Man-Haters

Shaker LC forwarded this article which discusses the recent case decided by Maryland's Court of Special Appeals which ruled that "when a woman says yes, she can't take it back once sex has begun—or, at least, she can't call the act rape." I've already written about the decision here, so I won't rehash that, but I was interested in one of the arguments offered in favor of the ruling.

Mel Feit, executive director of the National Center for Men, a male-advocacy group based in Old Bethpage, N.Y., says biology is a factor. "At a certain point during arousal, we don't have complete control over our ability to stop," he says. "To equate that with brutal, violent rape weakens the whole concept of rape."

I'm interested in Feit's statement for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because his little biology lesson is a lie. Of course there's "a certain point" at which orgasm is unavoidable—that's true for men and women—but to suggest that men don't have physical control over whether to continue to penetrate a partner is ridiculous. As Lisae C. Jordan, legislative counsel for the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, points out in the article, "Any one of us who's had a toddler walk in on them knows that that's not true. Or a teenager who's had a parent walk in—they stop pretty quickly." Indeed. Feit's insistence on defining men as helpless slaves to their genitals diminishes men, not defends them.

And, secondly, pretending that "brutal, violent rape" is the only kind of rape there is "weakens the whole concept of rape," not the other way around. Date rape—the kind of rape I've described before as the kind of rape "that we don’t like to think about, the kind in which the opportunity presented by a woman who can’t resist, or even say no, becomes irresistible to a man who wears no mask and carries no knife. He is in every other way an average man, who may even have been the focus of this woman’s friendly attention earlier in the evening. He may even feel guilty about what he’s done tomorrow, but it does not stop him tonight—and he does not consider himself a rapist. And what separates him from most men is that he chooses to abdicate his responsibility in not hurting another human being for his own fleeting pleasure."—is the most common kind of rape there is. Not the "brutal, violent rape" we associate with stranger rapes. Women are three times more likely to be raped by someone they know than a stranger, and nine times more likely to be raped in their home, the home of someone they know, or anywhere else than being raped on the street.

Rape is singularly defined by the absense of consent. To argue that rape is only rape if it meets some arbitrary threshold of brutality is, in reality, nothing more than a covert defense of rapists. He couldn't have raped her; she doesn't even have a scratch on her! Feit's "weakens the whole concept of rape" argument is the worst kind of concern trolling—purporting to care about rape victims and the minimization of the gravity of rape, while in fact caring only about its perpetrators and attempting to narrowly redefine the crime.

In no way does it honor men to provide excuses for rapists. In every sense does it suggest that "all men are (potential) rapists" to say that men (all men) are biologically incapable of stopping intercourse "at a certain point." Yet again, we see that the charges regularly levied against feminists are being lobbed in the wrong direction.