Inherently deceptive

In the week following the election I wrote about various people sifting through the tea leaves to declare What It Means. In that post I presented an answer by Aphra Behn of Shakesville that can be summarized as: If your analysis doesn’t feature racism and misogyny it is wrong.

Fannie Wolfe, also of Shakesville takes up the call. Yes, it was misogyny. And that produces rape culture. Wolfe includes a definition of rape culture from Melissa McEwen, the primary writer of Shakesville:

Rape culture is the myriad ways in which rape is tacitly and overtly abetted and encouraged having saturated every corner of our culture so thoroughly that people can't easily wrap their heads around what the rape culture actually is.

One aspect of rape culture is the portrayal of male sexuality as “inherently predatory” and women are given the task of taming male violence. And if she fails and is assaulted it is her fault. Then if she complains she is being deceptive.

The nasty guy fits in very well with rape culture. He admitted to groping women – the better word is “assault” – and that didn’t matter to over sixty million voters. Consider the reverse scenario: A woman candidate admitting to groping men, accused by men of sexual misconduct, and leering as men paraded before her in a male beauty contest. And that woman winning over a more competent man. Right.

A large part of rape culture is that women are inherently deceptive. Bernie and his supporters suggested, perhaps even claimed, that the only way a woman could win is if she dishonestly rigged the system. All through the campaign was the issue of Clinton’s emails, with far more coverage than any other issue, with the refrain there just has to be something deceptive in there. While the habitual liar was given a free pass. On to the emails hacked by Russia. One reason why these gained so much traction is it supposedly allowed the media to get to the “real story” beyond the supposedly constant Clinton deception.

Before Christmas I wrote about how the media chose to portray Clinton in a negative light and never challenging the nasty guy’s nastiness. Included in my conclusion:

Media companies chose to turn Clinton’s transparency against her. … Media companies chose to portray Clinton as a liar worse than the nasty guy.

That’s because rape culture claims that women are inherently deceptive.

Yes, this election had a large component of misogyny.