maaarine: We always speak of women’s safety. Let’s talk about male violence instead (Anne Enright, T

maaarine: We always speak of women’s safety. Let’s talk about male violence instead (Anne Enright, The Guardian, Mar 20 2021) “They admit to rape but not to blame: “I felt I was repaying her for sexually arousing me,” a man in one of the few studies says.On a Reddit forum where, at the onset of the #MeToo revolution, my soul went to die, men wrote “from the other side” of sexual assault.Their accounts implied covert participation – “She just had this unusually sexual way of carrying herself” – or active reciproca­tion: “In my mind, at the time, she wanted it.” (…)Men do not just disappear in court, they disappear from the discussion, they disappear from the lang­uage we use.Rape is described as “a women’s issue”. We speak of “women’s safety concerns”, not “con­cerns about men’s violence”.We call it “an abusive relation­ship” as though the relationship were doing the abus­ing, or an “abusive home” as though the walls were insulting the occupants for fun.The notor­ious line “she was asking for it” is not so differ­ent to “a woman was raped”; both take the rapist out of the sentence.Male agency is routinely removed from descriptions of male violence, and this helps men get away with it. (…)The vengeful sentence “I felt I was repaying her for arousing me,” feels very familiar to women, who are long tired of the weirdness it contains.But the man who said it also seems to consider arousal to be a kind of punishment. It is not pleasant. It is unfair.The man who says, “This is her fault, she did this,” feels as though he has been acted upon.He is passive, perhaps unbearably so. This man is taking himself out of his own desiring; you might say he is obliterating himself.If I were a man, I might want to put my self back into the discussion, I might want to do a reality check.But if I were a man, I wouldn’t be writing this because writing about rape, talking about rape, protesting against rape and being raped are all women’s work.” -- source link

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