Wheelbarrows
Just one of my favorite social-political action initiatives, Men Can Stop Rape.
I’m an urban girl, so when the word wheelbarrow pops up twice in a week, it has to be discussed.
I have fond memories of a sturdy wheelbarrow in my father’s backyard, me tossing dandelions into it. He was the consummate suburban farmer in his day, my father, second only to his own, my grandfather. Huge zucchinis. Real sunflowers. The gene passed me by, however hard I tried to grow things, although I did manage to sprout a few avocado trees in college.
Still. You don’t want me to water your plants while you’re away.
But back to wheelbarrows. The other day they were filled with bodies in Haiti, today we fill them with women who have been raped. It’s an obsession with me, right? The sexual assault thing is an obsession, gets me riled up, and the very idea of marital rape sends me into Let me at ‘em mode. Militant, angry, feminist. Whatever you want to call the outrage that describes mine when I hear about rape.
Anyway, today I’m reading from a women’s anthology, Transforming a Rape Culture (some of you wanted to know what I’m reading lately). This is the 2005 edition and it opens with a reprint, an essay by famed feminist Andrea Dworkin. She speaks to 500 male attendees at the regional conference of the National Organization for Changing Men, 1983, St. Paul, Minnesota.
How would you begin such an address? Five hundred men! Here’s how Ms. Dworkin begins:
What I would like to do is scream; and in that scream I would have the screams of the raped, and the sobs of the battered; and even worse, in the center of that scream I would have the deafening sound of women’s silence, that silence into which we are born because we are women and in which most of us die.
Every 3 min, a woman is raped; every 18 seconds, a woman is beaten, she tells them.
Could this still be true, 27 years later?
What would you say if I said, Yes.
Actually I don’t know. I was hoping one of you could tell me.
She beats on them, of course, the men who have come to learn to be better men. She tells them she doesn’t care much for their guilt, for their sadness at the way things are, sorrow for seemingly unstoppable male aggression towards women. She cares not at all for their feelings or determination to change themselves as people, or partners, friends. She wants action, some kind of political action that will inspire a truce, a 24 hour truce. No rape, not anywhere in the world, for 24 hours. That kind of truce.
I’m quite sure we’re still waiting for it.
Ms. Dworkin continues to say,
Do you remember pictures that you’ve seen of European cities during the plague, when there were wheelbarrows that would go along and people would just pick up corpses and throw them in? Well, that is what it is like knowing about rape. Piles and piles and piles of bodies that have whole lives and human names and human faces.”
Most men received the address with love, she remarks. One threatened her physically, but her female body guard stopped him.
Anyway, it’s time we promoted male responsibility here on the blog. And it’s time you knew that men, actually, do get involved. They do more than rape. Most probably don’t rape, is the truth.
The National Organization for Changing Men has morphed into NOMAS, the National Organization for Men Against Sexism.
They’re still standing. And then there’s Men Can Stop Rape, a truly fabulous worthy cause. I have one of their posters up in my office, the one you see above.
Also check out Men Against Sexual Violence.
You would think, seriously, that rape is no longer a spectator sport, with all this attention. But wouldn’t you know? It still is. Boys still think it’s cool to brag about their conquests, and they grow up into men who do the same, and sometimes one or two of them will hold a woman down while five to ten more rape her. This still happens.
Why? Because if a guy is invited to rape a woman and he says no, he is obviously a wimp. Or maybe he’s gay. That’s the thinking. Men afraid of other men.
I wish I were making this up. Twenty-four hours. Just 24 and we’ll all be free, according to the late Andrea Dworkin.
therapydoc
P.S. Andrea Dworkin only lived to 58. She wrote 10 books on radical feminist theory. Her website is a must-see.
Quote from the home page:
“Every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.”
Gloria Steinham
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Posted in Everyone Needs Therapy