What’s wrong with “Don’t rape”

This post is about why I don’t like this sign:

If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with somone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word. . . The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact. The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over — to believe that what happens to our friends — what our friends do to our friends — is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape”.

So the solution, as I see it, is not to say “Don’t rape.” Or rather, not to say just that. You absolutely have to say what rape is and what’s wrong with it as well, because some people really don’t know. And you have to say it often, and guys…you have to say it to your friends. You have to say it so that they don’t have a Pact, and don’t operate under the illusion that they do. It isn’t good enough to simply hate rapists and publicly wish for every horrible thing you can think of (including rape) to happen to them– that’s allowing the most obvious and acknowledged perpetrators of sexual violence to act as scapegoats for the rest, for the “accidental” rapists. It’s actually disturbing rather than touching to see explicit declarations of how much someone would like to punish a convicted rapist, especially a child molester, when they come from men who generally seem to regard women’s sexual consent…loosely. It suggests that their regard is more for women and children’s “innocence” than their autonomy. Hint: rape isn’t bad because it leaves a person tainted. It’s bad because he/she didn’t choose it. Yes, being raped can certainly make a person feel tainted, but that’s an artifact of both his/her control having been taken away and the bizarre, sad cultural construct of sexual purity which says that sex– especially virginity-removing sex– somehow permanently changes a person, usually a woman, into something…lesser. Something worldly, and therefore a little more profane and a little less sacred. Sex is necessary according to this thinking because we can’t make the babies without it (yet), but it lowers a person– especially if they have a lot of it, or enjoy it too much, or have no intention of making babies using it, ever. This is called puritanism, and it’s the friend of pastor and pornographer alike.

But I digress. Point being…we can’t just say “Don’t rape.” We may not be able to stop it altogether, like we’re not going to stop murder, but we can do a lot more toward that end by articulating what it is, why it’s wrong, and not accommodating the thinking that enables it.