I was about 12 years old when this song was a hit, and it made me feel very nervous about what it meant to be a man. The air of menace is pretty extreme in this song, from the obvious resemblance of the title to the word “rapist”, to the warning, finger-shaking tone of blame it takes toward the women in the world who need to beware of the Rapper, to the description of his techniques in seducing women, which are threatening, manipulative and evil.

Hey girl, I bet you
There’s someone out to get you.
You’ll find him anywhere
On a bus, in a bar, in a grocery store.
He’ll say “Excuse me, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after.

So, he starts his rappin’
Hoping something will happen.
He’ll say he needs you,
A companion, a girl he can talk to.
He’s made up his mind.
He needs someone to sock it to.

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after.

He’s made an impression,
So he makes a suggestion.
“Come up to my place
For some coffee or tea or me.”
He’s got you where he wants you.
Girl, you’ve gotta face reality.

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after

How’s a boy supposed to distinguish between what this rapist is doing and what he’s been taught to do in order to earn the romantic attentions of the girls he longs to love? And it’s confusing to think how menacing and dangerous it sounds to be the prey of what sounds like a fairly non-coercive seduction technique. Then, after all this sinister hinting around, the girl is instructed to simply face reality.

Something I have often thought about but rarely articulated is that men are not only taught how to be men in haphazard and slapdash ways, but also are taught many overtly contradictory ways of expressing masculinity, of varying degrees of evilness and aggression.

I think even the manliest man you have ever met is, at heart, completely uncertain as to just what a man is supposed to do or what is expected of him, and this uncertainty causes a great deal of misunderstood anxiety, which is most handily identified by men as anger and resentment toward women, who he thinks have invented and have sole responsibility for all masculine behavior through the all mighty power of the pussy, before which he trembles in abject fear.

This song does double duty, threatening both men and women with a dark vision of manipulation, coercion and rape.

Go get ‘em!

Men who are raped are a strange lot. In the larger view of the constant daily rape of women, it’s not much of an issue at all. Most feminists (I use “feminists” to identify humans with uteruses, versus Feminist Freds, who are simply friendly to the idea of feminist revolution) will snort derisively at the the very thought of wasting time considering the circumstances and particulars of men who are raped. But on this blog, it’s a useful tool for helping men to understand the depth of feelings our oppressed women friends experience.

Empathy and understanding of what constitutes rape can be gleaned from a consideration of men who are raped. Piercing the thick skin of men who live in a bubble of male privilege and who have been trained from birth to never, ever allow themselves to see anything through the eyes of women, is an almost insurmountable struggle. 

Feminists grow up in a culture that is based entirely on the viewpoint of mankind being male. This makes it hard to see how one-sided the ability to understand what the other gender experiences is for men. Women grow up almost completely within a male identity, and are acutely aware of their femininity as different from humanity. Women don’t have to try to imagine the world from a man’s viewpoint, it is shoved down their throats constantly, because male is the default state of humanity. Women see themselves as men plus femininity, because they are human, and to be human is to be a man.

This is how I started to understand one of the proofs that women are oppressed. Realizing that women are allowed, even forced, to see things as if through a man’s eyes, and that most women see most things as if they too were men and that their own oppression was to be defended and encouraged, was a big step in understanding why not all women are feminists, even though it seems paradoxical that women would fight their own liberation from oppression. What is normal in a patriarchal culture like ours is to see yourself as a male, as right, as on top, as a winner. To identify with and collaborate with the men who are the eternal winners, the default top dogs, is only natural in those who see the world as a contest where you seek to win and someone else must thereby lose. Getting as far up the pyramid as you can means you must justify your allegiance to the winners who can reward you with a place beneath them, but above many others.

Men, though, are so actively discouraged from seeing anything through women’s eyes, from any hint of empathy or understanding, that women are probably incapable of even guessing at the barriers that men erect and defend against any consideration of the female point of view.

Men feel that to open yourself to the female viewpoint, you must feminize yourself, you must consider yourself inferior to men, you must be a loser in life’s hierarchy, literally debase yourself to an extent that women would find just as difficult to consider, since it is deeply insulting to women to admit that seeing the world through women’s eyes is anything like this. Women, who prefer to see the world from a male viewpoint, but who also know where they stand and what being a woman can mean in relation to the threat of male domination without male protection, would prefer to imagine that men see themselves as they see themselves, as men with additional aspects, rather than as men see them, as unfathomable people who are less than men because they exist to be used as domestic servants or to fill sexual needs. And men see femininity as mysterious and incomprehensible mostly because they can’t allow themselves to enter into any kind of consideration of living a life as a number two human to men’s number one, a life of domestic drudgery or of being tricked, pursued and used sexually by men.

