Rape shield laws are another kind of evidentiary rule. They “work correctly” about as much as rules regarding hearsay or business records do. But you don’t often see people jumping up and down shrieking about how terrible the excited-utterance exception to hearsay is and the injustice it wreaks on innocent men’s lives.

Also, how interesting that steve thinks merely being visibly female is the same as “flashing money”. Yes, not being in a burlap sack with an armed husband at your side, in public, is JUST LIKE waving a hundred-dollar bill under the nose of someone who makes that much money in a month.

Sorry to put a counter point, and I am not trying to take away the horror of physical violation, But I have grown up in rough neighborhoods and have been told many times not to flash money around. A mugging is no fun either

This is interesting. You shouldn’t flash money around because someone will steal your money. You shouldn’t show your body because then someone will assault you and forcibly have sex with you.

Interesting in that our culture so easily equates the female body with sex.

I wonder if men who get hit in bar fights are told that they shouldn’t have gone flashing their faces around?

There is no difference between being raped
and being pushed down a flight of cement steps
except that the wounds also bleed inside.

There is no difference between being raped
and being run over by a truck
except that afterwards men ask you if you
enjoyed it.

There is no difference between being raped
and losing a hand in a mowing machine
except the doctors don’t want to get involved,
the police wear a knowing smirk,
and in small towns you become a veteran whore.

There is no difference between being raped
and being bitten by a rattlesnake
except that people ask if your skirt was short
and why you were out anyway.

There is no difference between being raped
and going head first through a windshield
except that afterwards you are not afraid of cars
but of half the human race.

Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing all of the time
on a woman’s hunched back
Never to stroll alone a sand road
through pine woods;
Never to climb a trail across a bald
without that aluminum in the mouth
when I see a man climbing towards me.

Never to open the door to a knock
without that razor just grazing the throat.
The fear of the dark side of the hedges,
the back seat of the car,
the empty house rattling keys like a snake’s warning.
The fear of the smiling man
in whose pocket is a knife.
The fear of the serious man
in whose fist is locked hatred.
–Marge Piercy

In fact, if I were a judge, in that situattion, I’d be tempted to say, “If you don’t start doing the job you’re being paid for, I’ll hold you in contempt and adjourn until Ms. Twisted gets herself a real lawyer. And if she complains about you to the bar association, I’ll testify against you.”

Nobody’s claiming that being mugged is anything like being raped, beyond the fact that in both crimes one person is a victim.

Nobody here is, and I’m aware of that. I was responding to the trope of comparing the two crimes that prompted these discussions, and I suppose i wasn’t terribly clear on that. Rape apologists are always trotting out some other, lesser crime as part of their “It’s just like if I did this” commentary, and I wanted to point out the underlying assumption that you have to come up with some other sort of crime to apply the scenario to men.

Nobody’s claiming that being mugged is anything like being raped, beyond the fact that in both crimes one person is a victim.

It’s the blaming (or the absurdity thereof) that we’re comparing, not the violations.

The analogous situation to being raped, for a man, is, well, being raped. Having your money stolen out of your wallet is a different crime than having your body violated.

Of course, the reason that these nimrods liken rape to theft is partly that they see women’s bodies as property. It’s also partly that the idea of being raped themselves is so horrific and implausible that it’s not even on their radar.

A woman who dresses attractively, goes to a club, and gets raped, is in no way similar to a man who goes to a bad part of town and gets mugged. It’s similar to a man who dresses attractively, goes to a club, and gets raped. If given the choice between being mugged and being raped, these men wouldn’t hesitate to choose the former.

ACS, this is a byproduct of the fact that the criminal justice system is the state against the defendant. There’s no way to structurally change that without scrapping the Constitutional protection against double jeopardy.

The real fix is to get rid of judges that want to make the rape shield statute weaker. In practice, since doing so helps criminal defendants, those judges have problems anyway — where they are appointed, prosecutors have political pull and want them off; while where they are elected, they are “soft on crime.” Plus, if judges get too wild in making exceptions, it cannot be fixed in the particular case, but the appellate courts can take the next appeal and knock down the expansive readings of the exceptions.

You’re right, in that, on balance, I wouldn’t be willing to trade the principle of double jeopardy for more enforceable rape shield laws. Still, there are major institutional, legal, and, really, just basic epistemological barriers to the effective prosecution of rape. I don’t mean to devalue the importance of the attitudes in the system, but rape has been conceived of as a chattel crime as long as the crime has existed — you can even see it in the property-crime metaphors and analysis applied to rape (see also: “stolen virtue” and, hell, even the extended analogy that started this thread)

What I meant to say is that in many ways, rape has an imperfect and mutable legal definition, and the elements of the crime, particularly “consent”, have a tendency to shift underfoot in ways that make it an extremely difficult crime to prosecute. The imperfect solutions we’ve come to — in particular, rape shield laws and victim’s rights protections — just don’t work correctly, especially as technological advancements in policing (especially robust DNA testing) have put an increasing amount of defense focus on the actual testimony of the victim.

In this sense, I’m a bit of a technocrat, in that I believe that radical social change is necessary but insufficient — without competent solutions to underlying problems in the system, the legal system will continue to produce unjust results.

– ACS

The real fix is to get rid of judges that want to make the rape shield statute weaker. In practice, since doing so helps criminal defendants, those judges have problems anyway — where they are appointed, prosecutors have political pull and want them off; while where they are elected, they are “soft on crime.” Plus, if judges get too wild in making exceptions, it cannot be fixed in the particular case, but the appellate courts can take the next appeal and knock down the expansive readings of the exceptions.

– ACS