http://www.daclarke.org/PowerBlame.html
(choppy pieces of smart)
Pretend you're in an abusive relationship. Picture yourself saying to this other person, "I have the right to be treated with respect." Now, that may developmentally be important for you to say, but there comes a point when it's no longer appropriate to keep the focus on you -- you're not the problem. Contast how that former statement feels with how it feels to say: 'You have no right to treat me this way." The former is almost a supplication, the latter almost a command. And its focus is on the perpetrator.
For too long we've been supplicants. For too long the focus has been on us. It's time we simply set out to stop those who are doing wrong. -Derrick Jensen, Endgame
When the focus is on the victims -- on the victims' behaviour, on how to "save" or "help" the victims, on how to "educate" the vulnerable to be "safer" -- the focus is removed from the perps. When we talk about "saving the forests" or "saving the oceans" similarly we render invisible the people -- people with names, addresses, and bank accounts -- who are making the decisions (and profiting from those decisions) to liquidate the biosphere and use it as a dump for the excreta of industrialism. They have no right to do this -- or in a sane system of "rights" they would have no right.
...
The issue with, say, the government posting warnings to women that getting drunk may expose them to increased risk of sexual assault, can be perceived perhaps by two analogies. One is a sign on a small service road at my local harbour. it says "CYCLISTS SLOW DOWN, WATCH FOR CARS." Why does this sign not read "MOTORISTS SLOW DOWN, WATCH FOR CYCLISTS"? After all, it is the motorist who will injure or kill the cyclist in a collision, not the other way around. Or let us take a cross cultural view: if the Afghan government were to post signage in public places warning women that to go unveiled may expose them to greater risk of harassment or injury (or death) at the hands of Taliban extremists, we would be outraged. We would focus on the behaviour of the men who are attacking these women, not on the behaviour of the women in going unveiled -- even though, indeed, at this point in history it would be unwise and dangerous for a woman to go about unveiled in public in Taliban-controlled spaces, and that is the "reality". The big difference is in whether we consider that "reality" (actually a socially constructed set of rules, a hierarchy of privilege and power) is acceptable or not, and whether it is immutable (in which case we will label it "natural") or not. And this judgment in turn may depend on whether we feel, at some level, that remedying the injustice will erode our own personal privileges (i.e. force us to give up our SUV or our air travel vacation -- or the many benefits of dominance over women -- or erode our sense of national, ethnic, religious or gender identity).
Thus when it is our own Taliban (our own motorists) -- men who rape women because, like Donald Rumsfeld, they believe that "weakness is provocative," and because they can get away with it -- their behaviour suddenly becomes *natural* or *normative* (like danger imposed on peds and cyclists by motorists), and the women's behaviour becomes the "controllable factor" that should be influenced in order to "solve the problem" (just as our traffic planners want to control and restrict ped and cyclist behaviour and freedom more and more stringently to "protect" them from the danger from cars which we are not allowed to reconsider or challenge). But when women react with instinctive (or reasoned) outrage to the suggestion that the British government would consider printing such a warning, you see the result: accusations of irrationality, flailing defences of the "rape culture", naturalisation of male sexual predation and banditry, etc.
Returning to the "safety" of women, a thread at ET on "Protecting Prostitutes in Europe" offered the information that prostitute protection efforts varied widely from one country to another, for example in Köaut;ln,:
Based on a system already working in Utrecht, this provides a safe zone for prostitutes to meet clients and access services. In a fenced-off area covered by CCTV, sex takes place in cubicles fitted with panic buttons and a second exit. (Deutsche Welle) But it's estimated that only 300 out of Cologne's estimated 4000 prostitutes choose to work here. Possible reasons include reluctance of clients to come to this area and distrust of the authorities.
Run that by me again? In a fenced-off area covered by CCTV. In cubicles fitted with panic buttons and a second exit. Is that a normal work environment? "Just a job" like any other, as we are so often told? What are we protecting here? Why is it taken for granted that men's attitude to women and to sex is so violent, so aggressive, so dangerous that women who offer sexual services, for their own safety, should work in cubicles with panic buttons, under the surveillance of CCTV? Why are we not asking, "What is wrong with these men, what is wrong with our cultural construction of masculinity and sexuality, that prison-like technology is necessary to 'protect' these women from being murdered or tortured or beaten by their clients?" What are we protecting? The women? Or our preconceptions about male privilege and behaviour? And what does it mean that fewer than 10 percent of the city's prostitutes "choose" to work in this Panopticon environment?
Do they make this choice freely? Do they perhaps feel offended and humiliated by being filmed and surveilled -- free entertainment for the security guards? -- while they work? Or do they know their business will fall off sharply if they work in a controlled and supervised zone, that one of the things their clients are looking for is the vulnerability of the prostitute, the knowledge that men can and do abuse and kill these women with impunity? Does the "safety zone" spoil the experience for the male clients? if so, what does that say about the clients?
We argue constantly about how to protect prostitutes, about the rights of prostitutes. We say, prostitutes have a right not to be beaten, not to be murdered. But this is supplication. When are we going to say, No man has any right to treat any woman in this way? When are we going to say, "The government is working on the wording of a warning to men to be posted in public places, advising them that drinking may impair their judgment and result in their committing actionable offences against women for which they will be held responsible"? When are we going to rewrite the sign to read MOTORISTS, SLOW DOWN. WATCH FOR CYCLISTS?
ing [cf the appalling control freak up-thread who thinks he gets to write "the rules" for any sexual encounter, and female partners have to obey], (b) women are inferior, and (c) f*cking=dominance literally and figuratively.