Fake Rape Email

Last week I published a rape prevention tips email here on Blog Fabulous. I’ve since taken it down as it was discredited bysnopes.com .

Only seconds after I took it down I got an email from a reader asking me where it was. She said it had reminded her to turn off the usual rambling of her brain and be aware of her surroundings. She had found herself in a precarious situation that she probably wouldn’t have thought about had she not just read the rape prevention tips I posted.

For that I am glad that it had that effect.

But, I feel extremely conflicted about the effects and implications of such hoaxy emails.

1 – Aren’t there enough reasons for women to be aware of their own vulnerability without creating more?

2 – Emails like that do imply that there is something we do to “cause” our own rape. Or that there is some way women could “prevent it” – which places the blame on women’s shoulders. When the reality is that a rapist is the only one who can prevent a rape or attack on a girl or woman. In a many ways those emails perpetuate the fiction that if we dress a certain way or don’t dress a certain way, don’t park next to a van, are rude to strangers instead of being too nice – in other words if we “stop asking for it” by having the audacity of leaving the house, then we’ll be safe. But, in fact – we won’t be safe until rapists decide to stop getting their kicks from sexual violence.

3 – Wouldn’t our energy be better spent teaching men and boys to respect women? Even the sexual kind? I mean, we are equally sexual beings so why do we keep getting blamed for all the negative sexuality on the planet? - somehow we’re even blaming girls for the sexualization of their own selves. Girls have virtually nothing to do with child pornography, but they seem to take the blame for wearing too short a skirt on Halloween. As if the perversion of men is somehow girls’ fault and they can somehow prevent it by wearing a turtleneck. I think emails like the one I posted play into this type of fallacy. The reality is that if we start dressing our girls in turtleneck’s pedophiles will make porn featuring turtlenecks. Because they are pedophiles - not because girls are sexual.

4 – Wouldn’t our energy be spent enforcing harsher rape laws? The fact that we don’t have harsher rape laws is evidence that the whole culture as a whole thinks we, women and girls, shouldn’t have worn the skirt, spoken to that stranger, done the bills in the car, had long hair or a pony tail.

5- Emails like this, I think, play into the fallacy that women are either whores or virgins and those who are raped fall into the whore category because she wore the wrong panties or skirt, got into the wrong car or walked down the wrong street – though none of these behaviors are illegal, unusual, wrong or immoral.

I recently read this quote by Emily McGuire, author of Princesses and Pornstars on Blue Milk, She argues that instead of focusing on women, rape-prevention education should be targeted at boys and men, saying that not a single women has ever caused her own rape.

“Am I arguing that girls and women shouldn’t be held responsible for their behaviour? Not at all. If a woman drinks to excess, then falls over in the street, loses her wallet and vomits all over her shirt, she has only herself to blame. But rape is not a consequence of getting drunk. It’s a consequence of a man deciding to rape someone.”

So, I am very happy if my posting that email made my reader safer because it made her more aware. But, I want to be known as someone who posts only credible information that I have taken the time to research. Certainly, rape and rape prevention is an issue women should be aware of – I am taking a kick boxing self defense class and have my daughter enrolled in Taekwondo.

But, there is plenty of reliable and credible information about self-defense and rape prevention like The Gift of Fear. Incidentally, I ignored my own intuition that the rape tips email was hoaxy and went against my own instincts, precisely what Gavin De Becker tells us to avoid in The Gift of Fear.

But women, I believe, need to stop believing that we have the power to control the actions of men if men choose to rape, because only then will society get the guts to prosecute rape harshly.

I know it’s really, really scary and painful to realize we have no control over the terrible possibility of rape - but the truth is that we don’t . Believing that we do – well, that’s simple codependence, which I define as the delusion that we can control another person’s actions or feelings by our own behavior.