Our discussion in class yesterday lead me to begin thinking about some interesting issues. I am a frequent member of the viewership of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and something that resonates from that show with me whenever I think about rape is that rape is an act of power not of sex. The reason that I mention this is because yesterday in class we spoke about Smith’s rape of Kelly and how his defense was self-centered and egotistical (as Holly pointed out) and that caused me to remember, as I mentioned in class, that he used the fact that he saw it in pornography as an excuse for his rough, forced sexual acts. This defense of pornography was then flipped by the prosecuting attorney as an excuse where she said something along the lines of “since he was trying to pleasure her it wasn’t rape because rapists only care about their own needs.” (I apologize that I don’t have the specific quote, I do not currently have my book with me.) My point is that I am completely disgusted that a prosecutor would use the acts of pornography to justify the behavior of a rapist.
Another idea that I began to think about during our discussion was that of the role that alcohol plays in rape, an article on USA Today’s website (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/28/alcohol-most-common-drug-in-sexual-assaults/3285139/) discusses that alcohol is the number one date-rape drug, as a classmate mentioned yesterday in discussion: people often forget that alcohol is a drug and this causes there to be a cultural misconception about the role that alcohol should play in rape cases; the only role that it should have is that of discussing the facts of the case, not of determining the credibility and reliability or validity of a rape allegation. I know that we have a strong cultural belief that women who are drunk when raped are likely not remembering that they had given consent, but men who commit rape while drunk are excused for not knowing that what they were doing was wrong. I do not have answers of how to fix this problem in our culture, but a have been thinking about ideas to change this mindset.
I think that we need to evolve the role of drinking out of a relationship with gender roles. As Jamie pointed out we often view men drinking together as the preface to a business discussion or as a way to elicit courage in a bar, but when women are drinking together it more closely relates to gossip and immaturity in other forms. This idea that men and women drinking in a bar has different connotations is astonishing to me because I do not understand what gender has to do with the desire to go to a bar with your friends and consume alcohol. Changing socially constructed gender roles is never easy, but I do believe that it can be done if we, as a culture, start to give women a voice about their drinking habits in much the similar way that women have started to gain a voice about their sexuality.
Jackson mentioned that sexuality is generated in a shroud of ambiguity and should not be discussed in the public eye—I believe that this is changing with the attention to sexually violent crimes and the uproar in female comedians becoming increasingly candid about their sexual experiences in very real and vulgar terms (Chelsea Handler and Amy Schumer first come to mind). I think that if something similar were to be discussed related to alcohol consumption more explicitly, instead of just a means to a sexual end, then we can start to break down social constructions of alcohol consumption meaning different things to the genders.
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