{"id":63547,"date":"2013-01-26T14:30:33","date_gmt":"2013-01-26T19:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=63547"},"modified":"2013-01-25T14:01:55","modified_gmt":"2013-01-25T19:01:55","slug":"who-benefits-from-rape-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/polyamory\/who-benefits-from-rape-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Benefits From Rape Culture?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll just leave this here.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rape was just an excuse, I think,\u201d said the 27-year-old [Nate] Hubbard, who is No. 2 on the Big Red\u2019s career rushing list.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWhat else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that?\u201d said Hubbard, who is one of the team\u2019s 19 coaches. \u201cShe had to make up something. Now people are trying to blow up our football program because of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Approached in November to be interviewed about the case, [Coach Reno] Saccoccia said he did not \u201cdo the Internet,\u201d so he had not seen the comments and photographs posted online from that night. When asked again about the players involved and why he chose not to discipline them, he became agitated.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou made me mad now,\u201d he said, throwing in several expletives as he walked from the high school to his car.<\/p>\n

Nearly nose to nose with a reporter, he growled: \u201cYou\u2019re going to get yours. And if you don\u2019t get yours, somebody close to you will.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shawn Crosier, the principal of Steubenville High, and Michael McVey, the superintendent of Steubenville schools, said they entrusted Saccoccia with determining whether any players should be disciplined for what they might have done or saw the night of Aug. 11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

This is a chunk from a New York Times<\/em> article<\/a> about a rape case in a sorry shit town in the rust belt, Steubenville, Ohio. It\u2019s one of many sorry shit towns in the rust belt, in the southland, in the southwest, in the northeast, in Pennsyltucky, in Arkansee. A couple of football players are being tried in an episode in which a semiconscious and at times unconscious 16-year-old girl was allegedly dragged from party to underage drunken party and raped repeatedly. Other kids snapped cell phone photos of the proceedings and posted them to Instagram and Twitter. (I only use \u201callegedly\u201d to protect this site. I believe the victim.)<\/p>\n

Anonymous\u2019 KnightSec group has resuscitated some of the social media from the night and outed some alleged participants and commentators. The LocalLeaks group<\/a> has prepared a dossier on the town and event. OccupySteubenville has shown up to rally in support of the victim. But the first to blow open the case was a blogger, Alexandria Goddard, who writes the site Prinniefied.com, and was hit by a lawsuit (since dismissed) for her trouble.<\/p>\n

I agree with what she recently stated on her blog: \u201cWhat bothered me greatly was the number of bystanders (as evidenced by social media) who stood by and did nothing. The complete and utter lack of empathy of anyone that night bothered me greatly.\u201d<\/p>\n

They not only did nothing, but they appeared to treat it as entertainment, taking pictures and making snarky Twitter comments. My goodness, what on Earth makes people like this? How do they get that way? Must be them video games.
\nNo, it\u2019s the parents and divorces. Can\u2019t be Satan; that\u2019s sooo \u201880s. No, it\u2019s the antidepressants and the ADHD drugs.<\/p>\n

No, it\u2019s something beyond that. They\u2019re \u201clike this\u201d because it is useful and profitable to someone that they be \u201clike this.\u201d They haven\u2019t managed to kill kids off fast enough in the wars lately, not in America. So somebody\u2019s making them insane, as surely but far more subtly than kids are recruited to wield machetes in the Congo. <\/p>\n

The kids didn\u2019t shoot the photos because they\u2019re a bunch of bored Clockwork Orange<\/em> types looking for thrills. They did it to disable the girls, because girls in general are doing pretty well nowadays in America; they\u2019re making better grades and getting out of shit towns and getting more education and making more money than the boys. They\u2019re competitors in a limited market, and they need to be disabled. You don\u2019t have to shoot them for going to school. Rape culture is designed to scare the girls into submission. You don\u2019t have to rape them all; you only need to create a culture of shame and fear; that\u2019s more efficient. <\/p>\n

In Steubenville, according to the Times<\/em> article, \u201cmore than one-quarter of the residents are living below the poverty level.\u201d There is nothing there for a young person, except an illusion and a football game on Friday night. The volunteer coach — himself a young man — quoted making that chillingly deluded statement at the beginning of this essay is one of 19 coaches for the team, the article says. <\/p>\n

Nineteen coaches. People in that city are in such a state of cognitive distortion and mental disease that they believe that winning high school football games is more important than not only the law or one girl\u2019s safety, but more important than the health and safety and education and simple, decent caring for all the young people who live there. <\/p>\n

These young people have been horribly misused. This is abuse, of not only the girls but of the boys. I can even have compassion for the boys: the arrogant little poof who apparently declared on Twitter that the girl got what she deserved because she had dumped him, or the smirking star of the video monologue whose rape jokes have gone viral. They appear to have no idea what they\u2019ve been turned into. What they do horrifies me, but slightly less than wondering who did this to them, and why. No one gets this sick all by their lonesome. There\u2019s the whiff of the bred-and-trained fighting dog about them. But who were the trainers? And why?<\/p>\n

Many people have already drawn parallels to India, which blew up over brutal rapes about the same time the Steubenville case was coming out. I\u2019d say let\u2019s also draw a parallel to Egypt, where the youth — in the majority — are called \u201cthe waiting generation\u201d because there is Nothing. There. For. Them. No jobs, no hope. And we\u2019ve seen what happened.<\/p>\n

A young man quoted in a Frontline article<\/a> says: \u201cI have a bachelor\u2019s of commerce. Why are you surprised? That\u2019s what upsets me. I swear by God. I was educated. I wasted my whole life in education. Pointless. I hang my certificate on the wall, then I spit on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could also draw a parallel to almost any of a dozen countries in Africa whose unemployment rates for young people run from 60 percent to 80 percent. <\/p>\n

What makes us think we\u2019re any different? The young people who have no hope will glom onto anything that gives them the smallest chance that their lives can mean something, whether that\u2019s football or meth or driving a fertilizer truck into a building and killing people in the name of somebody\u2019s god. Rape culture is just one of the tools in the box.<\/p>\n

Of course, not every small town in small town America is a shit town. Some of these towns (hello, Kingston!) are experiencing \u201crevivals\u201d with the influx of Portlandian artisanal cheese eaters and \u201ccreative class\u201d software money. It\u2019s just enough money to make the ones who have been there for years, slowly slipping down, seethe. And the ingrained corruption at the top doesn\u2019t seem to change. <\/p>\n

Other shit towns are enthusiastically turning themselves into third-world economies through sucking the last of the resources out of the ground. People in these towns get told they\u2019re going to hit bigger than Lotto if they sell their land rights to the frackers. Never mind that economies based on draining resources end up with a few very rich and the rest impoverished and uneducated and usually very sick. <\/p>\n

The sports culture of Steubenville sucks the energy out of the young people like some strip-mall goth sucking a Monster energy drink. As in many tribes, the old men get the first and biggest hits off the pipe.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how to fix economies or what to tell young people who have been so betrayed and used. All I know is that the only thing that makes sense is that older people are somehow profiting from sick kids. Who is the \u201cthey?\u201d What\u2019s the money trail? I don\u2019t know. I know how people profited off me back when I was a shit-town girl in a recession. But I feel like I was just the beta test model — they, whoever they are, are getting really good at it now. Professional. It\u2019s a growing industry, eating our young.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila I\u2019ll just leave this here. \u201cThe rape was just an excuse, I think,\u201d said the 27-year-old [Nate] Hubbard, who is No. 2 on the Big Red\u2019s career rushing list. \u201cWhat else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that?\u201d said … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}