First of all, thank you for this post, and you are brave for making it.
A small number of people came up with things like "What about men raped by women, or same-sex rape? Where does that fit into this?" To which the answer was "That doesn't fit into the topic of this post," with a side of "You're derailing." Now, a couple of those posters actually were derailing, but is the idea derailing? I don't know. Having been raped by a woman, and raped while not everyone around me considered me a woman, I feel left behind by this argument, actively pushed out of the conversation. At the same time, I just said above that I wanted there to be room for serious conversations about specific elements of rape issues that weren't focused on my experience. So shouldn't I be glad that this conversation didn't apply to all of my assault experiences, not angry at being excluded? Isn't it important to have these conversations that happen in broad sweeping gendered terms, even if they leave some people or experiences out? (I think part of the problem with that is that the same people get left out, time and time again, but I don't have a good solution for that, or even know if it's true.)
I think that is exactly the problem- the same people left out again and again, and by default. So that if someone whose experience is not that of a heterosexual cis-woman having been raped by a heterosexual cis-man wants to have a conversation about his/her/hir experiences, he/she/ze has to have it in a separate "conversation about rape of people like me in circumstances like mine" space, away from "normal" conversations about rape which involve straight cis-men raping straight cis-women. And that's othering, it's heteronormative and cis-privileged, and it overlooks the similarities of experience in favor of the differences. And sometimes it's those similarities which need to be discussed, so people become more aware of what really goes on and how it's not just a straight cis-men and straight cis-women phenomenon.
So while some people saying these things is derailing (such as "But women rape men too!" as a way of shifting the blame to women "equally" in a conversation about men raping women), not all instances of mentioning non-"default assumption" rape is derailing. Sometimes it's very necessary to keep the conversation honest, to keep participants from leaving people out, and discrediting their traumas, and making it harder for them to heal because they're being silenced from the rape discussion spaces as well as out in the general world.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-18 06:00 am (UTC)A small number of people came up with things like "What about men raped by women, or same-sex rape? Where does that fit into this?" To which the answer was "That doesn't fit into the topic of this post," with a side of "You're derailing." Now, a couple of those posters actually were derailing, but is the idea derailing? I don't know. Having been raped by a woman, and raped while not everyone around me considered me a woman, I feel left behind by this argument, actively pushed out of the conversation. At the same time, I just said above that I wanted there to be room for serious conversations about specific elements of rape issues that weren't focused on my experience. So shouldn't I be glad that this conversation didn't apply to all of my assault experiences, not angry at being excluded? Isn't it important to have these conversations that happen in broad sweeping gendered terms, even if they leave some people or experiences out? (I think part of the problem with that is that the same people get left out, time and time again, but I don't have a good solution for that, or even know if it's true.)
I think that is exactly the problem- the same people left out again and again, and by default. So that if someone whose experience is not that of a heterosexual cis-woman having been raped by a heterosexual cis-man wants to have a conversation about his/her/hir experiences, he/she/ze has to have it in a separate "conversation about rape of people like me in circumstances like mine" space, away from "normal" conversations about rape which involve straight cis-men raping straight cis-women. And that's othering, it's heteronormative and cis-privileged, and it overlooks the similarities of experience in favor of the differences. And sometimes it's those similarities which need to be discussed, so people become more aware of what really goes on and how it's not just a straight cis-men and straight cis-women phenomenon.
So while some people saying these things is derailing (such as "But women rape men too!" as a way of shifting the blame to women "equally" in a conversation about men raping women), not all instances of mentioning non-"default assumption" rape is derailing. Sometimes it's very necessary to keep the conversation honest, to keep participants from leaving people out, and discrediting their traumas, and making it harder for them to heal because they're being silenced from the rape discussion spaces as well as out in the general world.