When men are raped, a window opens up into the world as women see it, since women are quite familiar with the constant threat of rape they walk around with. Men, unless considering jail time, are never in any fear of rape. Men will even joke loudly and with great joy that they would like to be raped, since for them, rape is a wonderful thing that happens when a person gets what they really want anyway: sex. 

Lately my buddy Misogynist Mike was telling me some stories about his days hanging around New Orleans, crashing at the tiny apartment of a plump little stripper named Sheila. After a few days, Sheila made some overtures to him indicating that she would be open to sex. Mike was younger than her, and young enough to see an older woman as still slightly mom-like; intimidating, asexual, threatening – especially since he had a roof over his head thanks to her graciousness, and she had the power to make him homeless if crossed. He had sex with her, even though he wasn’t at all attracted to her, even though it made him feel more vulnerable and dependent. He had a hard time understanding these feelings, except that she wasn’t that good looking. His feeling of discomfort while he was having sex with her was a powerful emotion, though.

“She raped me, man!” he finally realized, happy at the thought he was once good looking and desirable enough to be raped, since men see being raped as a good thing. “I didn’t want to, but I was afraid she’d throw me out in the rain that very night, so I did it any way. That’s rape!”

Yes, it was rape, and if he wasn’t so happy at the idea that rape wasn’t so bad when you were a man being raped by a woman, he might have been able to take it to an understanding of how constantly women feel threatened by the same kind of rape. Sex without true attraction, with someone who intimidates and threatens you with dire social problems like hunger and homelessness; we call that marriage.

Alice Marian Mills (née Harbord-Hamond), Lady Hillingdon

Vibrating Liz, a commentator on the blog I Blame the Patriarchy, educated Twisty’s commentators on the origin of the oft-quoted catch phrase of every decent patriarchal marriage: “Just lie back and think of England!”

Men find this idea unsurprising and quite rational, and will applaud any woman who cares to express it, while reserving some quietly constructive criticism on various ways a woman should actually enjoy submission to involuntary sex. Men like to think that woman actually enjoy sex when they are forced to enjoy it, either by their own “better” natures as illustrated by this phrase, or by some voodoo sex magic that they think will work, usually gleaned from a thorough and lifelong study of the pornographic tricks that bring about results; ranging from mercilessly chomping between a woman’s legs to spanking, humiliations, or that classic favorite, dick size.

The real quote is very good, from a letter Alice Marian Mills (née Harbord-Hamond), Lady Hillingdon, sent to her mother. “I am happy now that George calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week, and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England.”

This is as perfect a description of rape as you would ever care to read. And I say this in full knowledge of how much worse it could be – after a beating, with a stranger, at gunpoint, in a back seat in a dark alley, afraid of death. In both cases there comes a point where you just lie there and take it. In both cases there’s nothing in it for you but the humiliation of knowing that you must submit. Violence makes very little difference.

A man chases women until he finds one who allows him to fuck her, impregnate her, and thereby own her life. This is the essential meaning of marriage, if you strip away all the details about God and legalities and shades of moral do’s and don’ts. The chasing of women, the relentless pursuit, is what reveals marriage as the brutish and domineering thing it really is.

The fear of gay marriage must be closely related to the fear of dominant gays. Men, or dominant sex partners, no matter what sex, will be allowed to chase women, or whichever sex they target, that they see as submissive or open to being seduced. The idea of sex itself is drenched in coercion and male supremacy, and marriage is the codification of the essential underlying meaning of sex being about pursuing and winning. Putting this power into the hands of gays means allowing them the same privilege to openly pursue those who haven’t chosen to be gay but who can be had by the same mixture of cunning and force that men use on women.

It has taken me a really long time to even come this close to understanding the fear and outrage straight people feel about gay marriage, since I have a nature that has never really been comfortable with my given role as a predator. Once you see that the echos of rape resound throughout the entire construction of arousal and sexuality in a patriarchy, you stop being befuddled by the moral window dressing that they all use to disguise their unexplored fears and desires.

So the sum of my understanding of the fear of gay sex and marriage is this: If we let those gays openly marry each other, they can openly pursue anyone they want, and that means that gay people will start raping, owning and marrying straight people. The idea that anyone can rape and enslave someone is a subtle threat to male privilege.

I can’t help but feel awe about the unbelievably fine and delicate sensitivity of male privilege to the slightest threat from any side. For something that most people would swear does not exist, it certainly has a robust self-preservation instinct, even in the face of total emotional chaos, which is how I used to characterize the fear of gay marriage.

One of the most horrible trends in modern life for women is the legal drift towards softening the definition of rape. There is an idea out there that men can be raped, too, as long as they are young enough, which does not make any sense at all if you see these men. They are huge, powerful, sexually active rape machines ready to coerce and exploit weakness and the submissive training women get from childhood on.

