[Content note: rape culture, sexual violence]

So somebody on reddit thought that putting up a post to get “the rapist’s point of view” would be a good idea:

Reddit’s had a few threads about sexual assault victims, but are there any redditors from the other side of the story? What were your motivations? Do you regret it?

Not linking directly, but as the thread developed comments challenging the self-identifying rapists who posted there were explicitly discouraged by the forum admins. Then a subthread became focussed on one poster identifying as a serial rapist, describing his grooming tactics, being smug about how rape myths allowed him to keep on getting away with it, and being fucking creepy about how he planned to go back to his usual “handle” after that discussion and nobody on reddit would know who he was.

Liss put up a counter-thread at Shakesville for rape-survivors and allies to talk about their reactions in a safe-space.

This man’s MO was a series of micro-manipulations designed to test his targets’ boundaries via gaslighting long before the premeditated isolations and choreographed-for-confusion-therefore-deniability assaults ever took place. This is the pattern that quite a few people are recognising as paralleling their own acquaintance-rape stories: the suave fellow unexpectedly flirting, then saying/doing things bordering on inappropriate and then backing off quickly so they thought they imagined it, rinse/repeat over a few hours/days/weeks until they were befuddled but still trusting, then the isolation in order to micro-manage the rape-that-rape-myths-suggest-is-not-really-rape-rape. That each time he did something inappropriate and confusing their warning bells went off but he switched gears back to smooth and charming so fast that they ignored their inner sense of being manipulated. That the escalation of the boundary-testing was in retrospect obviously part of the grooming process.

Many of these micro-manipulations almost exactly parallel the techniques taught by PUAs in the “Seduction Community” as “Game”, by the way. If somebody had deliberately set out to provide “cover” for serial sexual predators, by surrounding them with a bunch of amateur seducers who will be clumsily negging all over the shop and thus prime the convention that only a bitch wouldn’t give such gaffes the benefit of the doubt, thus allowing the suave gaslighters to stand out all the more against this gauche background … suffice it to say, the lesson that we need to trust our own spidey-senses jangling over conforming to the “but he hasn’t done anything really awful so gotta give him the benefit of the doubt” social script has been very hard learnt for many of us, including those of us who learnt it indirectly through the experiences of our family, friends, classmates and colleagues.

And then some NiceGuys™ wonder why women won’t give their cheesy come-ons a “fair go”.

Categories: ethics & philosophy, gender & feminism, violence

Tags: rape culture, sexual assault, WTF were they thinking?