogue. In the last year and a half since I joined the GMP editorial staff, I have had probably a few dozen different MRAs or “antifeminists” either publicly or privately tell me that their feelings about feminism have changed because of conversations they’ve had at GMP, with myself or others, such as Julie Gillis. I’m not out to convert people to feminism, but I don’t want to silence people entirely.

    Sure, I’d love to axe any comments I disagree with. And sometimes I have to have other editors tell me to back off the commenters when I’m getting too harsh with them (like I’m on The Bad Girls Club, “Hold me back! Hold me back!”), but in the long run, I hope people will see that commenters make up a very small proportion of who reads us (or any site) and that our editorial voice is reflected in the articles and posts you see on our front page.

    Also, to note, I heard Howard with Lena Dunham when it was happening and at first he was sarcastic, but at the end of the segment I felt he was incredibly heartfelt, and I was moved. She is a champ for even going on his show, but her spirit is inspiring in about a billion different ways, and that was just one of them. In doing that, in engaging with him the “enemy” I strongly believe that he saw what he did as deeply wrong, and probably learned a lot about fat-shaming and disrespecting women. Hopefully his listeners heard his apology (which wouldn’t have happened had she not gone on the show) and were moved and learned something, too.

    I could go on and on about their exchange and the idea of bodily exposure being rape, but I will end my little note now. It’s already frighteningly long!

    Thanks for the words.

    Joanna Schroeder (Senior Editor)

    • http://twitter.com/iproposethis joanna schroeder

      (Seeing that above, I’m actually laughing out loud at how long it is. My apologies!)

  • http://dannyscorneroftheuniverse.blogspot.com/ Danny

    Matlak responded defensively and doubled down on ignorance, which empowered a hateful mob to make gender-based attacks on those offering thoughtful criticism that could have helped his site continue to grow.
    If that “thoughtful criticism” had been more than declarations of rape apoligism and anti-woman sentiment it may have actually been the help that you claim it to be.

    There are not many places that are perfect as most of us will agree but there is one thing I’ve seen done at Good Men Project that has not been done on a large scale. And that is to provide a space for men to tell their stories and have conversations that need to take place for the betterment of not just individual men but for men overall.

    Or better yet, why can’t he correct his website’s policies to make it a safe place for a real discussion on rape?
    The policy does make for a safe space for discussion on rape. What it doesn’t make for is a space where certain groups are expected to take a back seat to others based on nothing more than group affiliation. And speaking of….

    The first step is admitting that when it comes to sexual assault, those of us who aren’t experts have to listen and learn before we speak.
    Actually a lot of the guys that comment over there do have experience with sexual assault. The problem is “sexual assault”, in terms of safe spaces and conversations and humility and knowing when to speak and when to listen, usually means “sexual assault against women”. There is a lot more to the discussion on rape than listening and helping women that have experienced sexual assault at the hands of males.

  • DKyle

    While I agree with your analysis, one point that is often lost is that while most men do not fear rape, men are actually more often the victim of rape than are women according to the Justice Department there were 216,000 male rape victims in prison in 2008 alone and each victim was raped between 3-5 times. This far outnumbers female rape cases. http://reason.com/archives/2011/06/20/rape-factories

    • http://twitter.com/mhairi_mcalpine Mhairi McAlpine

      That link doesnt specify the gender or sex of the 216,000 rape victims, it quotes one case involving a man and one case involving a woman. I suspect there probably are more male rape victims in prison, because there are more men in prison and prisons are – as that link says – rape factories, however the idea that men are more frequently the victims of rape is utter nonsense.

      The only areas where males are substantially sexually victimised is in the family as children and within prison, women are sexually victimised everywhere.

      • http://dannyscorneroftheuniverse.blogspot.com/ Danny

        But it’s my understanding that the conversation is about rape. Not rape with quantifiers.

        I understand what the author of the post is trying to get at but it seems that in the end he is trying to say that regardless of the numbers on rape gender is what determines what role one should have in the conversation. I don’t fully agree with that mind though.