I found Silly Walk's reminiscences interesting and informative Thanks
.
I know it's onl;y anecdotal evidence, but when it comes to cultural influences , anecdotes can winklle out what's
really going on a damned sight better than statistics can. There are too many different ways to interpret statistics .
Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ? But, then, Al's offering of a single, equally anecdotal counter-example does not in any way disprove the "rape culture " theory. You'd surely
expect to find any number of individuals and families who buck any given trend.
In Laurie Lee's autobiographical work "Cider with Rosie" he describes how, as an adolescent, he and his mates made a half-assed plan (whicjh they never actually went through with) to waylay a mentallly challenged local girl and gang rape her. From a modern perspective, it's shocking. Some people also find Lee's understated treatment of the subject shocking. There's a sort of "Boys will be boys" tone to it that suggests that this kind of thing really was pretty normal in rural England, back in his day.
I'm thinking that kids who grow up in a rural enviromnent (like Lee and his friends) are more likely to have a sort of matter-of-fact c attitude to sex, because they'll all-too-likely have got their sex education from watching farm animals mating. So they won't see it as any big deal. That matches with my own (limited) experience of country people. I found a really startling alteration in attitudes to sex when I went to stay in a hamlet in rural Herefordshire for a little while. I mean, for example, it was clear that people I met there (whilst not
approving of paedopholia) did not see paeophilia as a serious crime that ought to be reported . (One guy told me about a man who drove along thev main road near the village, picking young children up and paying tjhem to masturbate him. He's been one of those kids. The kids appreciated the chance to earn easy money. When I questioned to guy about the
ethics of that , he shrugged and said the guy was harmless, in view. "He didn't force us. I felt sorry for him," he said. "I think he did it becuse he was lonely". The difference is that whilst the same sort of thing surely happened in the city too, it would never be talked about so openly and so casually.)
Similarly, when I when a child, sex education in English schools was presented as a purely biological thing (straight after the life cycle of the frog, usually
) . None of the sociological nor emotional aspects were discussed at all. If you had any
feelings on the issue (and who woudn't ? upon discovering that their
parents had - immensely hypocritically- done very
rude things, involving unmentionalble body parts? and that onself was the outcome of that act ?) then you just had to work through those feelings for yourself. One had the impression that feelings just didn't come into it at all. Then the "permissive society " came along and had the effect of heightening one's guilt about having any
feelings about sex (which guilt was already fighting with the more-traditional guilt about sexual desire) especially
girly-type feelings such as love and affection.
For myself, as an adolescent girl in the seventies, I was much more embarassed about the
significance my mind attached to the sex act and by own viginity (for as long as it lasted) than I was about he act itself. And that was entirely due to cultural influences: what I saw on TV, and read in books and newspapers. And being autistic didn't help, there. It meant that I was much more exposed to - and influenced by- exaggerated media reports than I was to the complex, human perspectives of the people immediately around me (who'd mostly already earned my contempt for their narrow-mindedness). And inasmuch as I grasped that most of the people around me hadn't "moved with the times " near as much as the media suggested, I just put that down to them being dinosaurs.
I can easily imagine all kinds of individual attitudes to sex arising out of that particular cauldron of social forces, depending on gender, upbringing, enviroment, personality, etc. But you couldn't claim that anbody's attitudes were unnifluenced by societal norms- or that societal norms no longer existed, just that those norms were in a state of flux, and we were all receiving a a bunch of confusing mixed mes
sages. There was a rendency towards casting off ( or rather repressing ) the "sexual hang-ups" of previous generations, together with a (less obvious) move towards " maculinising" sex .
It was a bloody hard time to be a girl. On the one hand , you got social disapprobation for being "frigid" , or old-fashioioned, iif you didn't put out; and on the other hand, the double-standards that would put a girl down as a "whore" for behaving in ways that were totally acceptable for boys (and always had been ) were still alive and kicking. You couldn't do right.
What I see happening nowadays , is a bit of re-balancing of sexual mores going on. I mean, it's now totally OK to have emotional feelings about sex , especially if somebody groped you without your consent....and all the lecherous gropers of the past 3-4 decades are winding up in court, FFS (or all the ones who wound up famous, at least). Now , I loathe that kind of behavious as much as anybody, but it was so damned common in my youth (and I think it was probably always common) that I fel it's unfair to make examples of a few individuals like that.
For my own part, when I've taken exception to a guy groping me, I've told him very fi rmly to stop. And if that didn't work, I slapped him in the face. And yeah, I can see that some girls (and boys) wouldn't be so assertive . Some girls (and boys) might freeze and wind up being effectively raped. And I can also see that it's ugly behaviout that ought to be stopped a root...if possible. But it doesn't follow that all those guys are evil . Or let's say, if they are, then we might as well top ourselves, because there's no escaping such widespread evil any other way.
So i'm very much with Al, in wanting to firm up the definitions of "rape" and "sexual assualt" to stop this thing becoming a witch-hunt. But i find this idea that societal forces don't come into this at all to be laughable. If different cultures
don't have different rate -rapes I'll be bloody amazed. But the evidence suggests that they do. And what the heck is your problem with
that, Al?