This Margaret Lyons makes her point so POORLY, its hard to even know what it is. I THINK her bottom line is "women should demand to be treated better."
And in that, I wholeheartedly agree. That said, some women get off on being mistreated, while others just have REALLY AWFUL self-esteem. Men that like to mistreat women don't really care which you have, or so I surmise. I really don't know.
In any event, if you, man or woman, reader, are being mistreated, THEN WALK AWAY AND FIND SOMEONE WHO TREATS YOU BETTER. Why the fuck would you accept mistreatment over and over and over again, and then claim only the person mistreating you can correct it!?!?!? Further, how is the person mistreating you supposed to know THAT YOU DON'T LIKE IT OR WANT IT? I'll tell you that I don't enjoy pain, but I like to work out and that involves pain. Some things people follow through on regardless of what they say about it.
Ms. Lyons whole "gray rape" argument is TOTALLY BOGUS AND NONSENSICAL. If you don't want to be there, ladies, SCREAM OUT the word "No!," push away your partner, march out of the room (armed with a weapon if necessary), and NEVER GO BACK.
Unless your partner is a real FELON-CLASS RAPIST and not a man who thinks you're playing games with him, he will BACK OFF AND/OR TRY FINDING OUT WHAT'S WRONG.
So how many real rapists are there in the world - few, I would imagine. Its a VERY ugly and disgusting thing to do; THAT'S WHY ITS A FELONY. How many jerks are there in the world? Millions, I'm guessing. But the REAL question is this: how many girls with low self-esteem are there in the world? Answer: WAY TOO MANY, and all of the women mentioned below qualify. They all have the same disease: the thought pattern of: I deserve whatever this man in front of me tells me I deserve. This is HORRIBLY wrong as you are GIVING SOMEONE ELSE COMPLETE POWER OVER YOU. This is YOUR FAULT, NOT HIS.
Sexual mistreatment, as described below isn't the fault of some "culture." Its one person giving someone else total power to mistreat them and then failing to refuse when it happens. PERIOD. IT IS SIMPLE, NOT COMPLEX, confused ladies of the interwebz.
Any man will tell you; when dating or dealing with a girl/woman, you DO NOT do what she says unless she backs it up with actions. Much of what women DO is at ODDS with what they SAY.
TAKE A LESSON, MS. LYONS, YOU IMBECILE.
On Girls, Adam, Rape, and Consent
Is Adam on Girls a rapist? I don't know. But does he care an appropriate amount about his partner's consent? Nope! No, he does not — and his disturbing encounter with Natalia on this week's episode is not the first time we've seen that in action. Remember that time he peed on Hannah?
I'm on record for actually kind of loving that scene, and I wasn't particularly horrified by it at the time. But since then, Adam's pattern of behavior has often been frightening and downright creepy, and "On All Fours" brought that to a, er, climax, and inspired many responses.
"Adam may not be a rapist, but he sure is an asshole," writes Jennifer Wright at the Gloss. "What happened in the last episode of Girls was not 'uncomfortable sex,'" writes Samhita Mukhopadhyay on Feministing. "Natalia’s humiliation and debasement are not sexy, but painful," says Jace Lacob at the Daily Beast. "'No means no,' but it is not the only measure of consent," says Amanda Hess at Slate. And over at xoJane, Marianne Kirby writes this:
Gray rape can be a problematic term — some people use it as a label for rape that they don't consider "real" or "as bad as real" rape. That is totally bogus. I use the term here to mean the kind of encounter that people sometimes have where consent is not given but it is assumed; it's a term used to describe "nonstandard" sexual assault and, in some ways, it is a weasel term to cover the conflict we feel about consent.Because that is the kind of thing that happens all the time in our culture. Our rape culture. And it's the kind of thing that leaves women (not just women) uncomfortable and unsure, both about their own experiences and when they are watching something like the scene between Adam and Natalia.
And over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Phillip Maciak writes this
... Why does Adam revert here? Nostalgia for Hannah? A desire to ruin something good? A desire to show Natalia something? And what does it mean that this scene ends with a money shot, maybe the most graphically sexual image to appear on HBO, including Game of Thronesand Deadwood itself? Perhaps more so than Girls has done, the shot of Natalia on the bed, post-coitus is designed to reveal to us the shuddering disconnect between imagination and reality, between the image of this in Adam’s head and what it actually looks and feels like. To echo a refrain from Dear Television earlier this season, this is what it looks like for Adam to get what he wants.
(On a slightly related note, when did everyone stop wearing condoms? The Pill does not protect against STDs, folks.)
There's no one right way for Natalia to react — she might brush it off as a bad night, or she might be bothered by it for a while, or she might be haunted and traumatized by it for years. It doesn't seem like a legally prosecutable instance of sexual assault. But it's a far cry from a mutually consensual endeavor, and this episode asks us why we're so, so careful not to call things rape, or why we think there's an acceptable level of reluctance, coercion, or intimidation that can be part of a sexual encounter.
These ideas of manipulation and consent, of agency and victimization, areGirls' calling card. It's Hannah pitifully, tragically, agonizingly jamming Q-tips in her ears, or Shosh discovering that Ray has moved in with her without asking. Girls thrives in that scary area bounded by what we say we want, what we actually want, and what we want people to think we want. In lighthearted episodes, that triangulation leaves us wondering why Ray is so focused on certain cuts of jeans. In darker episodes, we're left to wonder if one of our favorite characters is actually a rapist.
No comments:
Post a Comment