Marciano490 said:
If you want to say I'm perpetuating rape culture through my comment, I'll be cool and hear you out, but I need more than a throwaway line or two from a place of assumed authority.
In this instance, im treating rape like anything else under the sun, especially any legal matter, and saying all facts need to come to light.
But here's the thing: this isn't a legal matter if you're not in the courtroom. This is a social matter. And, from a social perspective, sexual violence does have different issues that you have to take into account. Most crimes are rather difficult to dismiss through social pressure in the face of the testimony of the accuser and physical evidence--the "he was asking for it" doesn't really apply to, say, vehicular manslaughter, you know? And here's the worst of it: even if the accuser is legally unable to prove the case, even if the accused walks with a not guilty verdict, that doesn't mean the accuser hasn't had their life ruined, psychologically (by an event that is,
to them, traumatic on a scale I personally cannot fucking envisage) or socially ("she was just a slut"--who thinks worse of a robbery victim if the robber is found not guilty?) by what they feel was rape.
And to get the favorite sinecure of the shitbag out of the way: yes, there are some false rape accusations, made up of whole cloth. Sometimes, fucked up people make shit up. It happens. But by any metric one would wish to offer, they're a fuckin'
rounding error compared to the ones that happen. And the ones that happen and are never reported. The public perception of sexual violence (and not all sexual violence is rape) is lost, chiefly by the victims, in the but-waits and well-actuallys. The in-theory-benign middle viewpoint is, as Snod mentions, an implicit attack on the position or credibility of the weaker party (who is, contrary to the ideas of monstrous assholes like Paul Elam, usually the accusing female, not the oppressed male), as most support of the status quo usually is. And you are,
of course, technically correct. But the accuser is vastly disadvantaged compared to the accused and already has an uphill battle ahead of her; your attempts at neutrality are representative of the kind that can and do make victims of sexual violence--and this is not theoretical to me, this is a slight rephrasing of what I have been told by a rape survivor who never reported it--go "jesus, if people are going to smarm about how being
fair means they must actively doubt the story of somebody
being raped, why should I put myself through that?".
Note: not "the courts". People. People like you, dude. And you're a good dude, I don't believe you're at all malicious in this, but the way we--dudes, mostly, but some ladies for sure--are brought up makes it so fucking hard to see this until it clicks, and then you can't not see it. I promise you, it's there, and it's fucking all of us up in ways I don't think any of us can fully grasp from inside our heads. So I would argue that this is where airing that technical correctness fuels a way bigger, way uglier problem that we must
try to see, because not seeing it hurts people we love.
(Also, clear out your PM box or something. I've got a couple things I think you'll be interested in, but they're off-topic.)