Did you know that rape is a form of casual sex? News to me, too.

Good old Man Boobz has done it again, and lead me to a post I can write about by Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart.

*Trigger warning for sexual assault apologia, and sexual assault stories


She made a “flow-chart” (in scare quotes because it’s…not really a flow-chart at all so much as, I don’t know, vomit with a bunch of arrows? I’m being generous here) in which she tries to show how casual sex leads to “ECONOMIC STAGNATION!!!!!!!!!!” Yes, that is an exact quotation from her chart. And you know, I could detail, as others already have, how problematic it is to assume that something untested and unproven is “common sense”, but that’s not what pissed me off or inspired me to write about it. Rather, it’s that sexual assault is included under “casual sex”.

I'll be waiting a while

Well, breakups suck. My boyfriend of six years broke up with me last night. That and many other reasons contribute to the suckitude (it's a word, damn it!) of this, not least that male "friends" of mine whom have shown more-than-friendly interest in the past are now going to assume I'll go for them. Men who can actually see women as human beings they might want to just be friends with seem few and far between for me past high school. One I lost contact with, one I ended up dating (he's the one who just broke up with me), and the other is gay. Just about every other male friend of mine is, well, too friendly, and there are few, if any, of them I would actually take up on their offers. You see, investing in a relationship with a very intelligent and intellectual man for over a quarter of my life has left me with some high standards. Basically, I don't want to do it all over again with another man. He's simply going to already be where I'm at. Thus, I decided to to devise some ground rules for dating me. The fact that none of the aforementioned too friendly males have likely read this or will read it pretty much solidifies that we will never end up together. So here it is as follows:

You think you even have a chance at a long-term relationship with me?

A true account of abortion

I have a story to tell here. For safety's sake, I won't tell who's it is, be that mine, my friend's, my family member's, or some random woman's whom I met on the bus, although I have written it in my style regardless. But I have to tell it because it deals with an important issue to me, made even more important by this story, and it flies in the face of many common myths surrounding abortion. Nothing has been embellished here; it's all true. Some of those reading may know whose story this is, and that's fine, but I'm relying on the relative anonymity of the internet to at least induce enough confusion to protect the narrator's identity.

*Trigger warning for sexual abuse, emotional turmoil, and described abortion

How feminists "expand the definition" of sexual assault

I hear and read this phrase a lot from pseudo-feminists (people, especially women, who call themselves feminists and use that as an excuse to criticize and disagree with just about everything feminism stands for), anti-feminists (same as pseudo-feminists, but they don't claim to be feminists), men's rights activists (anti-feminists who claim that men, not women, are oppressed), turncoats (they used to identify as feminists, and perhaps still do, and used to pretend to support feminist theory and philosophy, but are now pseudo-feminists, anti-feminists, or men's rights activists). First of all, let's be clear: I am in no way purporting that the continued expansion of the definition of sexual assault couldn't lead us down a dangerous road. If, for example, sexual assault included all anal sex (which, by the way, is a hell of a lot more likely to come from religious Right-wing fanatics than from feminists), or, in a rather mangled quote misattributed to feminist Catharine McKinnon (it was Andrea Dworkin), that all consensual sex between a woman and man is rape (and that wasn't what she meant), there is cause for concern.

About that "rape by deception"

*Trigger warning for sexual assault scenario

Last I wrote about it, I'll admit, I was angry, and what I said about that particular case I still stand by, but what if the case actually had been as we had initially thought? A few posts ago, I listed some "gray rape" scenarios and explained why each was either clearly rape or clearly sex. Rape by deception generally actually refers to instances such as a man turning out the lights and pretending to be woman's husband before sleeping with her, something I listed as rape for obvious reasons, which I won't explain here. If you want the explanation, visit my "gray rape" post. Another example of rape by deception would be a police officer telling a person ze caught that ze will let hir off if ze has 'sex' with hir, and the officer then did not let hir off. That's rape for other reasons too, obviously. So what about what we believed this case to be? Claims went from "She specifically said she wanted a long-term relationship with only a Jewish man, and he said he was Jewish" to "They were in the heat of the moment and she asked if he was Jewish and he said yes" to "She didn't even ask if he was Jewish or not; she just assumed because his nickname was considered Jewish". Not in any particular order, and there were all sorts of in between, but since these are the ones that stood out to me, these are what I will tackle.

Reverse Sexism

...doesn't exist but what if it did? Inspired by an essay where a woman described how, hey, she wouldn't mind a wife of her own! Men don't seem to get sexism, but I'm sure they might if the roles were reversed. A lot of people seemed to like this on deviantart (with the exception of that MRA I mentioned in my first post), so I'm posting it here.

