So here’s an interesting thing. This article about Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid written by a woman in New York City (certainly a progressive city by most feminist standards) discusses rape culture without naming the term, but also contains a bunch of rape apologia of its own. Check out this telling excerpt:
Perhaps more importantly, I wonder whether it would have red flagged my now live-in boyfriend, who I met on OkCupid. He’s a great guy, but we’ve on several occasions discussed just how vague some of those match questions really are. For instance, the Predator Alert Tool looks at the OkCupid match question:
“Do you feel there are any circumstances in which a person is obligated to have sex with you?”
A “yes” answer is deemed problematic, obviously. However, some of the people answering “yes” might be men (and women) who, for instance, think that spouses are in some sense “obligated” to have sex with each other, but that that obligation does not extend to any particular night or cover extenuating circumstances like illness. Those individuals are not necessarily rapists waiting to happen (but they maybe could have thought twice before putting a red flaggy answer like that on a dating site without further explanation).
Spouses who think marriage is an obligation to have sex sometimes but not other times are “not necessarily rapists waiting to happen”? Really? What, exactly, are they, then? Opportunistic (coercive-)contract-leveraging sex-havers? You married them, so “on some level,” you owe them sex? Is an obligation to fuck (unless you have a headache) really still in the fine print of your marriage vows? REALLY?
Sometimes people ask me why the various Predator Alert Tools (especially the Predator Alert Tool for Facebook, which aims to create a support network of sexual assault survivors who share an abuser in common) aren’t more widely used. This is your answer, my friends: because even women living in a feminist progressive city like New York who actively promote the Predator Alert Tools still have a metric shit-ton of internalized rape apologia that they don’t even recognize as such.
Discuss.
