Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

That was someone’s quip on FB, pointing out how many rape victims using that pseudonym show up when rape hits the spotlight. Case in point, the Cornell gang-rape case.

Someone complained on Bluesky recently that it was ridiculous that so many people were shocked — did we learn nothing from MeToo, and multiple past cases? While I get her incredulity, I’m fine with this case generating public outrage, even though it’s only one of countless such cases.

Perhaps it’s that like the Pelicot case in France, the rapist texting to his buddies with an offer of free-you-know-what undercuts the idea that rape is some guy losing control or making a stupid mistake or thinking with his small head. When you’re offering a woman zoned out on booze and ketamine to your friends, you’re making a conscious choice — and it’s a very bad choice. Cheryl Rofer on LGM suggests parents dropping their kids off at school the past month or so may have played a factor. Or that the fury of #metoo, contrary to multiple proclaimations, hasn’t died away.

Jill Filipovic writes about “feeling de-personed, reduced to a sexualized thing, to a collection of body parts. Feeling profoundly betrayed because you thought a man was worthy of your trust and you learned the hard way he saw you as less than a human and more of an orifice with a brain inconveniently attached. Feeling the sheer terror of realizing your physical safely is contingent on the whims of a larger, stronger man (or a group of them).”

“This is precisely why more women don’t come forward, and why more rapists aren’t prosecuted. Because mostly-male cops and prosecutors find it more believable that a 20-year-old would want to have sex with a room full of fraternity brothers than accept that she was raped. What ever happened to common fucking sense?” — Jessica Valenti.

What happened may be that the DA decided New York’s rules on rape while voluntarily intoxicated made the case a long shot — but as pointed out at the link, that’s no excuse: “This district attorney saw an allegation of a gang rape and didn’t even bother to interview the victim. He looked at a summary of the allegations and came to the conclusion that there was no provable crime, and didn’t bother to conduct an investigation.”

“Thomas Giuffra told CNN’s “State of the Union” that people attempting to unmask his client’s identity had also targeted at least three women mistakenly identified as her. The former Cornell student is identified as Jane Doe in court documents.“She’s received multiple threats, and women who aren’t even Jane Doe receive threats,” Giuffra said. He added that he had received a threat Sunday morning.”

“The Cornell 7, did not take turns raping an incapacitated girl for seven hours because they were unaware that their act was non-consensual. The lack of consent WAS. THE. APPEAL. This is not an educational issue, this is a VALUES issue. If you value dominance, rule-breaking, feeling powerful and asserting your manhood more than you value not-hurting a woman, rape is the outcome of those values. A non-consenting girl is a feature, not a bug of frat life. Dominating her makes them feel powerful, allows them to assert status with their boys and proves their masculinity.” — Celeste Davis in a post on why most proposed solutions won’t solve the problem.

“It is notable, however, that in Sanday’s and others’ research, participants and spectators both talk about assaults of women using the language of fun – “party games,” “trophies,” and “entertainment.” They consistently express cruelty as enjoyable leisure, not coerced, reluctant conformity. This goes beyond masking despair with a visible laugh or pretending to be having fun. The issue on campus isn’t “a woman got drunk and something bad happened to her”; it’s, chances are far more likely, “a man set out to find a person who is drinking and knows it will be harder for that person to say no, resist, or be believed later.” Anti-feminists and misogynists prefer to focus on a victim’s culpability rather than on perpetrators’ decision-making process and incentives, however.” — Soraya Chemaly.

In the case of Megyn Kelly, they focus on the victim being unattractive: “That the girl who was never the most sought after suddenly had four guys who wanted to have sex with her. And she counted this, yeah, in her inebriated state, as a win and liked the feeling of being sexy and desired and wanted.” You will not be shocked “she’s too ugly to rape” is an undead sexist cliche — but while Kelly does not shock me, she disgusts me. Never let rape-apologist bullshit like that get normalized.

“It’s a horribly familiar shape. We recognize it. We’ve seen it before, too many times to count. We saw it in Steubenville, in Glen Ridge, in Saratoga, in Torrington. We saw it at Trinity High School — Louisville’s version of Georgetown Prep. It is the shape Gibby Haynes described as “the ever-present football player rapist.” It seems like every town big enough to have its own McDonald’s has one. Except there’s never just one. Because this species always hunts in packs. The activity is, for these guys, a form of male bonding. The bond this forms and expresses is, for them, the most important thing. “Bros before hoes.” The girls they join together — always together — to prey on and to humiliate are incidental, interchangeable, forgettable and soon forgotten.” — Fred Clark’s thoughts on the Kavanaugh hearing sound perfect for the present controversy.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat [units] with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men.” The War Horse at the same link: “Women serving in combat specialties have always been required to meet the same job-specific standards as men, based on the physical demands of their chosen field, such as infantry or artillery. But the broader physical fitness tests taken by all service members once or twice a year serve a different purpose: measuring overall fitness. Those tests have historically been scored using age- and sex-based standards.” Astonishingly (he said sarcastically) “Whiskey Pete” is fine with keeping the adjusted standards for older men.

