on brute force. (tw: rape)
this is going to sound crazy maybe, and i apologize if i'm actually wrong about all of this, but there's this nagging thought i've been having while studying rape culture, studying maybe a little too much for my mental health.
my concern is this: any formulation of why rape culture reproduces itself, why men take advantage of women, and why women have to keep their guard up around men, premised on essential biological differences in strength between genders, runs into a couple problems. the first is that, like any social theory predicated on essential gender differences, transgender and nonbinary people are bound to come along and throw a wrench in it, and that even if you don't want to deliberately exclude them, you kind of have to strategically ignore them for your theory to remain coherent. the second is that even then, arguing the issue is rooted in innate differences in strength produces a slew of troublesome edge cases.
for one thing, this doesn't account for the catcaller who harasses a group of women. if it were simply a matter of brute force, the man would think twice before bothering a crowd of 3 or more women; he'd be outnumbered, he'd be outmuscled, he's liable to get swarmed. i don't care how beefy you think you are, you can only take on a half-dozen people at once in movies. so his willingness to harass them likely does not come from any conscious certainty that he could take the whole group in a fight—because he couldn't—but from a certainty that there won't be one.
rooting your discourse in strength also doesn't account for the way men behave around women who have men by their side. which is to say it does, but only to an extent; what it doesn't account for is that such men will back off even when the other man is shorter and thinner and less muscular than him, NTR fantasies be damned. why? he could, in all likelihood, murder the weaker man with his bare hands if he felt the need, so what does he have to be afraid of? (there's an obvious answer, i know, i'm building to it.)
in fact, this doesn't account for any form of harassment that happens in a crowded, public place, not by itself, since anyone trying to commit a crime in, say, a bar is competing against the whole bar (this isn't really true, you know it's not, you know why, you know where this is going,) and no man is stronger than a whole bar. in fact, no man is stronger than the society in which he finds himself. the logic of brute force makes sense in the abstract, or when talking about wild animals, but we live in a relatively (!) organized society, and in most other cases, from robbery to murder even to public nuisances, it's understood, implicitly, by most people, that no amount of strength will keep you from being caught and punished, that in fact the only thing you can do to protect yourself is to avoid getting caught. fighting is out of the question, because you will be swarmed, and if you resist the swarm you will be swarmed harder, until you fold.
it also doesn't account for terry crews. it doesn't account for any man who is raped by a woman. if men are dangerous because they are strong, then why did you let her do that to you? why couldn't you have just fought her off? do you see how that sounds?
it doesn't tell you why i, a man, am not more afraid around men bigger and stronger than me, and i'm not, and most of them are. it also doesn't tell you why a woman bigger and stronger than me might be afraid of me, because i'm not that tall, and i'm not that heavy, and basically any woman with a regular gym membership and the discipline to use it could kill me if she felt the need, but that doesn't mean she feels safe with me in the gym.
it doesn't tell you why a civilian man would have the gall to attempt to
assault a muay thai expert. he had his ass handed to him, of course (of course!); one of them was trained to fight, and the other wasn't. her outfit and build should have implied as much—why didn't he know better?
it doesn't tell you why a grown woman would feel anxious around a
preteenage boy.
the only thing that leaves for scrutiny is the social contract itself. maybe men harass women because they don't expect punishment for doing so, and because they don't expect resistance from their targets. i know they do expect resistance from men, and that the possibility of resistance is usually enough. just because you could theoretically win a fight doesn't mean you want to get into one if you can avoid it, doesn't mean you couldn't sustain a disabling injury in the process, doesn't mean you aren't doing a risk-assessment: what will my boss think if i come to work with blood on my shirt? what if i get kicked out of the bar/club/store/lecture hall? what he comes back the next day with a baseball bat and takes me by surprise? what if he presses charges? what if his family does?
of course, all of these are things women could do, and we notice that
men react more violently to the slightest hint of resistance from women than to resistance from men, even though full on resistance from women would not be any safer to deal with, in all those above forms, than resistance from men. a restraining order served by a woman is still a restraining order; the man who risks it is taking on risks he would not otherwise take.
the issue is that for most men, getting beat up by another man isn't the end of the world, let alone backing down from a fight with one, whereas backing down from a fight with a woman, for many men, is the end of the world, even if unconsciously; resistance from women makes them panic, it's dangerous to them, it threatens to undermine their status among other men if it isn't quashed, so those men will, all things being equal, allow themselves much more inconvenience in responding to it.
of course women are also discouraged from resisting, they have more to risk if they do, because their aggressors have to more to risk if they don't push back.
and this ties into the original problem, which is that even if they get violent, they'll more likely than not be let off the hook, by the bar, by the store, by the whole legal system. the reason we can deter most people from enraged murder, but not enraged rape, is because murder is illegal and rape is not, not really, not in practice. it's only even socially frowned on in our imaginations.
i don't know whether brute force was instrumental in getting this system set up. maybe it was. maybe it wasn't. but it sure isn't what
maintains it.
