I was at a Hip Hop documentary showing/symposium this afternoon, and while I feared it would be a bunch of white academic types saying cringeworthy things and missing the point, the crowd was a surprisingly well-spoken and diverse group and the film was a good exploration of the link between mainstream Hip Hop and hyper-masculinity in American culture.
At one point in the film, There was a disturbing segment showing women having trouble moving through spring break crowds in Florida, and scantily clad women at a video shoot, and the way both were being openly disrespected and, in the Florida case, openly groped and fondled by men, sometimes even as they protested. One man, when aggressively called on his actions by a woman he’d touched, was laughing with his friends at her anger.
Afterwards, during the discussion, one girl opined something along the lines of “Well, look how they were dressed. One girl in that video was basically just wearing a bra and panties, and when you’re around men dressed like that, you’ll get that treatment.” Several women in the group immediately (but respectfully) took issue, one saying “I go to the beach in a bikini all the time, and nobody has ever grabbed my ass.” But interestingly, nobody addressed one issue; namely, that we always put the onus for the situation on the woman’s appearance.
We have this problem among Muslims, of course, as the Al-Hilali idiocy showed; it’s not up to men to exercise simple fucking restraint, obviously it’s up to women not to tempt men. Of course, anyone who has been paying attention knows that in the Muslim world (or among Orthodox Jews or some African Christians), even with the mania over women covering, sexual assault is still a common occurrence, whether in the form of casual groping or outright rape. My friend Aisha, a hijabi since the age of 16, told me that men have tried to rape her on two separate occasions and on one her attacker specifically said “take off that scarf, bitch”. Aisha is the equivalent of a back belt in two systems, so that was really just too bad for those guys, but the point stands. Muse also wrote about her own experiences along those lines here, and I’m sure if I sat and thought, I could think of many, many more examples. Of course, as Natalia Anatonova recently pointed out, the same is extended to strippers and sex workers in general; we’re okay with women having that kind of job but once they do have it, hey, they forfeit any right not to be raped because they’re provoking these poor, helpless men.
Of course, we don’t accept that men can’t resist the urge to steal, because all the wonderful inanimate possessions they see (and are practically assulted with advertising for) are right ther, tempting them. Try going in front of a jury claiming you stole that big screen TV because the store shamelessly flaunted it in the window, the jury will be back fairly quickly. Or the owner teased you by parking his cherry Benz on the curb. Or try telling a judge that you just couldn’t resist that beautiful vial of crack you found and it’s the fault of whoever dropped it during the raid. Shit, if I punched every idiot with a “If you can’t support our troops, move to France” type shirt/bumper sticker, I’d love to claim that their idiocy over powered my reason. And not only does that not stand up legally, people in general would think it was crazy. But when it comes to a woman’s body, suddenly, to a lot of Americans as well as Al-Hilali, it’s “Cover up the meat so the cats don’t rape it”.
Muslim men, of course, are enjoined to ‘lower their gaze’, but gosh, that’s just so hard! Americans love to crow about how great we are and how well we treat women, but then we simultaneously grade their worth by how sexy they are and tell them that if they can be construed as displaying that sexiness AT ALL, well, boys will be boys right?
I go to San Diego once or twice a year. When I’m there, I spend a lot of time at Imperial Beach swimming in the ocean, eating falafel and pad thai by the pier, trying to surf, or just strolling. As might be predicted, I see a lot of nubile young women in various states of undress. Guess what I do? I just go on about my day. Saying they’re asking to be groped is like saying I’m asking to get my pad thai stolen because I’m eating it in public. And, at the risk of stating the obvious, while I wouldn’t appreciate having my pad thai taken, it wouldn’t be an act of violence against me as a human being that violated all my boundaries. So in a roundabout, messy way, I”m saying; men, take some fucking responsibility. Don’t act like a horndog all the time and don’t think with your nutsack, and don’t act towards any woman the way you wouldn’t want some random guy acting towards you.
But women, yeah, can you stop wearing those Brazilian cut bikinis at Imperial Beach? There’s kids there. Geez.
