BitterBuffalo has found an anti-rape campaign that focuses on what men can do to prevent rape. This should be the norm, but instead most campaigns focus on what women can do to avoid rape, which is sick not only because it puts the responsibility on the targets of crime rather than the criminals, but also because when criminals are denied one target, they just move onto another. So there is worse than no point in advising the targets of crime on avoidance.
This campaign from MenCanStopRape.org is different:
It shows four couples. Above each couple is the slogan “My strength is not for hurting.” At the bottom is the slogan “Men can stop rape.” In all the images, the men look directly into the camera while the women look off to the side.
The first couple is a young Asian man and woman. It says, “So when she changed her mind, I stopped.” The second couple is a young white man and woman with dark hair. It says, “So when she was drunk, I backed off.” The third couple is a young man of color and a white man, and it says, “So when I wanted to and he didn’t, we didn’t.” The fourth a final couple is a young white blond man and woman, and it says, “So when I paid for our date, she didn’t owe me.”
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I really like these ads. With normal anti-rape ads, I often think that I never see billboards advertising: “If you want to reduce your chances of being victim to drunk driving, don’t cross the street at night” – instead, we see “don’t drink and drive”.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Those are inspiring. The other thing I liked (besides the obvious fact that they focus on men) is that they don’t water down masculinity. The slogan “My strenght is not for hurting” seems very much in line with a healthy attitude about manliness, but the beautiful thing I percieved is that it completely shuts down machismo. Yes, you have a certain strength if you’re a man, but using that strength to force yourself on women is stupid and wrong, it seems to say.
Miss Gradenko(Quote) (Reply)
awesome. I hope we see more such campaigns in future.
A.(Quote) (Reply)
When I first saw this campaign I was quite excited. I showed it to many friends.
One of them immediately said “The problem is it focuses on rape as a thing men do. Women rape too.”
To which I replied, after a long pissed off pause, “Sure. But there are only 4 posters. To keep it correct, statistically, they have to do 72 more* before they do ones about how women shouldn’t rape either.”
Which may have been snide of me. Because this friend has a friend who was raped by a woman. But still, I couldn’t help feel that the objection lead less to a line of “yes we should try to stop all rape” as it did to a line of “but women rape too so we really shouldn’t say anything to men until we fix that.”
….
Anyway, I still love the ads.
*I don’t know that the math there makes sense. I was making numbers up.
Brand Robins(Quote) (Reply)
This brought tears to my eyes. Would that we could see these on billboards all over Australia.
Syburi(Quote) (Reply)
The stats on child molestation are:
1 in 20 men goes around raping kids
1 in 3300 women goes around raping kids
I wouldn’t think a higher percentage of women would have much success raping grown men than they would raping children, given the strength differentials. (I know, I know – the usual MO for women raping men is to get them drunk, but if/when strength comes into it, the average woman will be at a disadvantage with the average man.)
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I’m sorry that your friend was raped. It’s awful no matter if it’s a man or a woman who did it.
I’m not sure if the point of the poster was to stop all rapes as it was to address the attitude of entitlement and the issues of consent that can lead to rape. I could be totally wrong here (so feel free to correct me), but I don’t think most women who commit rape do so out of a sense of entitlement (i.e. s/he owes me sex) or because they’re fuzzy on the issue of consent (i.e. I didn’t know having sex when s/he was drunk and couldn’t say no was rape.)
I would think most women who commit rape do it so deliberately, so the message of taking a personal responsibility to prevent rape wouldn’t be applicable to them, the same way I don’t think that message is applicable to serial or sadistic rapists.
But on the subject of entitlement, consent, and personal responsibility, I think it’s a kick ass poster. I’m glad to see someone spelling it in out the clear that no, you’re not entitled to sex because you bought dinner, yes sex with someone who’s drunk and therefore can’t give proper consent is wrong, and if they don’t want to, you don’t force them.
Lika(Quote) (Reply)
May I ask where you’re getting those stats?
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
I also have a male friend who was raped by a woman. He was drunk and she was sober, so it’s very possible she didn’t view it as rape (and I wish I’d known enough to call it such at the time).