In case you’re wondering, 90 percent of women in the Marines can meet the new standards. Of course, Hegseth is starting from a loathing for women in what he sees as male roles, so we’ll see what happens next. Remember, his spiritual mentor, misogynist Doug Wilson, is very big on male supremacy.

“The U.S. already has abortion travel bans—we just don’t normally call them that.”

“A judge criticized the Department of Health and Human Services for citing nonexistent scientific evidence or potentially AI-generated citations to support sweeping changes to federal teen pregnancy prevention programs. The Trump administration had said money Congress appropriated for such programs should avoid encouraging teen sexual activity and be used only for programs that promote abstinence and “body literacy.” The administration’s changes were challenged after HHS cut tens of millions in grants.” No surprise. It’s a proven fact that comprehensive sex ed and affordable birth control can reduce the unwanted pregnancy rate, ditto the abortion rate — but Republicans would sooner have more abortions than approve of women enjoying sex.

“A death related to ectopic pregnancy should really be a never event,” said Dr. Alice Abernathy, an OB-GYN in Philadelphia. At the link, ProPublica reports that since abortion bans became legal, ectopic deaths have soared.

Danny Katch looks at “the deep misogyny of an anti-trans movement that poses as defenders of women when it’s convenient but ultimately is driven by a desire to police all violations of traditional gender norms.”

The Girl Scouts support members in their faiths, including Muslims. Needless to say, bigots hate that.

Republican Florida governor candidate Byron Reynolds assures women repairing Florida’s roads is so they can get to the hair salon and stay pretty.

“Although many families strive to share these responsibilities, research has consistently found that mothers tend to shoulder a larger share of the work tied to their kids’ schooling. That includes not only attending school events or packing lunches, but also the less visible work of scheduling doctor appointments, signing up for after-school activities, and responding to emails or calls from teachers and administrators.” One of the reasons is that no matter what instructions they get, schools tend to call the mother first.

“White men get to fail,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits young, progressive candidates to run for office. “Women do not get to make mistakes. People of color do not get to make mistakes.” Litman said the argument was not that serious allegations should be treated differently because of a candidate’s identity, but that Platner had been granted an unusual degree of latitude to recover from earlier controversies that a female candidate or a candidate of color would probably not have been afforded.

“It is a very strange thing to move through the world understanding that the one half of the population that never had their humanity doubted on the basis of their genitalia, that enjoys the privilege of being the default category of human, remains the primary arbiter of your physical safety and, sometimes, your personhood.” — from Jill Filipovic’s essay on the Cornell Seven.

This is an idea that I’ve seen in multiple different forms, most recently here.

This is kind of funny, given the Toddler in the White House devotes endless posts on Truth Social to proclaiming everyone who hurts his fee-fees or threatens his power is cringe. For example claiming James Talarico isn’t manly enough to eat meat (yes, this idiocy has become a theme on the right) so he eats it, then runs away to vomit. Right-wing masculinity is all about painting their opponents as low-status, which is to say too girly to be men. And of course, there’s Margaret Atwood’s observation that men’s greatest fear with women is that women will laugh at them.

The assumption women are driven not by rational argument but by things like “social status, popular consensus” is an Undead Sexist Cliche, a variation of the cliche that women are too emotional to think rationally (unlike say, the Toddler, who lashes out and applies tariffs for no other reason than someone in Switzerland wasn’t nice to him). I first ran into it 12 years ago, when libertarian Julie Borowski (a glance at her political postings online makes me think she’s one of those libertarians who are right-wingers in all but name — anti contraception, anti-abortion, anti-women having casual sex) declared women don’t want to be libertarians because they’re conditioned to worry about being “socially acceptable and fitting in with their peers” and so they can’t embrace the logic of an unpopular, minority worldview. As I note on the old post, she ignores that most men aren’t libertarians either, and that women, have in fact embraced many unpopular worldviews: women fought for the right to vote, for equality, for civil rights, for gay rights, when all of these were minority positions.

More recently we have Elon “fascist salute’ Musk embracing the position that anyone except high-testosterone alpha males is a sheeple. Implicit in this is that Musk himself is one of those alpha males rather than a pathetic attention-seeker who cheats at videogames. Hardly his worst sin, but telling — far from being a tough guy doing as he chooses, he’s as desperate for approval as anyone else.

