Every time I come back to this my thoughts end up traveling along Foucauldian lines, thinking in terms of power and collective strategy, so I guess I'll just go with it.
There are certain acts or things very significant within a society, which are paradoxically significant in such a way as to make discussion of them and reaction to them very difficult: race and rape, and to a lesser extent nudity and (healthy) sexuality, are examples. On a personal level, the prevailing silence on these topics relegates most discussion of them to extraordinary, often emotionally charged, situations. So a person's instinctive (and reasonable) response to the topic will be to anticipate that emotional charge, and change their words accordingly, whether or not it's actually present. A certain fearful uncertainty (you realize you probably do not know who among your friends has been raped, and who is a rapist) contributes to the difficulty of holding a discussion. On a collective level, the undiscussed act or fact strengthens some power relation, while at the same time allowing that relation to benefit from a contradictory explanation for itself -- in this case, the pertinent explanation for sexism would be something like "Men should protect women." So the fact becomes undiscussable, allowing a power relation to benefit both from an unspoken act and from a contradictory rationalization.
More generally, I think shame and blame (which not coincidentally appear in discussions of rape, or race, which seems the topic most comparable) have the collective result of allowing some large-scale asymmetry to be sustained both by an irrational, unspeakable act/fact and by contradictory rationalizations. And whatever the worth of shame and blame to individuals, the paradoxical nature of the concepts thereof damage attempts to discuss the unspeakable, and thereby hinder attempts to challenge the rationalizations of power with the reality of power: discussions of rape and race that turn to the topic of blame, say, are more likely to be circular and unproductive.
As for how to actually discuss rape: I dunno. A silence resulting from a prevailing irrationality of society can only be countered by extraordinary reasonableness, whether on the part of a group able to discuss the topic or an individual able to weather the inevitable deflections and confusions. Because that reasonableness is extraordinary, there's no easy way to acquire it. Anyway, pardon the tangential nature of my response.
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There are certain acts or things very significant within a society, which are paradoxically significant in such a way as to make discussion of them and reaction to them very difficult: race and rape, and to a lesser extent nudity and (healthy) sexuality, are examples. On a personal level, the prevailing silence on these topics relegates most discussion of them to extraordinary, often emotionally charged, situations. So a person's instinctive (and reasonable) response to the topic will be to anticipate that emotional charge, and change their words accordingly, whether or not it's actually present. A certain fearful uncertainty (you realize you probably do not know who among your friends has been raped, and who is a rapist) contributes to the difficulty of holding a discussion. On a collective level, the undiscussed act or fact strengthens some power relation, while at the same time allowing that relation to benefit from a contradictory explanation for itself -- in this case, the pertinent explanation for sexism would be something like "Men should protect women." So the fact becomes undiscussable, allowing a power relation to benefit both from an unspoken act and from a contradictory rationalization.
More generally, I think shame and blame (which not coincidentally appear in discussions of rape, or race, which seems the topic most comparable) have the collective result of allowing some large-scale asymmetry to be sustained both by an irrational, unspeakable act/fact and by contradictory rationalizations. And whatever the worth of shame and blame to individuals, the paradoxical nature of the concepts thereof damage attempts to discuss the unspeakable, and thereby hinder attempts to challenge the rationalizations of power with the reality of power: discussions of rape and race that turn to the topic of blame, say, are more likely to be circular and unproductive.
As for how to actually discuss rape: I dunno. A silence resulting from a prevailing irrationality of society can only be countered by extraordinary reasonableness, whether on the part of a group able to discuss the topic or an individual able to weather the inevitable deflections and confusions. Because that reasonableness is extraordinary, there's no easy way to acquire it. Anyway, pardon the tangential nature of my response.