By Alex Saint
It’s been an interesting week in rape news. By
‘interesting’, I mean, of course, ‘depressing’.
On the one hand, there was the story of the
15-year-old Maldivian girl, who was sentenced to 100 lashes for the crime of
being repeatedly raped by her step-father, which provoked international and
cross-gender outrage.
On the other, there was the Steubenville rape case,
in which two High School football ‘heroes’ were convicted of raping a 16-year-old
girl and publicly broadcasting it, which provoked outrage only after a load of
feminist shit hit the fan following CNN’s expression of sympathy for the
rapists.
The two cases are horrible in their own right, not
least because they show up the culture of rape-victim blaming in all its nasty
glory, with the outpouring of horror over the Maldives case being put into
stark contrast by the amount of “Weeeell, if you’re 16 and are drunk at a party
what do you expect (stupid bitch)?” sentiment for the Steubenville case.
What was particularly astonishing, though, was the
sympathy for the Steubenville rapists, promising young men with glittering
careers ahead of them who had - “tragically” - fucked it all up by a night of
high jinks. High jinks, that is, that involved kidnapping a paralytically drunk
girl, parading her from party to party, raping her vaginally and anally,
urinating on her, generally degrading her (see the picture) and broadcasting it
to a rapturous audience. (One 12-minute video they posted was tagged #rape and
#obscene.)
What was particularly grim was the amount of
bystanders who witnessed it and who joined in on the online orgy (“The song of
the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana,” said one tweet. “Some people
deserve to be peed on,” said another).
Along with the perennially disturbing thought that
many think the victim got what was coming, is the thought that the two boys
raped her because they thought it was, well, a funny thing to do.
It’s hard to pin-point what’s behind this kind of
sadism and, crucially, what normalised it - after all, we all have mob
mentality in us and people can do atrocious things when the boundaries are
blurred...
... but my money’s on football culture and internet
porn culture.
America’s obsessive football culture starts early in
the US, with stadia-filling High School football often being the centre of
small-town life, putting the players simultaneously under incredible pressure
while perching them on lofty pedestals. Not only is the players’ football-star
status constantly lauded and applauded, there’s not much of anything else in
these teenager’s lives to provide counterbalance to their seemingly singular
male brilliance.
This rarified existence, with its implied impunity,
is fertile ground for a sadism that, at its core, uses the advantage of
privilege to take pleasure.
Adding fuel to the fire is internet porn, a more
frequently violent, humiliating and degrading - in essence more sadistic -
version of porn than its print counterparts of yesteryear. If you don’t believe
me, compare a search online to a copy of Penthouse circa 1983.
And, of course by virtue of technology, internet
porn is now everyday. The trickle-down effect is that kids can access hardcore
porn in the playground, be under pressure to sext images of themselves to
people they hardly know, tweet or Facebook their sexual experiences without so
much as a backwards glance, post sex tapes...
... and not only think it’s perfectly normal, but
also think that the version of sex being espoused - the cum facial, spit-roast,
ass-to-mouth version - is the *only* version there is.
The bit where football culture and internet porn
culture cross-over is where things get nasty.
If internet porn represents women as dumb bitches
for men to fuck every which way they want and football represents men as
untouchable demi-gods - and, crucially, there aren’t enough boundaries or
contradictions in place, then it doesn’t take long for stories to emerge...
stories such as the Steubenville Two, who probably didn’t realise they were
rapists until they raped.
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