Shailja Patel is an “acclaimed poet, playwright and activist,” and “was born and raised in Kenya, has lived in London and San Francisco, and now divides her time between Nairobi and Berkeley. ” She’s an opinion writer for the Guardian, BBC, and Al-Jazeera.
Given that illustrious biography, you can imagine what kind of insufferable progressive she is.
She decided to voice her opinion on Twitter about why concealed carry is bad and rape is a tool of the patriarchy (unrolled for easy reading).
When you tell women and girls to learn self-defense, or carry weapons against rapists, you’re not reducing rape. You’re just saying “let him rape someone more vulnerable.”
Stop calling for dystopias. Start working to end patriarchy. Make a world BEYOND RAPE.
Patriarchy wants us to believe that rape has always existed and always will. That rape is intrinsic to masculinity. This myth serves patriarchy by transferring all consequences of rape, including shame and blame, onto victims. Patriarchy stays unaccountable.
Rape culture is how patriarchy sustains the hegemonic myth that rape is a given, an unchangeable condition, of all human societies. So men never have to hold themselves or other men accountable. Rape is a women’s issue.
Rape serves patriarchy by keeping all women scared, ashamed, scrambling for a non-existent safety, and available to men on the most unequal of terms. Patriarchy tells women their best hope of survival lies in being chosen by powerful men who’ll protect them.
So many responses think it’s entirely reasonable to expect all women and children, regardless of age, health, disability, life conditions, to be armed and trained for combat 24/7, even in their own homes. But completely unreasonable to imagine and call for a world without rape.
So many responses ignore the reality that men rape their own daughters, granddaughters, nieces. Men rape their wives, in-laws, girlfriends, dates. Their sisters and cousins. Their colleagues and employees, their constituents and congregants. Men rape their domestic workers.
Should women have guns in bed with them, when they sleep with their partners? Should girls take guns to school to shoot rapist teachers? Should women take guns to church for rapist pastors? To work, for their colleagues and bosses? To family gatherings, for creepy relatives?
I can’t convey through words how absolutely hateful and vile this line of thought is.
Rape is evil. Evil exists as part of humanity. Evil people do evil things. Good people stand up to evil and stop evil from happening.
This idea that rape is not an evil carried out by evil people, but is inherent to men and is used by men against women assumes that all men are evil and is nothing but anti-male bigotry.
As a man, I believe it is my duty to protect and defend women from rape and to empower them to defend themselves from the same.
I was never taken as a child into a room full of men and told that I needed to rape women to keep them in line. I know of no man, at least in the Western world, who was. The Islamic world is a little bit different…
There is no conspiracy among Western men to rape women to subjugate them.
As per the idea of “we need to teach men not to rape, not teach women to defend themselves.” One of the most important lessons of the bible, as well as of philosophy is that evil exists. In the book of Genesis, there were only four people on earth, Adam, Eve, Cain, and Able, and it turns out, one of them was a murderer. Miguel wrote a post a few years ago that still gives me chills, about a truly evil human predator and the futility of trying to educate evil people against rape.
So not just does this insult the majority of men who are not evil and not rapists, it creates a false sense of security (and superiority) that evil men can be educated.
While it is true that some evil men to hurt those around them, pushing the paranoia that every husband, father, grandfather, uncle, boyfriend, etc. is a potential rapist and inherently untrustworthy is viciously mean and disturbingly hateful.
Lastly, one thing I never see any of these types of feminists talk about is the high rate of female sexual abusers who target children they are in the care of or the prevalence of young female teachers who have sex with younger male students. This would destroy the narrative that rape is a male thing used to abuse women and not an evil thing used by evil people against those who are powerless to defend themselves.
Everything about this is thread is terrible. She states that all men are inherently awful rapists but women should not lift a finger to protect themselves and that women are forced to rely on men to protect them but no man is trustworthy enough to not be a rapist.
This is what happens when hatred of men, being woke, and rejecting the responsibility of self-defense combine. You get a nonsensical screed that insults men and puts women in danger.
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