I have a disturbingly large number of friends who were raped. Every other one (that I know of) was raped by a man or men.
Regardless of individual anecdotes, the overwhelming majority of rapes are committed by men, and that’s what this campaign is addressing. I don’t think it’s somehow defective because it can’t address the reasons behind 100% of rapes (how could it?). It doesn’t demean the victims of female rapists to try to stop men from raping, and such an attitude smacks of “If you can’t save the world don’t do anything at all.”
I still think we need to have rape defined to teenagers of BOTH genders in a comprehensive way, but the presence or absence of that message doesn’t make this campaign any less awesome.
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
This is fantastic! :’D
Sure, it might not cover all kinds of rape as pointed out in a comment above – but it’s certainly a big chunk of it. I’d rather have them to start somewhere than doing no campaign at all.
Apparently they’ve already been around for a while. It’s a pity that these kind of organizations are so much less popular than the omnipresent advices for women to avoid being raped.
Sabrina(Quote) (Reply)
I’m EXTRA excited they addressed rape in the context of homosexual relationships too. Best anti-rape campaign ever? Quite possibly.
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
100% agree.
Love it, love it, love it!
Nuria(Quote) (Reply)
Me, too.
Scarlett(Quote) (Reply)
It’s a big assumption to make, that men who rape do that because of some misunderstanding around issues of entitlement and consent (whereas women don’t suffer these “miscommunications”).
Rapists of any gender or orientation rape because they want to rape. They get off on the power dynamic and they get off on the humiliation of the other party.
But the people around them allow them to justify their actions as misunderstandings, miscommunications, issues of excessive drinking or lack of social boundaries, etc.
I think this campaign will be more effective on the friends of rapists than on rapists themselves. It will force the non-rapist enablers, those who don’t say anything when they see Joe got the his room with a girl who’s blind drunk again, or watch Sam put his hand up a girl’s skirt while she sqeuals and “jokingly” tries to get away, from keeping schtum in those situations. Or at least, that’s my hope, because I think that would be a genuinely successful strategy in exposing and marginalising people who get off on non-consensual sex.
MarinaS(Quote) (Reply)
Hm, I don’t know. I think this ad campaign doesn’t address the person who rapes for power, but more those who aren’t aware of their actions as rape, or who feel entitled to “getting some”. These people, I would think, don’t set out to rape another person and hence this campaign might (!) reach them.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Likewise.
I also–cynic that I am–think it addresses the kinds of rape where you *can* change the potential rapist’s mind. People who *set out* to rape are not the sort of people who can, I think, be reformed or redeemed, certainly not by public awareness campaigns. What this campaign does is get the guys who think it’s “not *really* rape because [she wanted to before, we were in a relationship, I bought her dinner, blah blah blah]” and, as Marina points out, the friends/enablers.
Which is a major step forward.
Isabel C.(Quote) (Reply)
It’s true that many rapists can’t be changed (at least not by methods we’ve discovered to this point), but they DO adjust their tactics according to what they think they can get away with. By chipping away at the pro-rape culture, this ad helps shrink the world in which rapists feel they can rape without repercussion, or even have tacit approval from society.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Of course – I had intended to include a link, but forgot:
http://www.childmolestationprevention.org/pages/tell_others_the_facts.html
“An estimated one in 20 teenage boys and adult men sexually abuse children, and an estimated one teenage girl or adult woman in every 3,300 females molests children.”
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
It’s a big assumption to make, that men who rape do that because of some misunderstanding around issues of entitlement and consent (whereas women don’t suffer these “miscommunications”).
I didn’t mean to imply that men who rape did it out misunderstanding (and I acknowledge that my assumption that women don’t suffer those “miscommunication” is probably wrong.) I was saying some men do and this poster applies more to those men, but you’re right, Mr. Fuzzy About Consent and Mr. “The bitch owed me sex for the money I spent on her” rape because they want to rape, and use entitlement and confusion as a way of justifying their actions.
It will force the non-rapist enablers, those who don’t say anything when they see Joe got the his room with a girl who’s blind drunk again, or watch Sam put his hand up a girl’s skirt while she sqeuals and “jokingly” tries to get away, from keeping schtum in those situations.
