JAN
SIEGEL
Writer, journalist, social commentator
Ape
Culture:
Time to Move On from the Stone Age
Rape culture is a term much in use
nowadays, but we tend to disregard how far back it goes. It’s too easy to peg it to the present day.
I was a seventies
teenager – the decade that constituted a gloomier follow-up to the sixties,
often due to the power cuts. We
visualise the sixties still as the ‘summer of love’, an era when everyone grew
their hair in order to let it down, smoked anything they could roll, and lived
in communes with mauve walls and lava lamps, talking about peace and eating
marijuana fudge. By the next decade, the
permissive society was entrenched, we were all on the Pill, the economy was a
busted flush and the summer of love eventually mutated into the winter of
discontent, only with more sex. It was
supposed to be a sexual free-for-all – but you can’t change the thinking of
centuries in a few sweet years. And now
– right now, here in the wonderful twenty-first century – it’s important to be
aware that for many people IT HASN’T CHANGED AT ALL.
Sexual
freedom is interpreted far too often as sexual entitlement, invariably on the
part of the boys. And that becomes
sexual bullying. Especially in
schools. The guy who sleeps around is
still ‘a bit of a lad’, the girl who does the same is a slag. The labelling is Victorian, the attitudes go
back to the Stone Age. Recently, numerous
cases in America have highlighted this.
Brock Turner, the swimming champ who got a mere three months for raping
an unconscious girl; the Steubenville affair in 2012, where several boys
assaulted an underage girl and posted their antics on social media; the
suicides of Rehtaeh Parsons and Audrie Pott after they were gang-raped,
photographed, and ridiculed. In addition
to the rapes, girls have been pissed on and had insults written all over their
bodies in indelible ink. Terry Pratchett
has said all evil starts with treating people as things: what clearer example
is there than this? These girls are not
treated as humans but as objects, toys to play with, break, discard – and the
perpetrators are often little more than children themselves, spoiled,
destructive children who have never learned empathy or respect for their
fellows. Media reaction has been divided
between indignation at light or nonexistent sentences and sympathy for the
rapists: poor things, they had a ‘lapse’, let’s not damage their future,
although they have ruined the future for their victims.
Firstly,
it’s time to investigate the parents, and find out how far they have cultivated
this moral blindness and sense of entitlement on the part of their
offspring. If an underage boy commits a
crime of this magnitude we should examine his home life and see to what extent
it contributed to his behaviour. If you
think this unjust, read Brock Turner’s father, who pleaded that his son should
not have to pay a high price for ‘twenty minutes of action’, as he
characterised the rape. And the girl is
always blamed: she was reckless, careless, promiscuous, asking for it. Vulnerable. (Remember, girls, it’s a crime to be
vulnerable.) Parents create the
environment in which their children grow: if we are going to postulate that
youth mitigates the crime, then the parents should be held at least partly
responsible.
Secondly,
we need to face the fact that although in the west we have a sexually liberal
culture, we don’t have the core attitudes to go with it. Too many of us still think like the Edwardians,
like the Victorians – like the Puritans, like mediaeval clerics – petrified in
the mindset of past millennia. If boys
get drunk, it’s part of the growing-up process, they’re just kicking up their
heels; whatever they do is simply youthful high spirits and feeling their oats. If girls get drunk, they’re graceless, immoral,
unintelligent; anything that happens as a result is their fault. Girls who get pissed, who show too much leg
or too much cleavage, who sleep with their boyfriends – these are still the
brazen hussies of the nineteenth century. And the men protect their own. In school rape cases, teachers and coaches
are often involved in subsequent cover-ups, excusing the boys on the grounds of
their sporting excellence, or perhaps out of a deep-seated envy.
We
can’t talk about sexual freedom when 50% of the population doesn’t have
it. A sexually free society would give
men and women (boys and girls) the same rights, the same choices, the same
responsibilities – and the same respect.
Until we yank our minds free of the prison of the past, with its double
standards, its narrowness, its hypocrisy, rape culture will always be with us. We
still haven’t left the ape behind.
That's all for today. stay tuned for more posts
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