Originally Posted by
Drakain
Ugg. I hate these threads. Why am I even doing this?
Rape Culture - to the extent that it means a societal bias against the victims of rape, is a very real thing. But because literally every fucking thing is politicized to it's most ridiculous extreme, anytime someone express skepticism about the facts revolving a rape they get labelled as being 'part of the rape culture' - which is reductionist and stupid.
This is why the bias against rape victims exists:
1. Most everyone has sex.
2. Most people have been in situations where they been disinhibited or impaired and had consensual sex.
3. The most common defenses to a rape case are a) it wasn't me or b) the victim consented.
Think about that for a moment.
This means that the story you will probably hear from someone accused of rape is likely to be this: we were having a good time, we were flirting, and were both drink/doing drug, and we had sex. In other words the accused has just described a situation that a lot of people have been in. In that context, a lot of people can see themselves in a similar situation: wrongfully accused by someone who is either lying or can't remember giving consent. It's the fact that people can see themselves in the position of a wrongfully accused person coupled with the fact sociopathic lairs have falsely accused people that creates a toxic environment for the victims. Because many of us, at least on some level, recognize the implicit risk of being falsely accused ourselves that we frequently subject the victim to a series of assumptions and suspicions that we wouldn't a victim of another crime.
Look at it in the context of a Robbery. Sure, if someone is walking through a bad part of town we objectively recognize that that person is more likely to be robbed. But when he is robbed, we don't let the robber off the hook or hold him any less accountable for his conduct. We may recognize that the victim in that scenario exercised poor judgment, but we don't conclude that he deserved to be robbed or that the robber should be punished less because the victim made the crime eaiser to commit. That's, in my mind, what 'rape culture' actually is. It's the fact that we treat victims of the crime for rape differently than the victim for other crimes.
On top of that, the actual process of going through a rape investigation and trial is terrible. The way our judicial system is set up is that a victim of rape can, will be, be required to explain their bad decisions and have their choices examined to minute detail. So we end up learning a lot more about the poor decisions the victim made, and blame her for it.
A functional decent person obviously doesn't believe anyone deserves to be raped because its a vile thing to do to another human being. But the fact is, while we might never commit a rape, we may do a lot of things that real rapists also do: drink, have disinhibited sex, have casual sex, and get so drunk we can't remember what happened the night before. And real rapists know that, and so do their attorneys. So that's the story they present. And we give them the benefit of the doubt, sometimes, because we can recognize ourselves in the fiction they're trying to sell us and it terrifies us.