There was recently a case in the paper here in St. Louis about a teacher who was prosecuted for raping boys 13 to 16 years old. She said she was forced to have sex with them, but her defense didn’t hold up, because a colleague of hers claimed that when she spoke about it to her, she never mentioned being forced.

Rape. She was forced to perform oral sex on these boys and the prosecutors successfully charged her with rape and sent her to prison.

Just another addition to the already growing list of legal excuses to allow men to rape women. If a man is young enough he is allowed to rape as many women over 21 as he wishes and simply claim that they raped him, making it impossible to prosecute. I suspect that the teacher, Cathy Heminghaus, knew this and it probably played an important part in her feelings of being trapped and intimidated by those kids, who were the real criminals.

My readers, few as they are, yet much appreciated by me, might want to help me list all the latest legal excuses for raping women. I know that dressing provocatively is a great legal case for wanting to be raped, as is being drunk, asking for it then changing your mind, and many other things.

But it took me a long time to blog about this case, though it has been outraging me for weeks now as I followed what little of it I could glean from our once-great and now pathetic local paper. The full horror of teens being able to rape teachers as much as they please and then send the teachers to jail for doing it was just too much for my tender heart to take. It just makes me so sick.

First, there’s this list of facts about the state of women in the world today, Thanksgiving, Life and Death, and Anti-feminism. I feel the need to direct any readers I might have to this because I don’t say much about the indisputable need for everyone, especially men, to understand that being pro-feminist is just plain normal and being anti-feminist is morally corrupt and soulless.

Blue Milk informs me that today is White Ribbon Day. I grimace at the dutiful and sanctimonious wearing of ribbons and suchlike demonstrations of solidarity that are better expressed through actions than gestures, but I applaud the idea that we should all support any consciousness-raising efforts. The idea that much of the world supports violence towards women, rather than deploring it, makes these two posts must reading for those who might not understand why I go to the effort of trying to blog about feminism at all.

When you read her account of a woman plagued by a man who raped her you will go into a righteous feminist rage. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could think their way around this woman’s problem. Because women who have been raped are unprotected by law or common civility.

Here’s a perfect way to figure out if Your Nigel will ever get feminism or not. Tell him this story and ask him what he’d do. When he offers up something lame, ask him if there might be any problems doing that if he were this woman.

Put him in her place. There’s no need to examine or criticize his points, because the point would be for him to walk in a woman’s shoes a while. The more men think about what it would be like to be raped by a man and how hard it would be to do anything about it, the less time they spend thinking about how terrible it would be if some bitch claimed that they raped her. Which is what men always fear first – the very idea that one of their loving advances might be misunderstood as rape is more on their minds than being raped. Once on this line of thinking men go nowhere but backwards.

This is because every man, deep in his heart, knows that manly sex done by real men is more like rape than the kind of sex women seem to like. And it makes them very defensive and afraid.

I had to invent several other men to populate this blog who don’t exist. Misogynist Mike, who thinks women are all stupid whores. Men like him are everywhere, and if you are one you can expect to be moderated into nonexistence on sight. But I will use his persona to illustrate the viewpoints of men like him, and show men like myself how we can slip into his ways of thought without questioning it.

Then there will be Pornsick Pat. Many a feminist male sympathizer will be much disturbed by seeing things he does and thinks are really good are also shared by this fellow. This blog will maintain a rigorous and firmly-held standard that pornography degrades women and that it also degrades men just as much, and will attempt to help men understand that this degradation is why they instinctively feel ashamed of consuming porn.

Lastly, we will have Your Nigel. This is the fellow who you date who could never be like Pornsick Pat and Misogynist Mike but who simply hides the truth from you because you could never date a guy like that and he knows it.

I will be posting on topics like rapists and those who defend them. The level of public acceptance of rape is getting to the point where it’s alarmingly close to being mainstream sex.

I’ll also touch a little on the topic of the beauty industry and examine it from the standpoint of how it creates a tendency towards pornsickness in men through constant titillation and how it creates and supports men hating women for not being as they should be, rather than from the more typical feminist viewpoint of how terribly oppressive it is for women.

I hope you like what I write, and if you don’t, let me know. I have a pretty thick skin. Comments will be heavily moderated, and might be a little slow – we shall see. Men who spew hatred of women will be banned. Men who think they know everything and want to argue until they have “won” will be banned. Women who do the same things will be banned if needed, but I expect this to be a safe place for women, and intend to keep it that way, even though the intention is to raise the consciousness of men who want to become more aware of the cruel and unsuspected effects of a misogynist world on their all-too human hearts.