*Trigger warning for simulated sexual assault apologia

       I am a modern woman. What do I want? First, let’s start with language. When using a singular pronoun of unknown gender, I want it to be written in the feminine (for example, she, her, hers). When referring to the human race, I want it called womankind, women, and woman because words like humanity, people, humankind, and humans are unnecessary after all. However, I want certain objects to have male pronouns such as ships and cars, and we shall call our home countries the “fatherland”, unless that country wants the world to know how powerful it is, in which case it will be appropriately termed "motherland".
       If we must be gender inclusive, we will always put the feminine before the masculine, such as “her or him,” “she or he,” “her or his.” Animal names shall also be in the feminine and we will only use the male version when referring to the gender (example; a lion is a male lioness).

How Gray is "Gray Rape" Really?

Originally posted on my deviantart account.

*Trigger warning for rape apologism

*Trigger warning for described rape scenarios

I recently came across a Cosmopolitan article (on the net, since I don't read Cosmo) that discussed a "new kind of rape" it calls "gray rape." I shit you not. Now, I was lead there from Cara on The Curvature, and she was just as infuriated as I was when I read the article. Admittedly, this discussion took place in 2007, but I still find it a relevant topic to discuss right here, right now. Why? Because people still don't get it. I recently had a conversation in which the person I was talking to said, "But you have to admit that there is a gray area." I have to admit no such thing. Because there isn't. People may not be black and white, but actions can be and often are. Rape is black and white. It either happened or it didn't. If it did, then only the perpetrator is to blame. If it didn't, then only the false accuser is to blame. Period. No gray.

Gray rape is supposedly "sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial and is even more confusing than date rape because often both parties wake up unsure of who wanted what." From this, you would expect the stories to be of a nature where two strangers woke up not knowing each other and couldn't remember what happened the night before and one of them wonders if it was rape (and even then it wouldn't be "gray rape" since if one later remembered that they hadn't said yes, it would still have been rape). But no. As Cara stated, "victims of gray rape didn't only all fail to say yes, but also all actually say no", which they did. I read the article, and there was nothing gray about any of these scenarios, and that includes the one that they didn't even bother to list as gray rape but rather as a confusing experience. By they, I really mean "she," Laura Sessions Stepp, according to whom these assaults wouldn't happen if only women didn't partake in the hook-up culture.

Lolicon as an "Art Form"

Cross-posted on my deviantart account. I'm not linking to the argument itself.

*Trigger warning for sexual assault apologism and defense

There are few people who get my ire up more than sexual assault apologists, and defenders of the abomination that is lolicon (and shotacon) are exactly that. I'm posting an argument I had on deviantart.com concerning the subject where this pedophile tried to defend it as an "art form". I've said most of what I want to say on the subject in this argument. 1, as I call him here, was a lolicon 'artist' himself, surprise, surprise. One of his pieces of 'art' depicted the young adolescent girls with the title, "So easy, a cave man could do them" and another with the title, "Lolicon Dating: get them now because in a few short years they'll realize you have to spend money on them first". For easier reading, since this is light text on a black background, my comments will again be in magenta.

1: If you don't like an artform then don't look at it. I don't like yaoso I avoid it, I don't like how museums have neaked dude taking a sh*t or sitting nude on a rock and I avoid it. I don't make useless complaints about it.



2: But lolicon could potentially harm someone. If a person got too much into lolicon, it could lead to lusting after little girls in real life. I don't support getting rid of it, either, but I can understand the point.

"Rape By Deception" is that by the Israeli Court System

*Trigger warning for abuse of a rape victim by the court system

So I might be a little late on this, but I'm adding my two cents anyway. According to BBC News, it turns out that that whole rape by deception case in Israel is not as many of us had previously thought.

This was in fact a "real" rape charge where the girl in question had to be taken to the hospital, bleeding and bruised and half-naked. This girl had also been sexually abused by her father since the age of six, forced into sexual slavery, and had been living in a women's shelter when she met Sabbar Kashur. She had felt safe with him, and had hoped for a relationship, not sex. So where does the rape by deception part come in? A plea bargain.

Yeah. Rather than face full sentence, Kashur took the plea bargain sentence of eighteen months in prison on the charge of "rape by deception". Thus, the whole she-cried-rape-when-it-turned-out-he-wasn't-Jewish crap came not from her at all, but from the courts.