2 posts tagged “rape”

[Crossposted to Official Shrub.com Blog.]

Via Majikthise, Brad Hicks has a good analysis of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

There’s not much more I can say about the analysis, but the responses in comments are quite interesting, particularly in how the song is defended. It’s illustrative of the ways in which the status quo with respect to rape and consent gets defended.

Aesthetic Defense

And analysis destroys another great song.

Here the argument is that we shouldn’t engage in feminist analysis of popular culture, lest we lessen our enjoyment of or ability to participate in said culture. If we look to closely at our culture, the argument goes, all we’ll see is patriarchy. (In this way, it’s similar to the “we can’t complain about coercion or people wouldn’t get laid” argument).

Free Speech

Thus we must ban any song that may seem to have those sorts of connotations!

Please.

Occasionally the argument is not that the analysis will “spoil” the work for the critic, but that the critic has an agenda to “spoil” the song for everybody else through censorship. The effect of this argument is to silence criticism because nobody wants to sound like a censor. A related argument is that the critic is against sexuality in general rather than the problematic depiction being critiqued.

Minimization

People shouldn’t be too uptight about music.

Also known as the “you have no sense of humor” or “it’s just a song” argument. Tekanji posted about this in “Debunking the Myth of Frivolity”, and it’s a better rebuttal than any I could give here.

Good Intentions

Both Frank Loesser and his wife have archived interviews regarding this song, its composition, and premiere at a party they gave for friends. Sorry, I don’t have URLs for them. Neither allude to anything that would lend credence to these darker interpretations of the lyrics.

This is a different kind of argument; it relies on the authority of the author (or someone closer to the author than the critic is) to say what a work is really about. That the author of the lyrics may have thought them playfully sexy and didn’t intend to describe a date rape doesn’t make them problematic; indeed, it’s a quite similar argument to the one that an actual rapist may make - that the understanding was that the encounter was fully consensual. While an artist’s interpretation of his own work can make for interesting conversation material, it doesn’t invalidate other interpretations, and it certainly doesn’t disqualify the work from being used as a springboard to talk about the culture in general.

Armchair Psychoanalysis

I think you have misinterpreted the lyrics according to your own ideas of right and wrong (obviously) and this has defined the result more than the song itself.

This is basically a way of deflecting the criticism back onto the critic, and ties into the argument from popularity: “Nobody else has a problem with it, why do you?” The effect is to get critics to stop talking about the work and focus more on themselves.

Rape Apologism

leaving verbal inflection aside she does a fair amount of dithering but assuming she has her own wheels and car keys the failure to get up and go combined with making *excuses* sounds a LOT like “convince me. I want to have my cake (being a good girl) and eat it too (not live like a nun)”.

In fact the whole point is that she is in the position to definitively say “no,” to leave, to forcefully reject her pursuer, but she specifically never does. In the end her response is always well “maybe.” I ought to say no. Well maybe one more drink. After all, it is cold outside.

“She really wanted it.” “She could have said no, or left.” I think these folks need to read Biting Beaver’s posts on coercive rape and playing hard to get, in order to see how problematic these statements really are.

It Was a Different Time

In a nutshell, she really wants to, but she can’t square that with societal mores.

Some good comments here, but also a lot of temporal imperialism.

It’s very easy to judge people in the past as naive, or stupid, or ignorant, or otherwise somehow shameful because they perceived things or conducted themselves differently from us. They weren’t, they simply lived in a different milieu.

I think these sorts of arguments are fundamentally misguided. “Temporal imperialism” is not the same thing as colonialism. The former is simply reinterpreting the data; the latter involves significant power differentials and the potential for exploitation. Both involve privileged perspectives, but the privilege of hindsight is by definition not exploitative; the past may not be able to answer for itself, but neither can it be altered.

In addition, the criticism of the song isn’t actually all that focused on the time the song was written, because it’s not one that establishes itself as belonging to its time period. These attitudes aren’t altogether gone, and that’s why it’s still important to point out that what’s described in the song is either a prelude to rape or indistinguishable therefrom.

[Crossposted to Official Shrub.com Blog.]

Plenty of people have commented on the Missouri rape case where a judge decided that once penetration had been consented to, there really wasn't any crime.

And as plenty of people have pointed out, this is a monumentally stupid ruling.

(Trigger warning.  Unfortunately, Vox has no cut tag at this time.)

Reading the narrative, it’s pretty clear that what consent there was was very limited. The complainant had just been sexually assaulted and raped by the appellant’s friend, and then gave a very conditional consent to appellant (”If I say stop, you have to stop”) which was then withdrawn.

How twisted do you have to be to see that as a “green light”?

It’s interesting to note that the complainant and appellant’s stories differ at this point. The appellant says he stopped immediately; the complainant says he didn’t. I suspect this is because everyone involved, with the exception of the appeals judge, realized that this is an important distinction on which the charge hangs.

There’s another difference in the testimony, which refers to the extent in which the appellant participated in the prior sexual assaults. According to the complainant’s testimony, he was heavily involved, and would presumably know that consent had not been given; according to the appelant’s testimony, he was away from his friend.

The trial judge’s instructions also strike me as fucked up:

The amount of force necessary depends upon the circumstances, and no particular amount of force is required but it must be sufficient to overcome the resistance of the victim. You must be satisfied that the victim either resisted and that this resistance was overcome by force or threat of force or that the victim was prevented from resisting by force or threat of force. The victim must have resisted to the extent of her ability at the time unless her resistance or will to resist was overcome by force or fear that was reasonable under the circumstances. Finally, “consent” means actually agreeing to the sexual act rather than merely submitting as a result of force or threat of force.

Given that the last sentence negates pretty much everything that came before it, why do the instructions spend so much time focusing on how much the complainant resisted?

The appellate judge’s ruling is based primarily on (i) Battle v. State a 1980 case that did not actually hold that ignoring post-penetration withdrawal of consent constituted rape, but merely that a jury instruction was ambiguous, and (ii) old English common law. The judge goes on to cite (especially barbaric) “Biblical and Middle Assyrian” law on the subject, which treated rape as “trespass upon the property,” calling it “common law.” In fact, it is no such thing; both the old English jurisprudence and the Biblical-era laws had long been superseded by later statutes and understandings on the subject.

It’s always been one of my little legal rules of thumb that any opinion that relies on “tradition” rather than statute or case law is worthless and more likely than not wrongly decided. Bowers v. Hardwick did this (and thankfully, has been superseded by Lawrence v. Texas); U.S. v. Reynolds did as well. 

Rape is a dicey issue in the criminal courts, because the typical lack of witnesses, the consent defense, and the standards of proof. It’s exacerbated by a societal view of sex that sees consent as mere acquiescence rather than as enthusiastic participation. It’s also dicey in the moral sphere, because the social consensus seens to be that anything which doesn’t meet the criminal standard of rape is acceptable. Not to get all Sapir-Whorf here, but I think the fact that we don’t have separate terms for “legal rape” and “moral rape,” the way we do for other crimes (e.g., “larceny” versus “stealing,” “murder” versus “killing”). There’s no term for someone who’s forcing sex on another in a way that doesn’t meet the legal requirements of a rape charge, which leads people to think it’s all right.

Once again, more at Pandagon.