Deborah Lipp

Of all the reams of material I’ve read about the Duke rape case, the raw news, the feminist, race, and class analysis, the anti-feminist rhetoric, the information on DNA testing, the meta-news about how the news is reporting the story, of all of it, the thing that resonates most clearly for me is the car theft analogy.

• Sometimes people who report their cars stolen are lying, for their own reasons, be it fraud, malice, attention-seeking, or whatever.

• Sometimes, a person consents to loan his car, and then accuses the borrower of theft. Such a case is ‘one person’s word against the other.’

• Physical evidence of damage to the car isn’t proof of theft. It might merely prove vandalism. If I break your car window, and then someone else comes along and jacks the stereo, I am not a thief, am I? I’m just a vandal! Nonetheless, such evidence is considered significant.

• Although there are numerous authorities advising you on how to avoid getting your car stolen, your lapses in following that advise aren’t all that pertinent to the theft investigation. If you left a package visible in the car, or if you parked on a dark side-street, your right to file a theft report would not be questioned.

• Some car thiefs are joy-riding youngsters, often alcohol-fueld, and with no criminal background. This doesn’t prevent the theft from being treated as a crime, nor does it shift blame onto the victim.

Now if you look at this, it’s pretty clear that rape is treated very differently in similar circumstances. That’s because we are freakin’ bizarre in how we treat rape, rape victims, and accused rapists.

The idea of false reporting is given many, many times the weight, on very shaky grounds. The victim’s failure to be cautious, appearing to be “provocative,” or easily victimized, is seen as mitigating the crime. The “your word against mine” argument is given enormous credence. Physical evidence of assault is downplayed.

Now, in essence I blame the patriarchy. The patriarchy teaches us to blame women for having sexuality. Men own women’s sexuality, so blaming men for ocassionally asserting their patriarchal right is less important than blaming women for not being “good.” (And I remind you that blaming the patriarchy is not the same as blaming men; the patriarchy is a system. Men are people. Some of my best friends are men.)

I’m kind of curious, though, about the recent trend to blame feminism. I mean, what’s up with that? And essentially I think it’s denial. I mean, one of the wonderful achievements of feminism has been to pull rape out of hiding, to make it a crime we can see and condemn and prosecute. To show us the violence of it, the hatefulness of it, the sadism, the absolute absence of “sex” in terms of desire or eroticism. So now we have to look at it, and shills for the patriarchy can’t stand how ugly it is. Deny, deny, deny. Blame the victim, boys will be boys—all that is old school, we’ve done it before and it’s not working well enough. So blame the people who make us notice. Please give me my rose-colored glasses back.

(Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo.)