Trigger Warning: Brutal Stupidity
By Rebecca Cusey wishes you feminists would quit raping rapists with your hashtags.
Angelina Jolie wants us to talk about rape, but not in the Western-centric, man-blaming, feminist-professor way of the chattering classes.
She would like us to move beyond insular #YesAllWomen Twitter outrage to a global perspective with a broader, wiser understanding of the evils of human nature and the ability to overcome that evil with good.
Getting from Angelina Jolie made a movie about metaphorically surviving rape to “this hashtag offends me more than rape does” is a weird, convoluted little journey only a wingnut could make.
Also, I’m not sure Angelina Jolie wants fuck-all to do with Ms. Cusey’s bizarre little tantrum. I imagine what Angelina Jolie wants is for us to acknowledge that there are women who face egregious sexism and rape and who have even less agency than Western women. I doubt she wants to pit Western women against all other women. Then again, who knows? I can’t see into Jolie’s head or heart. For all know, she is an incredibly awful person who likes raisins and named her child “Shiloh.” Oh wait, she did that second thing.
Jolie says:
“We must send a message around the world that there is no disgrace in being a survivor of sexual violence—that the shame is on the aggressor…We need to shatter that impunity and make justice the norm, not the exception, for these crimes,” Jolie said. “I have met survivors from Afghanistan to Somalia and they are just like us, with one crucial difference: We live in safe countries, with doctors we can go to when we’re hurt, police we can turn to when we’re wronged and institutions that protect us.”
This sounds like an extremely well-meaning but naive quote from Jolie. If Western women often have positive experiences reporting rape and abuse, it’s certainly not something that’s been well-documented. However, women having terrible experiences reporting rape/abuse/harassment has been rather well-documented. That being said, certainly most of us have far more agency than your average Somalian. But comparing ourselves favorably to Somalian women seems to me like setting an ankle-bruising bar. Surely we can do better.
Cusey mouthfarts:
In other words, Western women have what many women around the world do not: Tools to fight back. That’s hardly the word from the #YesAllWomen crowd.
Having tools and having good tools that actually work are two different things. I would argue that many Western women have been shortchanged in this area. It’s gonna be hard for me to fix a leaky pipe with this:
I leave you with an excellent comment I found Roy’s place, which nutshells this idiocy beautifully:
Pff, these jerky feminists, with their civilization that’s too advanced, smugly demanding there be no rape! Why don’t they ever tweet about how great it is to have universally noble cops and problem-solving rape kits?? Ungrateful bitches!
Look, Western civilization is perfect as is. But it’s also fragile. And if these bitches try to make it perfecter by reducing rape — angrily! — then we will topple, as we will have committed civilization’s gravest sin: Refusal to accept a certain amount of rape while tweeting heartfelt appreciation for how it could be worse.
UPDATE…another great comment from Matt:
By Ms. Cusey’s standard, does that mean the American Christianists should STFU about how “persecuted” they are, since there are other members of their religion being *killed* overseas? Or is the argument that being called a bigot after they go on a rant about how terrible “TEH GHEYZ” are somehow supposed to be worse than being killed?