A victim-blaming culture

As I wrote in another blog, I was deep into the True Love Waits movement when I was a teenager. It was mostly my church that facilitated it, and I honestly can't even remember the sex education I got from my high school. I'm only twenty; that in itself should tell you how well we were educated. Luckily, I was well-read by the time I decided to have sex, and knew enough basics to know that I should probably talk to someone before I made that decision. So many girls I know though, especially from that period of my life, are lost when it comes to sex. One of the girls that I was best friends with got pregnant with a significantly older man and never finished college, getting married to him instead (she's now working on getting a divorce and will be a single mother of two little boys). Another didn't realize that it wasn't okay for her boyfriend to "put his ... you know, all over me, when I'm trying to do stuff" (her words). She didn't know that he should have been kicked out of her life when he said things like 'it's her fault for looking so pretty all the time."

Victim-blaming has always been a staple in our society. It’s not only in cases of rape and domestic violence, but other crimes like burglary when the victim, for example, leaves his or her door open while they were asleep. It’s become nature to say “Well, if she hadn’t…” or “If he paid a little more attention.” Whether or not the person might have taken an extra step to defend his or herself from any sort of violent crime is simply not the question- but it’s way easier to blame them. It takes responsibility away from the attacker. “Almost any woman can land in the “impure” camp and be blamed for sexual violence committed against her” (155). This makes me angry not only because it’s the hurtful and easy way out, but because it can have a severe impact on the victim. When a woman starts believing that she was raped because of something she did, nothing is safe for her anymore. Nothing she can do is good enough. (I have a close family member that was a victim of this type of crime, and while I can’t generalize for all victims, I can report on her behalf).

Chapter seven, “Public Punishments,” made me literally nauseated on a few occasions. Valenti is good at opening the chapters with the most shocking and disgusting quotes from the Virginity Movement that she can find- “‘Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her husband.’” (145). Not only is this totally exclusive- young girls, men and boys, unmarried women, and so many others cannot technically be victimized by rape- but it assumes that a woman has to be “chaste” to be raped. This is only one of the many ways that the purity myth encourages violence against women. According to the purity myth, if you have pre-marital sex, you no longer have the facilities to say no. Oh, and also, you can never say no to your husband (god forbid). “Women who have had sex can’t be raped,” Valenti wrote, “because—as the law said—the “damage is done.”” (147). This implies, in itself, that any sex is damaging to a woman (but only the first time). The act of breaking the hymen is apparently “dehumanizing” them.

That, I think, is potentially very dangerous. It allows for violence against women because they’re just not worthy humans after they’ve had sex- consensual or not. While it’s not exactly taking the choice away for women, it’s a sneaky type of coercion with dangerous side effects for the woman that makes the choice to express her sexuality.

The change needs to start from an early age, I think, starting with the eradication of abstinence-only education as an education that instill gender roles early and develops harmful assumptions about sex that often lead to the very things (STIs, pregnancy, depression, etc) that they claim only abstinence will prevent. Otherwise, the rest of it is going to be an uphill battle, too. It might only be a start, but writing to our legislators at the state level about the harm that is caused by abstinence-only education would be a start, as would writing to local papers. There’s a chance that parents that support abstinence-only education simply haven’t thought of it this way, having been raised with it themselves (it’s certainly easier for me to stomach their support of the purity myth that way, at least, so I hope in part that it’s true). This kind of movement needs to start from the ground up, I think, so education is key.

“Dismantling the purity myth” and changing the “culture of virginity fetishization” go hand in hand, I believe, and it would start with awareness and education.

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