In which I decide to complain about people on the Internet, part II.

CountryPumpkin · 2012-02-05 11:22:13

http://www.fark.com/comments/6923463/Woman-receives-Facebook-friend-request-from-man-who-raped-her-when-she-was-14-years-old-She-gets-hero-tag-for-how-she-handled-it

Woman gets a friend request on Facebook from her rapist (she was gang-raped at the age of 14) and responds by calling him and talking to him about it. He apologizes and she gets a happy ending (which is kinda weird since, y'know, he raped her but whatever).

Let's see how the denizens of Fark respond:

Abuse of alcohol and drugs made it difficult for her to distinctly and positively confirm what she recalled.
Maybe the whole idea of getting trashed with 3 older males alone in some warehouse wasn't the best choice.

Leaving the keys in the ignition of my Corvette in South Central LA doesn't mean I deserve to get my car stolen, it means I contributed to it happening by doing something unwise.

TFA doesn't specify how old the dude was at the time. I mean, I'm not saying it justifies anything, but a 15 year old raping a 14 year old isn't quite as bad as a 25 year old raping a 14 year old.

Maybe the whole idea of getting trashed with 3 older males alone in some warehouse wasn't the best choice.
Yes, but that doesn't mean she deserved to be raped.
No it doesn't. But it might mean it wasn't rape. Regret != rape. TFA makes it sound like the guy didn't really know it was rape. Just a trashed girl with emotional problems.

tl;dr:

People get way too black and white about certain subjects, like rape. The people saying it was a bad idea to be 14, high and drunk and alone with a bunch of (14 year old?) guys are NOT saying she asked for it, or deserved it, or that the guys are less to blame - they are saying it was a bad idea to be 14, high and drunk and alone with a bunch of (14 year old?) guys.
My mother had a bad habit of crossing the street without looking, and when I called her on it, she would say "I'm in a crosswalk, it will be their fault if they hit me." Well, great - you'll be dead, but totally in the right.

Really? Like when he admitted she said "No, let's stop," several times and then became emotionally unresponsive? His regret and ignorance doesn't mean he is in the clear either.
'No. Don't. Stop.'
'No, don't stop.'
Did she hit him upside the head? Did she scratch him? Did she try to get away?
How good was his legal representation, versus hers?

The exact "blame the victim" mentality that contributes to this crap happening.
Sorry, but the world isn't black and white. Too bad so sad that life doesn't fit your simplistic world view.

I don't think they should blame the victim. And I do think this was "real rape". BUT... I also believe the guy when he says that he didn't know that at the time. He was probably under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol at the time and not thinking clearly. She was obviously doing this with these other guys as well, and any resistance she provided wasn't very forceful, probably as a direct result of the drugs & alcohol she had. And frankly, when this guy says she was a "messed up kid", he's speaking the truth. A 14-year-old girl getting drunk & high with three guys is a "messed up kid".

He deserves to feel like shiat for what happened, and it WAS clearly a rape. But just because he committed the rape doesn't make him a "rapist". If he did this while not in his right mind (which is what this sounds like), that's an entirely different order of magnitude from what the other two guys were doing. It sounds like THEY were the ones filling her with drugs and dragging her around as a sex slave. He shouldn't have gone along with it. He should've stopped it, or at the very least walked out and refused to participate. But he doesn't bear the same level of guilt as the other guys who were engineering the entire situation.

The exact "blame the victim" mentality that contributes to this crap happening.
Exactly who's the victim, though?
Women are not always victim. It is not the default setting, just as it isn't the default setting for domestic violence cases, IN SPITE of how the law treats it.
Man is not always victimizer. Same deal.
/too many fake claims means i don't automatically buy the status quo

That's like the chick who claimed some dude raped her............ and at the trial, she said she gave him her phone number! but then she tried to claim she only gave him her phone number because she was scared. Some old bullshiat.
If you want to stop, you need to show you want to stop. Not the passive aggressive mixed signals bullshiat. And definitely not the body language acting in a way counter to 'bare minimum'/legal minimum/plausible deniability mouthings.

If it was a bunch of kids hanging out with one another, and they were all drunk together, that's a different kettle of fish from some chick who got drunk with someone 20 years older than her who could better handle his liquor. Hanging out with kids one's own age who are also drunk is 'lesser' than hanging out with some older dude who's supposed to know better. And those two are both different from true stranger rape where someone was abducted and forced, not this 'regretting drunken sex' crap.

"When I think of my own personal history, and that of my closest friends, I'm reminded of just how prevalent the does-NO-really-mean-no? mindset it with American males."
Too much hyperbole, too much manhate for me to take seriously, and it wasn't the author of this piece, the one so enraged, that was raped. Oh, and her quip about "American males", because of course we invented rape.
Olawdy, that's what I hate with these sorts of articles- the manhate. Always the manhate. It may not have happened to a woman, but there's always a close friend that was (and usually a dubious story, unlike this one), and now said woman will use this incident to attack men.
Then, if you don't come out and scream at the top of your lungs "rape is bad!" and question the situation, or the attitudes of people, folks will ask you "Why do you like rape? Don't you see how bad rape is bad? Rape rape rape rape rape bad". It's so old, so tired.

I think she was raped, for what its worth. But I think there are different levels of rape. Hers was the lighter, still bad but im a dumb girl and just go with anything type. Reading Kristine's synopsis of the whole thing just screams to me '100% guy fault' and 0% hers. Also, that she has the mammaries to say at the end "D may have taken the time to talk to Emily, but we all know it was to clear his own conscious, and not to right any wrongs here." How the FARK does she know why he did it ? Does him talking to her about it and expressing bad feelings make it ok? No it doesn't. Does it count for something?Hell yes it does. Most victims don't ever hear from that person again (maybe a good thing). But this guy seemed incredibly polite and even searched her out to make some kind of reconciliation. Obviously it has possibly haunted him for years, maybe even more than her. So I guess now even a person trying to reconcile is useless, and we should just make them out as monsters forever. People dont get better? They don't improve? Life sentence or death, that's all we accept now as a society, is it?

LouieW · 2012-02-05 12:31:22

Kagami palm

Yeah, I definitely am not going to blame you for getting upset about that. Honestly, I am not sure why people would care about whether another type of rape would be "less bad" or "worse" than this situation (unless they were in charge of sentencing which I doubt they are). I guess the whole thing is similar to what was said in the "which is badder" wars thread about this stuff.

In my mind, any kind of sexual abuse is incredibly personal and speculating about other people's actions, motivations, and such only really makes sense if you are personally involved in it (e.g., you are in court testifying or are a lawyer/investigator in the case). Otherwise it seems rather pointless and nosy to me.

I agree with the spirit of the idea that people can improve and progress beyond past transgressions though.