6 thoughts on “roeper on rape”

  1. Again, using phrases like “more shameful than …” and words like “embarrassment” don’t cut it. This issue is not an “if-then” statement that linear types can package up with a pretty little bow: robbery=crime; rape=crime; therefore robbery=rape. And if there is still someone who thinks that a woman who’s been raped is shameful, that person probably lives in an outhouse in the woods and this argument doesn’t concern him/her, anyway. It’s a matter of the media splaying open the victim’s wounds for a story, wounds that are not like the wounds of robbery or any other crime. Robbery doesn’t take the ultimate intimacy and pervert it for the rest of a woman’s life. There is no historical sexist symbolism in getting your stereo stolen. Once (mostly male, it seems) commentators grasp that, then maybe they’ll see that this is a little more multi-faceted than an MS-DOS command. ne day there will be enough time between when sex (and even rape) was a man’s privilege, and and the newer time of a woman’s body being her own, to view rape as any old crime.

  2. I really like that. It’s sort of what I was trying to say last time this came up. Sure, rape is a crime, but all crimes are not equal. And it’s true– I haven’t seen a female commentator arguing this.

  3. Well, the first and most prominent person to argue in favor of naming was a woman: Geneva Overholser, former Washington Post ombudsman, Pulitzer Prize winner, ex-NYT editorial writer, journalism ethics authority, feminist, and Wellesley ’70.
    Quote: “We [the media] seem too ready to be social workers, choosing not to list the cause of death, not to name a rape victim, not to write about such socially unacceptable crimes as incest in the interest of some social good other than the one we most ardently believe in: accuracy, comprehensiveness, completeness, unvarnished truth.”
    It’s hardly a male-only position, and — believe it or not! — it’s not one held only by simpletons who’ve never evolved past using tools to broil mastodon meat.

  4. Well, I didn’t mean to imply that only neanderthals supported naming the victims. I just hadn’t seen a woman arguing for it. That’s all.
    But I don’t see how choosing not to name a rape victim makes you a social worker.

  6. It’s a complex issue, as I said before, but I still think I’d err on the side of giving the victim the choice of being named or anonymous.

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