meganbmoore (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
meganbmoore) wrote2009-09-30 10:57 am
meganbmoore) wrote2009-09-30 10:57 am
Entry tags:
Maybe I should just swear off humanity and become a hermit.
Apparently, significant portions of the world (or at least, celebrities) think that an adult drugging and then vaginally and anally raping a 13-year-old begging the adult to stop doesn't really count as "rape-rape" and since it was 30 years ago and the offender is an "Artist" you're just a meanie picking on an old man. It's just so awful that he had to live in "exile" for thirty years because he didn't like the jury's verdict and ran away from the law, and good movies (Presumably. Not sure I've seen any of them.) and surely that's enough suffering.
Of course, she was totally asking for it, and it was all her greedy mother's fault anyway.
But then, I'm not sure why that surprises me given some of the discussion in the last rape fiasco (though I always try to delude myself into thinking people won't really act the same if it's real life instead of fiction) to hit my corner of the internet.
Now, for background on the second (I am assuming that the first requires no explanation):
You have the Spiderman comics, which recently had Spiderman literally make a deal with the devil to remove his marriage from existence so that Peter Parker could sleep around and be more accessible to young people. Because that's totally better than a respomsible guy who loves and is faithful to his wife. Anyway. Peter has a female roommate. They had a one-night-stand after getting drunk. then you have Chameleon. a shapeshifter who can impersonate a person right now to tiny cut from shaving. So Chameleon, pretending to be Peter, goes to Peter's apartment, talks to the roommate, and has sex with her. (The end of this, incidentally, is that, "Oh noes! Now Peter's roommate thinks they're involved and he must pretend he's interested or she'll learn he's Spiderman! Poor Peter! Isn't is funny?")
Cue every woman and a number of men going "WTH THAT'S RAPE!!!" Cue the writer and other men saying "It's only rape if she's violently forced!" And then it gets compared to people using fake names, and implying that prostitutes and women who pick up men in bars and don't use their real names are raping the poor men by using deception. Never mind the fact that anyone buying an hour with a prostitute or picking up (or being picked up by) someone at a bar has a pretty good idea that it probably isn't the person's real name, and they don't really care if it is anyway. In one case, one party wants sex, and the other money, and in the other, both just want sex. And then general talk about false identities/names.
Here's the thing: None of it can, in anyway, truly be held up as comparable to this situation. Chameleon isn't simply walking up to someone and claiming to be Peter Parker and having sex with them. He's going into Peter's home, with the woman he lives with, wearing Peter's face, sitting at the table and pretending to be a person she knows, and then having sex with her knowing she believes she's someone else, who she trusts.
She never had the option of consenting to sex with him because she didn't know she was being deceived. She consented to have sex with someone else, and he had sex with her knowing that. When one person does not and cannot consent, it's rape.
Naturally, the discussion also involve how no one makes as big a deal about murder as they do about rape. Gee, I dunno. Maybe because if Roman Polanski shot a 13-year-old in the head of Chameleon shot Spiderman's roommate in the head, no one would be trying to say it was no big deal, trying to say it wasn't murder, using it as a gag, blaming the victim, or signing petitions for the murderer to not be punished for the crime.
ETA: Corrections regarding Polanski legal case are in comments at the LJ version of the post. I'm too lazy to fix it.
Of course, she was totally asking for it, and it was all her greedy mother's fault anyway.
But then, I'm not sure why that surprises me given some of the discussion in the last rape fiasco (though I always try to delude myself into thinking people won't really act the same if it's real life instead of fiction) to hit my corner of the internet.
Now, for background on the second (I am assuming that the first requires no explanation):
You have the Spiderman comics, which recently had Spiderman literally make a deal with the devil to remove his marriage from existence so that Peter Parker could sleep around and be more accessible to young people. Because that's totally better than a respomsible guy who loves and is faithful to his wife. Anyway. Peter has a female roommate. They had a one-night-stand after getting drunk. then you have Chameleon. a shapeshifter who can impersonate a person right now to tiny cut from shaving. So Chameleon, pretending to be Peter, goes to Peter's apartment, talks to the roommate, and has sex with her. (The end of this, incidentally, is that, "Oh noes! Now Peter's roommate thinks they're involved and he must pretend he's interested or she'll learn he's Spiderman! Poor Peter! Isn't is funny?")
Cue every woman and a number of men going "WTH THAT'S RAPE!!!" Cue the writer and other men saying "It's only rape if she's violently forced!" And then it gets compared to people using fake names, and implying that prostitutes and women who pick up men in bars and don't use their real names are raping the poor men by using deception. Never mind the fact that anyone buying an hour with a prostitute or picking up (or being picked up by) someone at a bar has a pretty good idea that it probably isn't the person's real name, and they don't really care if it is anyway. In one case, one party wants sex, and the other money, and in the other, both just want sex. And then general talk about false identities/names.
Here's the thing: None of it can, in anyway, truly be held up as comparable to this situation. Chameleon isn't simply walking up to someone and claiming to be Peter Parker and having sex with them. He's going into Peter's home, with the woman he lives with, wearing Peter's face, sitting at the table and pretending to be a person she knows, and then having sex with her knowing she believes she's someone else, who she trusts.
She never had the option of consenting to sex with him because she didn't know she was being deceived. She consented to have sex with someone else, and he had sex with her knowing that. When one person does not and cannot consent, it's rape.
Naturally, the discussion also involve how no one makes as big a deal about murder as they do about rape. Gee, I dunno. Maybe because if Roman Polanski shot a 13-year-old in the head of Chameleon shot Spiderman's roommate in the head, no one would be trying to say it was no big deal, trying to say it wasn't murder, using it as a gag, blaming the victim, or signing petitions for the murderer to not be punished for the crime.
ETA: Corrections regarding Polanski legal case are in comments at the LJ version of the post. I'm too lazy to fix it.
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