I like this cartoon-y thing (the rest of the which you can read by clicking here) for a few reasons.
1. It’s created by the writer of I Blame the Patriarchy, which is an angry, angry, extremely well-written blog I’ve been perusing lately. Twisty, who writes the blog, doesn’t like men so much perhaps (or perhaps just a certain kind of man), but I like her verrah much.
2. It makes nice sport of a recent study alleging a causal relationship between consumption of porn and decreases in incidents of rape, and of the way that there’s a certain subsection of male academia that always seems to be looking for a way of naturalizing rape.
3. It’s cool looking.
Incidentally, I did a lot of research, a year or two ago, on rape, and it’s amazing, and depressing, how little good social science research there is on the subject. There are good statistics, as one would expect, on the reporting of rape from year to year. There seems to be a consensus on how many women are the victims of sexual assault in their lifetimes (about one of four, with the majority of the rapists being men who are known or related to the victim). Little is known, however, about the psychology of the rapists themselves, and, much more problematically, very little is known about what kind of therapy or treatment is most useful in consoling and helping the victims of rape.
I talked to women from two of the rape crisis centers in the area (at the Springfield YWCA and at the Everywoman’s Center at UMass), and although both of them seemed to be extremely conscientious and capable and sensitive, neither of them had much in the way of statistics or literature to justify or explain their particular approach to dealing with women (and occasionally men) who’d been raped.
I suppose I should mention that I was doing a lot of research on rape because a friend of mine was sexually assaulted (though it was interrupted, thankfully, before it went as far as it might havve) at a party to which I’d brought her, and I was pretty unhappy with how I handled it. I’ll expand on that tomorrow or the next day, after I’ve had some time to think about how to approach it, but I wanted to put the subject out there.
