I was at a big cat conservation center today shooting a tour video, and before we could go anywhere we had to hear a safety talk. It was, basically, How Not To Get Mauled By Tigers. You know, keep all body parts on the correct side of the safety rope, don’t make sudden movements or loud noises, don’t run around because you will look like prey. A lot of behaviors to avoid. We then signed paperwork saying, basically, that it would be totally our own fault if we got mauled.
And some part of my brain went, “Oh, sure, blame the victim.”
And then I kind of thought about it. I mean, avoiding sudden movements won’t make be magically tiger-proof any more than avoiding short skirts makes me rape-proof. Except that if I follow all the Don’t Get Mauled guidelines, I actually have a really good chance of not getting mauled! Whereas following all the weird Don’t Get Raped rules would be, A, pretty impossible, and B, not actually preventing in any way the most common kinds of rapes.
But even more than that, it actually isn’t the tiger’s fault if I get mauled by a tiger. Tigers are supposed to maul. It is what they do! Nobody can reasonably expect a tiger to make the moral decision to refrain from mauling. If a tiger, given the opportunity, chooses not to maul someone, the tiger deserves a tiger-cookie (which is probably, like, a chicken for it to maul.) It would not be very effective to give a tiger a pamphlet on How Tigers Can Prevent Maulings. This is because a tiger is not a person!
I do not believe that rapists are like tigers. I do not believe that they can’t understand that raping people isn’t very nice. I do not believe that men who don’t happen to rape women have somehow overcome their natural instincts and therefore deserve praise. I don’t think a man’s natural instinct is to rape! I believe that men are people, and therefore capable of making moral decisions and having responsibility for the choices that they make.
The thing is, when we have a creature like a tiger, where there is no way to teach the tiger How Not To Maul and so we must instead learn How Not To Get Mauled, we put the tigers in cages. We cannot trust them not to maul people!
I don’t think men have to be locked in cages in order to prevent them from raping. In fact, I think this is demonstrably untrue! There are many men who are not in cages, and have never raped anybody! This is because men, unlike tigers, are people, and people can learn How Not To Rape. To teach, instead, How Not To Get Raped is to imply that men cannot learn how not to be dangerous and our only recourse is to assume they are all threats. This is also untrue!
If I walk up to a tiger, and I stick my arm through the bars of the cage, and it mauls my arm, that is my own fault. People will say to me, “What did you expect? It’s a tiger!” And I will say, “AAAAAAAUGH MY ARM OH GOD MY ARM.” And later I will say, “You are right! I am both the victim and the person at fault!”
But if I walk up to a man, and maybe I am wearing a skirt and also I smile, or I violate one of the other multitudinous Don’t Get Raped rules, and then he rapes me, people don’t get to say “What did you expect?” Because the answer is, I expected that a human being was capable of greater self-control than a tiger. I expected that a human being could treat me as a fellow human being. I expected that men were better than that.
This makes me a man-hater.
