Perusing Twitter, I found a piece from HelloGiggles, a blog run by Zooey Deschanel and two of her friends that runs mostly on user-submitted content. It’s a fun, cutesy website. Some people think it makes girls look stupid, but when I find gems like this one — “On Lady-Guilt: Enough is Enough” — I feel a lot more secure in my love for the site.
In it, the author talks about Lady-Guilt, which is her term for when girls blame themselves for things that, generally, is encouraged if it’s a guy doing it. One of her examples:
Lady-Guilt is girls who are unsure about having sex with the guy they’re seeing. They have completely valid reasons for not wanting to (yet), valid reasons for not wanting to be interrogated or pressured (though really, we should be allowed to not want that kind of pressure whether our reasoning is good or not) about it, and yet somehow wind up cast as the guilty party anyway, not if but when the man involved grows impatient with waiting.
My mind flashed back to Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neuroscience Create Difference, where, in chapter 6, XX-Clusion and XXX-Clusion, Fine discusses discrimination in the workplace. She talks about sexual harassment, but also how things such as a round of golf and a trip to the strip club — “business meetings” — lead to discrimination in the workplace too.
And when she actually discusses sexual harassment, referencing a study done by the Athena Factor, the statistics get alarming: the report found that 56 percent of women in corporate science jobs and 69 percent of women in engineering had experienced sexual harassment. That’s distressing.
Fine talks of alpha males, and though she never uses the actual term, dances around the topic of hegemonic masculinity. As Michael Kimmel wrote in “Bros Before Hos: The Guy Code,” guys live by a certain code, certain rules. He lists four basic rules, which originally came from social psychologist Robert Brannon:
- No Sissy Stuff!
- Be a Big Wheel
- Be a Sturdy Oak
- Give ’em Hell
Because of this mentality, men are sometimes excused for sexual assault, because it’s the way they are. It’s similar to some of the ideas laid forth by evolutionary psychology, which Natalie Angier talks about in “Of Hoggamus and Hogwash: Putting Evolutionary Psychology on the Couch.”
Angier writes how evolutionary psychology subscribes to the idea that men are more promiscuous and and less sexually reserved. For many people, this is reason to write off sexual assault, because men just can’t help it. It’s the same neuroscience magic Fine talks about in her book, and it’s furthering rape culture.
These little things, which so many men who will never commit sexual assault are guilty of, help make our rape culture a reality. On the one end, you have girls blaming themselves for little things, feeling guilty if they don’t want to have sex. On the other, you have men being told to take what is theirs, be a man, be strong. When combined. these two things contribute to the perfect storm of rape culture (it feels wrong to use the word perfect in there, let me tell you).
Rape Culture is garbage and so are you! 