at 13 we are already held responsible. if our shoulders show in school, we are sent home on behalf of the boys who are distracted. we grow up like this. by 16 it’s your fault if you wear the wrong skirt, drink too much, make a mistake, what did you think was going to happen. you are responsible for not screaming, for being too much of a tease, for trusting the wrong person. it’s your job to carry the baby to term, to mother it, to suffer for nine months for something someone else absolutely did. but you got yourself pregnant.
but men. god, it must be nice. nothing sticks to you, does it. when men do terrible things, you shrug your shoulders i’m one of the good ones, though, not all of us are like this. and you can say that because men is a big broad term and it’s unfair to use a brush under which a whole gender might be painted. women are liars, though. women just want attention. women make it up and try to ruin lives and are hysterical and never think about the consequences of their harsh language. and you all can look at each other and know you’re one of the good ones, even if you’re just mediocre, because you don’t think you’ve ever, you know, done something that bad. and it’s fine you’re still friends with that guy you know did do something that bad, but you weren’t at the party she says he raped her at (but you remember his snapchat), but it’s not like you’re him, and besides, it was a year ago and everybody lived. and it’s not your fault, and it’s probably just a misunderstanding, and you’d never say something like “women are whores” but you’d smile, wouldn’t you, and you’d nod because it’s a joke, come on. and it’s a joke, come on.
and when it’s your fault – and god! is it ever? – there’s always an excuse. you were drunk a little bit too. you didn’t know better. you were too young, making a boyish mistake. you were too old, from a different generation, you only know how to treat women in that way. you were angry, you were just fooling around, you were a good guy, not like one of the bad ones, you know, the black men or the brown men or the muslim men or the real problems with this country, amen. you’re a good upstanding citizen, and what, are we going to ruin your life with this simple accusation? no, we’re not, because you aren’t any of those things (if you were, huh, you’d be dead, you’d be shot by a cop or dragged in the street or lynched or kicked out of housing or in jail for weed or a million other things). you’re just a good guy who is being lumped in with the others because women, women are vindictive.
you spend three beautiful months in jail. or one. or a week. or you’re told by a judge the official ruling is no sex until marriage. or buckle down next time and really try harder for your swim team. and this is heartbreaking, god, you cry next to your lawyer while you are found actually guilty with no time served. does she even know the kind of stress you are under. how sad you are. how dare she look at you and ask you to take responsibility. you’re not a monster.
but god forbid you have a uterus and don’t want something growing in it. the judge looks at you from over where he sits. you’re 17 and an immigrant. and you’re going to carry that baby to term because he thinks you’re old enough to have good judgement.
it’s your fault. your responsibility. well, you should have thought about it.
Okay, I wasn’t going to do this, but it kept eating at me (and other people around me). So. Let it be known that I am a South African Bisexual cis female.
“Corrective rape was a term coined by South African lesbians! Thus this is a lesbian-only term!” is something that’s getting thrown around a lot by the Discourse Brigade.
The first time I saw this I burst into laughter. I mean, I am the victim of corrective rape and never have I ever been told by any of my lesbian sisters to not use this term. It never occurred to anyone I know that I would not be able to use this term, or that this is not what my sexual assault was.
It was yet another example of how silly people could be. Were people who had never spoken to a single LGBT+ South African really going to be this ignorant?
I never took it seriously for a second because, really? Surely nobody actually thought that South African Lesbians were gonna expect everyone to conform to some nebulously specific list of things to qualify to use the term “corrective rape”.
But hey, as an African you get used to people talking over you and thinking you ride to school on a lion. Whatever, you laugh and you move on.
But I couldn’t move on.
Because people kept telling other people that they were, I don’t know, spitting on people’s graves, for using this term “incorrectly”.
So let me tell you this right now: If your assault happened because you do not conform precisely to your society/culture’s cisheteronormative* values, congratulations! You get to use the term corrective rape. Compliments of your South African brethren.
End. Of. Fucking. Discussion.
Now- let me tell you why I couldn’t move on.
Because the assholes that are policing the use of this term are spitting on the graves of every single one of my fucking ancestors.
Allow me to explain.
South Africa is a really unique place. Did you know we have eleven (11) official languages? That’s not including the minority ethnic groups that call my country home.
Now, when you realise that you have nine (9) traditionally black South African cultures, two (2) white cultures, the Chinese people, the Indian people, Other Africans… You may begin to figure out we’re really fucking diverse.
And we’re pretty proud of that diversity. Post Apartheid.
Apartheid was a system built- at its core- on ‘us’ vs ‘them’. It wasn’t inclusive. It separated people. It put some people in positions of power over others. It redefined the term ‘gatekeeping’ (in my opinion).
It was really fucking nasty.
It killed a lot of people.
