When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.
Fortunately, you’re a good guy. We’ve already established that. Now that you’re aware that there’s a problem, you are going to go out of your way to fix it, and to make the women with whom you interact feel as safe as possible.
To begin with, you must accept that I set my own risk tolerance. When you approach me, I will begin to evaluate the possibility you will do me harm. That possibility is never 0%. For some women, particularly women who have been victims of violent assaults, any level of risk is unacceptable. Those women do not want to be approached, no matter how nice you are or how much you’d like to date them. Okay? That’s their right. Don’t get pissy about it. Women are under no obligation to hear the sales pitch before deciding they are not in the market to buy.
The second important point: you must be aware of what signals you are sending by your appearance and the environment. We are going to be paying close attention to your appearance and behavior and matching those signs to our idea of a threat.
“And whenever I see a black man, I cross the street. And every time I see someone who looks Arab, I assume that they are carrying a bomb. If I see someone who I believe to be a homosexual, I assume that they are infected with AIDS and wish to have sex with me. I don’t mean to be prejudice, in fact I’m not, but it’s a known fact that most of these people can and will harm me if given the opportunity. Moreover, I’m the one who, right or wrong, gets to decide whether or not these individuals pose such threats — which is all of them, or at least most of them.”
Why does so much of the radical third wave of feminism tolerate the very sort of profiling of men which it abhors when it is applied to other groups? At the very least do they not recognize just how hetereonormative this “Schroedinger’s Rapist” nonsense is?
In establishing the One and Other(ed) dichotomy within the study of sex and gender, by dividing “mankind” into men and women, all subsets of feminist study which followed simply assumed that the category of “men,” both as a theoretical and social entity, was fully formed. Post-modernism, queer theory and the queer liberation movement sparked some radical inquiry into the errors of this monolithic concept, but none of it managed to take hold within feminism as a whole. For evidence of this, consider how the feminist literature approaches the social existence of homosexual and bisexual men. Authors either ignore them or bring them into feminism by a process of “feminization,” thus treating them as women.
The remaining monolithic concept of men/male(ness) is so abstract that it allows feminism, and indeed reactionary theories of sex and gender, to mould it to suit the parameters of their arguments and theories. If liberal feminism is to believed, men are constructive market actors who are equal to women. If sex-role feminists and “mens rights” reactionaries are to be believed, men are heterosexual, stoic, family men who care more for sport and patriotism than they do appearance and emotion. And so on and so forth.
The third wave of radical feminism is most troubling in this respect, as it conceives of men and maleness (meaning male heterosexuality) as pathology. According to this gradation of radical feminism, to be a man is to be a (potential) sexual offender/oppressor. Most tragically, this offensive prejudice plays right into the hands of reactionaries.
This blog has been retired.
