Tag Archives: steubenville

We Are All Sluts

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While reading the victim-blaming reactions to the Steubenville case (I won’t link to anything here; if you want to read something that’ll make you throw up in your mouth, Google it), one thing stood out to me. It’s the sort of thing that should have been obvious before, after living for over 30 years in a culture of persistent double standards of sexuality. But it’s even clearer after looking at long lists of screencaps of horrible people typing disgusting things about a 16-year-old girl who was treated like a piece of meat.

The definition of “acting like a slut” can be anything and everything. It could be sleeping with multiple partners, or flirting, or suggestive dancing, or wearing revealing clothes, or just showing up at a party where teenage boys are in attendance. If you are on the receiving end of sexual assault by someone popular, then whatever you were doing at the time will be characterized as “acting like a slut.” Once the label of “slut” is applied, you are no longer worthy of protection under the law. Other people are allowed—nay, required—to do horrible things to you, and you were expected to know that before you acted like a slut. Once you are identified as a slut, you are playing foul if you report the assault to the police. If your assailants are prosecuted and convicted, then you are a slut who ruined their lives by doing whatever you were doing when they decided to treat you like the slut you clearly are.

It can’t be rape because you were acting like a slut, and you must have been acting like a slut because those guys wouldn’t dare lay a hand on any girl unless she forced their hands by acting slutty. We know they’re good guys because they’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t have it coming.

Here is an example of victim-blaming.

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You think I’ve said enough about the Steubenville rape case already? I have not yet begun to rant.

From a related article at Raw Story, I found this comment:

This is what the world really needs: more people telling women how not to get raped.

This is what the world really needs: more people telling women how not to get raped.

Pro Tip #1: There is no paucity of awareness that alcohol is involved in many rapes. There is not a woman in America who has not already been given the same evidence-free “advice” thousands of times: don’t drink too much, don’t walk alone at night, don’t go behind closed doors with a strange guy, blah blah blah. It helps about as much as telling us to throw salt over our shoulders whenever we pass by a black cat.

Pro Tip #2: You can insist until you’re blue in the fact that you’re not blaming the victim, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re attributing the violent act to the victim’s behavior rather than scrutinizing the assailants’ choices.

So after this commenter was rightly dogpiled, they continued with this:

Keep digging that hole! You might hit oil!

Keep digging that hole! You might hit oil!

Oh, dear. So much victim-blaming in so few words.

There’s one nugget of truth here: this variety of sexual predator does not choose sober victims. They want victims who are unable to put up a fight. Therefore, if this particular girl had not become intoxicated in their presence…they would have found another girl whom they could pressure to drink until she passed out.

The fact that the girl was below legal drinking age is a red herring. Women over 21 get blind-drunk all the time; sometimes they’re drugged by assailants, sometimes they just go overboard. When they’re intoxicated to near-unconsciousness, sometimes violent men take advantage of their compromised state and rape them. After that’s happened, there are always people around who are only too happy to focus on how wrong it was for the victim to have so much to drink.

So, with that in mind, the last sentence really says it all. I start from a position of thinking there’s nothing morally wrong with an underage girl having too much to drink. Illegal, yes, but there is such a thing as a victimless crime, and our law books are covered in them.  Staying sober doesn’t make you a saint, and getting hammered doesn’t make you a degenerate. If that girl got that wasted of her own volition, that makes her responsible for the resulting hangover the next day; nothing more.

If a couple of boys see a girl who’s falling-down drunk and decide to do horrible things to her while she’s too fucked up to put up a fight, that’s on them. That is not bad weather, or illness that naturally follows from excessive drinking; that is a decision that one human being (or several) makes against another. Telling the girl that the assailants wouldn’t have done what they did if she hadn’t gotten so wasted makes about as much sense as scolding her for wearing a short skirt.