Blame the Girls

[Content Note: Rape culture.]At CNN, whose coverage from the Steubenville rape situation remains abysmal, Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Women, includes a novel method of holding women and ladies responsible for rape:Is other people wondering why the Steubenville, Ohio rape victim's two close friends claimed against her? With this particular week's arrest of two other women who "menaced" the teenager victim on Twitter and facebook, we've the origins of the answer.Rape culture isn't just the province of boys. The frequently hidden culture of girl cruelty can discourage accusers from coming forward and punish them viciously after they do. That's the way the piece opens. It's adopted my many sentences about how exactly women are socialized to determine their worth via sexual attract boys, and just how which will make women competitive and traitorous toward each other, with a few areas of which To be sure plus some I do not. That is certainly not really a universal experience: None, and that i mean none, of my close girl buddies in middle- and school were ever nasty in my experience or each other on the guy, and that we wouldn't inside a million years have unsuccessful to aid and defend each other against sexual violence. Nothing spurred our ire greater than a dude who roughed up another in our circle. Also it certainly wasn't because we did not watch our value as based on the opportunity to get and men: I regret to state we did. But that does not always intersect using the "mean girl" apathy to sexual violence that Simmons claims it routinely does.The piece finishes thus:That does not mean that Jane Doe was raped due to girls' silence. Women may not speak up for a lot of reasons, but it is difficult to disregard the energy of the culture that pushes these to choose boys over one another and punish other women to safeguard their very own reputations.We should speak with women regarding their responsibility in situations such as this. To prevent another Steubenville, we have to train children from an earlier age about gender-based violence. The term "slut" isn't just an epithet it's a word which has given adolescents permission to abandon and hurt one another whenever a girl needs support most.Women must realize not just their moral obligation however their energy to become allies to one another at parties along with other potentially unsafe spaces for women. If boys understood that women banded together to aid one another, they'd be less inclined to talk about on social networking, a smaller amount commit, these terrible functions of sexual violence.So, she's "not to imply that Jane Doe was raped due to girls' silence," but she's stating that boys "could be less inclined" to commit and share on social networking functions of sexual violence if perhaps women "banded together to aid one another." Okay.There's truth to that particular, meaning that a variety of people showing unified condemnation of sexual violence is an efficient deterrent. But that is not only on women. It is not enough for boys not to rape they have to stand it solidarity from the boys that do, too.Especially because boys largely aren't jeopardizing retributive sexual violence being visited upon them when they stand at risk from a rapist and the target.It's amazing the amount of ways we are able to find responsible women for his or her own disproportionate victimization and excuse boys from the responsibility whatsoever.