And then Nelson Mandela came along. You know the story- he was imprisoned and instead of hating everyone he taught love and inclusion (after Winnie Mandela got him freed whilst running the Struggle- go read up on her. She’s a true feminist icon).
He is the father of our nation. And he taught us that hatred and bigotry and exclusion are never ever the way to go.
Afrikaans is still an official language. Part of the old Afrikaans anthem is still included in our official anthem.
We are taught that this is our country’s way forward.
We’re the Rainbow Nation!
LGBT+ people were granted every single right American LGBT+ people are still fighting for in our constitution in 1994.
But unfortunately, this lead to a huge homophobic backlash.
Thus- corrective rapes started happening all across the country.
But! The assholes who rape people? They don’t ask whether you’re lesbian or gay. They don’t check your credentials.
They can rape the girl who’s a little too ‘butch’ for their tastes, or the boy who might not play football (soccer for the Americans).
They do not care if you are a card carrying member of the LGBT+! They care only for the fact that you don’t look masculine/feminine enough. That you might have been staring at a boy/girl. That you said no earlier. Maybe you have a LGBT+ friend, so obviously you’re the same. Or hell, maybe your parents know you’re LGBT+ and they pay someone to rape it out of you. Maybe your arranged husband does it on your wedding night.
They do not care how you do not conform to societal standards- only that you do not.
And in South Africa we know this.
We know that no one’s rape is exactly the same as anyone else’s. Because it could never be exactly the same.
So yeah, here a completely straight white girl could use the term “corrective rape” and no one, no one, would bat an eyelash. Because she was correctively raped.
Because we know that united we stand, but divided we fall. And we have fallen so very very far in our past.
So no.
You do not get to fucking gatekeep this term which my brothers and sisters and I in this struggle have shed our blood and tears in.
You do not get to exclude people in our name.
Not when we freely gave this term to the world to use as and if needed.
Kindly respect us and our culture enough to not spit directly into our and our forefathers faces.
*I’m so sorry Trans Tumblr. I couldn’t find another word that really worked here.
** Yes, I have spoken to my fellow LGBT+ brethren. This is a PSA from the majority of us. If only because I cannot speak for all South Africans. Some of us are assholes too.
*** I know the UN wants to rename it “homophobic rape” but we will never us this term since it throws our Trans/NB/intersex/Bi/Ace/Aro/Agender/Questioning/Ally siblings under the bus. It frankly goes against what we invented it for. You, however, are welcome to coin the term yourselves.
So there are these two posts rolling around Tumblr, one about the importance of learning to fail which I already reblogged and so gave notes to; and the other about how antis fail to distinguish what people enjoy in fiction from what they enjoy or will enjoy IRL (nametagging @bai-xue so they know I’m replying to their post even though I’m not giving them notes directly), and I’ve been wanting to sort of—hybridize my reply to them. Because my personal theory re: antis (AMONG OTHER THINGS) is that there’s something more complicated
going on than just an inability to understand that fiction is distinct
from real life.
Broadly speaking, I think what the antis are responding to has to do with how we as a society
conceptualize error, failure, and regret. As in—I think antis’ stance on fiction is part and parcel
of the same all-or-nothing mindset that thinks (e.g.) that children
must never fail at something in school, and that the role of their
parents and teachers is to prevent that failure at all costs; and equally that (e.g.) our faves must not be problematic. In other words, I think we are deciding, as a culture, that there is the Right and there is the Wrong, and in our desire—often admirable—to see the Wrong removed from real life—i.e., we want to protect children from pedophiles, and dismantle systems of oppression, and so forth—we are trying to construct a world in whichpeople are never Wrong.
But often, people are Wrong. And—speaking simply pedagogically—being Wrong is often part of how a person learns how to be Right. So trying to eradicate Wrongness actually can, in a way that I recognize can be counterintuitive, make it harder for people to learn how to be Right.
It’s time to bring an end to the Rape Anthem Masquerading As Christmas Carol
Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s.
So. Here’s the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely *sounds* like a rape anthem.
BUT! Let’s look closer!
“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.
See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.
Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposed to, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…” She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: “at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.
So it’s not actually a song about rape – in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.
remember loves: context is everything. and personal opinion matters. If you still find this song to be a problem, that’s fine. But please don’t make it into something it’s not because it’s been stripped of cultural context.
This is actually really interesting. I’ve never known a lot of the background to this song.
This is fascinating and great commentary. I love context and history and linguistics. Here is my HUGE problem with having to hear it on the radio all the time at Christmas: most people lack that context. We aren’t analyzing music in this way every time we are encountering it. Actual victims of actual sexual assault are being reminded of their experiences with the pressure, the alcohol or the drugged drinks. The song can be a commentary on rape culture and still be super creepy and triggering to people. In a society where this attitude has been so deeply accepted we are still blaming victims, failing to adequately prosecute perpetrators, etc, I don’t think we need an anthem that however teasingly normalizes or romanticizes it.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 