Undead Sexist Cliches: The Slut Deserved to Get Raped

I’m not quite sure what put this particular cliche into my head yesterday, but who cares? Until people finally get it through their skulls that women do not somehow “deserve” rape because of the way they dress or the fact they actually walked into a bar or for not being a virgin, this bullshit needs to be slapped down, over and over, as often as necessary.
The standard rape apologist position (in between assuring us that they really, honestly take rape seriously but hey, if a woman insists on drinking/having sex/showing her legs…) is that if a woman does Something Stupid then it therefore follows that it’s her own fault because you know, guys will be guys, and naturally if she’s drunk and alone/she’s dressed like she’s looking for sex/she’s not a virgin/etc. hey, it’s her own fault, right?
This is, of course, a standard they don’t apply to anyone else (at least some of the right-wingers who preach this bilge seem to be of the law-and-order variety). If I’m foolish enough to leave my car unlocked in Durham, I may be setting myself up for theft but nobody’s going to suggest the thieves bear less responsibility. Nobody’s going to take a car thief seriously who insists it was consensual, and I wanted him to take the car.
Heck, pretty much every confidence game hinges on the victim consenting to participate, frequently in something illegal (check out The Big Con for some examples) but I’ve never heard anyone advocate that we stop prosecuting con men.
I’m sure if someone accuses me of fraud and I leave a message on their answering machine “You know, I guess that stock deal was fraud,” the prosecutor will not tell the victim he has “buyer’s remorse” (this is not made up—some dirtbag prosecutor told a rape victim that in Colorado after she told him she had the taped confession).
And of course, the standards for what constitutes “she asked for it” are pretty broad. There was a judge in a statutory rape case a couple of decades back who ruled that a five year old girl was obviously inviting sex. The thirteen year old rape victim in a Texas case this year got the whole tried-in-the-media routine (why was she wandering around on her own? Why did she dress like that?).
I got into a long argument on FB last year with some jackass insisting that the thirteen year old that Roman Polanski raped could have been setting him up a blackmail game: She was a model and an actress so she must have known how to use her looks to manipulate men, right? So she and her mom probably set the whole thing up. Yes, apparently this man believes the girl walked straight out of a film noir (when repeated posters pointed out the total lack of evidence, he replied that he was merely considering what “might” have happened).
The hard fact is, women do not get raped because they did something or wore something. They get raped because some men like to rape. That’s why women have been raped wearing burkhas and nuns’ habits. Why men rape senior citizens and little girls. Not because the victim triggered it. Not because she was “slutty” or hot or drinking.
Because some men like raping women. Period.