As someone pointed out recently, many men seem to be the sheeple they claim women are. They’re happy to obsess over Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and other right-wing misogynists. They’re happy to embrace popular mainstream sexist cliches like patriarchy is good and fighting rape is an attack on men. Or more sadly to repress any part of themselves their buddies might think too girly.

That’s not to say women are immune to shaming or incapable of following the herd. That’s a common impulse in everyone of any gender. Equally common, people can sheeple on one thing, independent on another — a political radical who reads best-sellers, a political conformist who reads the most avant-garde literature, someone who dresses in whatever’s fashionable but roots for an unpopular sports team, etc. And plenty of men have fought for unpopular causes or pushed the envelope of what was acceptable.

But patriarchy depends on thinking of men and women as two homogenous masses who all want the same thing, not individuals.

For more on topics like this, Undead Sexist Cliches is available in ebook and paperback.

Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.

Elsie Dominguez, a member of the Merchant Marine, says she was raped by a naval captain in 2021. When she told her superiors she was “discouraged from reporting, dissuaded from seeking medical testing, denied access to confidential reporting, and had her job threatened.” Finally she filed a legal complaint. As detailed at the link, the Department of Labor decided being doped and assaulted was an injury she’d sustained in the course of her duties, therefore a worker’s comp matter … and they denied her claim.

A 13-year-old middle schooler reported a classmate had raped her. The school and the cops decided it didn’t look like she was struggling, decided it was consensual and took no action.

18-year-old Jesse Butler comes from a prominent Stillwater, Oklahoma family. Jesse Butler pleaded no contest to charges including “first-degree rape, domestic assault and battery by strangulation, attempted rape in the first degree and rape by instrumentation” from when he was seventeen. He was charged as an adult, then dropped down to juvenile; instead of a 78-year potential sentence he got a sentence of community service and counseling.

These are not new issues. The military has a long history, like many organizations, of ignoring rape; it used to be acceptable to grant clemency to officers convicted of sexual assault. Lots of judges, prosecutors and cops think they can tell it’s consensual even when it isn’t: if she’s not literally trying to fight him off, hey, she probably wanted it. I get into this a lot in Undead Sexist Cliches. However they’re still an outrage and we should keep on being outraged. Shrugging and declaring that’s just the way of the world solves nothing. We won’t know if we can end rape until we try. We won’t know if we can reform institutions to deal with rape better until we try.

The media fail us too. When E. Jean Carroll first mentioned the Toddler raped her, the media largely shrugged. “Worse still, when outlets did cover Carroll’s claims, most seemed to lead not with her harrowing account, but with Trump’s denial of it.” Likewise the New York Times spent far more newsprint covering Hilary Clinton’s alleged email scandal than on the Toddler bragging about grabbing women by the you-know-what. And look what happened next. We see similar distorted coverage on other topics today.

After a while this becomes easy to normalize: Toddler supporters don’t care he’s a rapist, so what’s the point in writing about it? Because while rape is normal — in the sense of happening a lot, and rapists getting away with it — it’s still monstrous and we should never resign ourselves to thinking otherwise. This is hard because as I’ve said before, contemplating the reality of sexual abuse and assault is like living in a Lovecraftian horror — accepting the true nature of reality feels insane.

As Scott Lemieux says, the argument rape accusations won’t affect his base is bad too. “Hearing yet more new accusations of sexual assault might not change the mind of any swing voters or demobilize any educated suburban Republican voters, and then again it might. More to the point, since when is “will it materially change the outcome of elections?” the standard for determining whether something is newsworthy? By that standard — particularly if we’re talking about individual stories — almost nothing is. What are we even doing here then? If you’re a political reporter and believe something is only news if it will turn hardcore Trump supporters against Trump, the logical conclusion is find something to do for a living.”

Lemieux also quotes an LGM commenter making the same point: “regardless of his supporters we have to keep talking about these rapes over and over and over because otherwise we accept the implicit framing that it’s somehow okay or that there’s some kind of non-legal statute of limitations on holding someone accountable for rape. In other words we normalize it. We normalize rape. Rape.

That’s not okay. I understand that we live in a rape culture and that rape and sexual assault are to some degree already distressingly normal and normalized, but this is different. This is not hidden or glossed over or anything. It’s an open accusation, both credible and substantiated by what she said at the time, and consistent with over a dozen other accounts. We need to keep talking about it. A lot. Because if we don’t we give the message that you can get a free pass on rape* if you just…do it enough times that people get tired of hearing about it, or stonewall and lie about it no matter how obviously.”

Push back. Fight. Stare Cthulhu in the eye and say no, you are not acceptable. It will be a long time before we can end rape but reminding everyone, even the apologists, how evil it is, is a beginning.