Good point. At the very least, it tells people these are no longer excuses for rape, and the rapist can make a choice to keep from hurting others and therefore is responsible for his or her action.
Lika(Quote) (Reply)
The poster is speaking at least as much to rape apologists as rapists. You know, the friends, coaches, relatives and neighbors of rapists who say, “Well, she teased him for three hours then decided no. Frankly, between you and me…” and so on. I have no idea how many rapists bother to come up with a justification for rape, but rape apologists certainly do.
That’s “rape culture.” Changing it won’t make rapists turn into nice people, but it will make it harder for them to get away with it. Not just legally, but socially: without rape culture, even a rapist who beats the legal rap might be shunned by peers. Suddenly, for the first time in history, rapists would have a lot to lose by being rapists. If rape culture continually, gradually fell apart, I think victims would feel more comfortable reporting and juries would feel more comfortable convicting Nice White Boys along with the Other men they’re so happy to convict already.
The poster’s trying to help create a world without rape culture. Directly or indirectly, such a world *would* reduce rape.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Good point
Scarlett(Quote) (Reply)
Do you have a link to the research where those figures are from? I did read through some of the research on that site and I haven’t been able to find what study they’re using for their figures.
H(Quote) (Reply)
H, no, I don’t – I had the same experience with the site as you. The problem is, there are plenty of studies about how many people get raped, but way too few about how many people are rapists. These are the only stats I’ve ever seen regarding women rapists at all. Ever.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
That may be so, but the statistics on how many children get raped/molested by women make the 1 in 3300 figure unlikely. If 6-14% of molested children are assaulted by women, and only 1 in 3300 women is a molester, then those women are raping a LOT of children. An average of 26 or so in the US, actually.
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
Except, Shaun, that many child molesters are far more prolific than that. In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman states that “many child molesters victimize hundreds of children”, citing a study which found that molesters in their 40s had an average of one victim per month since their teen years (when sex offenders typically start). In the book notes, he says those numbers came “from an interview with Malcolm Gordon, a psychologist at the Violence and Traumatic Stress Branch of the National Institute of Health.” Goleman says nothing about the gender of the molesters, which suggests to me that the women are about as prolific as the men.
Goleman also mentions a bus driver and a school teacher who, between them, molested hundreds of children in one single year.
From http://www.darkness2light.org/knowabout/statistics_2.asp:
* Nearly 70% of child sex offenders have between 1 and 9 victims; at least 20% have 10 to 40 victims. (23)
* An average serial child molester may have as many as 400 victims in his lifetime.
So 26 women per child sounds about right to me, as an average.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer: Holy shit. I don’t have time to look at that right now, but holy shit that’s a lot of kids.
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
So I just linked this campaign on my blog, and I really don’t get many comments, but I immediately got this (paraphrased/translated from German):
“Stupid campaign. Men know rape is wrong, and whoever is not scared by long prison terms won’t stop because of these posters. At least women can do something not to get raped.”
To which I explained the posters a little more, saying how some people might find it natural to do what the posters suggested not doing, and end up raping someone without actually wanting to rape someone. And then he replied:
Wow. Welcome to the target audience, I guess. I had to really rein myself in not to unload on the guy, and I still might if he answers again.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Seems the guy is a pick-up artist who explains his “game” with evolutionary psychology. That explains a lot. Sadly.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Oh, Patrick, that sounds like Dmitri the Lover. He’s crazy, and you should feel free to unload or delete his comment, or whatever feels right to you. And he’s not sincerely confused about this stuff – he’s just deeply misogynistic. If he comments further, it’ll only get worse.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I’m already in a long conversation here, and I did warn him I would delete his comments if he went overboard. My patience is running low already, but since he meanders from topic to topic, I figured I’d keep him visible for now just to posit a good (or bad) example.
The most recent comment was that the “Yes means yes” campaign was about asking for permission every step of the way, i.e. during sex, anything a man does would have to be preceded by a “can I kiss you now?” etc. And then he argued that pick-up artistry could be regarded as feminist since at least one book he read said you should be friendly to women and, if they say now, move on to the next one.
Yeah.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
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