“The Race Card” vs. “Real Racism,” part five: drawing parallels between the “race card” and “crying rape”
As a multi-racial, cross-socio-economic, internationalist — put quite simply, I’m a huge mutt — I spend a lot of time thinking about the similarities and differences among people’s conditions, and specifically how oppression affects people of different backgrounds in similar or different ways. Yesterday’s post about building straw man arguments out of people’s real complaints about racism got me thinking about how a correlation could be drawn between racism and sexism in this regard. It’s often said that the laws surrounding sexual harassment and rape allegations are unique in our legal system in that they don’t require traditional objective proof — leaving the room open for a woman to falsely accuse a man and get away with it scott free on “just her word.” While on the face of it this argument makes sense, taken in the background of our current society (where statistics say that somewhere between 1/5th and 1/3rd of all women get sexually assaulted in some way over the course of their lifetime) it’s a ludicrous assertion. If some very small minority of women are able to abuse the formal structure of the present law, it pales in comparison to the very large population of women who are being ignored by it on a daily basis.
March 12th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
*I am not an American but in regards to the UK where I live, a woman’s accusation of sexual assault is usually not enough. If a woman accuses a man of sexual assault, is her word ‘automatically’ stronger ? I think the circumstances surrounding the incident strengthen this belief that women can get away with it. I have heard of too many times of judges literally judging women based on what they were wearing here in England as to whether their assertion of rape is credible.
Good post.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
It is not just rape and sexual harrassment that women can “make up” to get their own way. I know of women who have children with men, and when they break up they try to extort money using the children as the bargining chip. A male friend of mine was put in this situation and when he didn’t play along, she sued for sole custody. When it looked like he would win she suddenly decided to say that he physically abused her, was a raging alcoholic etc. This was taken at her word, and not only did he only end up with 4 hours vistation a fortnight, they had to be supervised by a social worker. Us women can be real bitches.