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UK study suggests that mainstream men's magazines normalize hostile sexism
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Before the OP, a pop quiz! Some of the following quotes were pulled from popular UK men's magazines (FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo - yankees, if you've never heard of these, think of Maxim and Stuff and you have the right idea). The rest of the quotes were from a book called The Rapist Files: Interviews With Convicted Rapists which contains exactly what it says on the cover.
Can you guess which of the following lines came from major UK magazines and which were pulled from interviews with convicted rapists?
Answers after the OP!
Hey, if you can't tell the difference, don't worry, you're not alone. In a recent study by University of Sussex and Middlesex University researchers, neither could a group of men between the ages of 18 and 46: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/mediacentre/press/2011/69535_are_sex_offenders_and_lads_mags_using_the_same_language.htm
To quote the researchers,
When the participants of the study were asked to say which lines they identified with more, they tended to sympathize with the rapists' quotes more. However, when the participants of the study were told explicitly that certain quotes came from interviews with rapists, they tended to sympathize less with those quotes - even if those attributions were actually false and simply randomly assigned.
This validates a suspicion that I've held for quite a long time. The vast majority of people understand that rape is wrong. However, we don't necessarily accept that the sexist attitudes that rapists use to legitimize those actions are wrong. We want to believe, for whatever reason, that rape is an anomaly rather than a direct product of cultural sexism. We want to believe that rapists are a unique class of people - aberrant, damaged, monstrous people - rather than face the possibility that rapists are just acting upon particularly extreme versions of sexist attitudes that are also expressed by non-rapists.
We hate rapists, but we don't particularly hate rape-y ideas.
Since I promised you the answers to the pop quiz:
Source links:
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/mediacentre/press/2011/69535_are_sex_offenders_and_lads_mags_using_the_same_language.htm
http://jezebel.com/5866602/can-you-tell-the-difference-between-a-mens-magazine-and-a-rapist
The actual journal article hasn't been published yet; it's going to be in the British Journal of Psychology. I'm hoping to get a PDF of it once it becomes publicly available.
Can you guess which of the following lines came from major UK magazines and which were pulled from interviews with convicted rapists?
1. There's a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex . . . The way they dress, they flaunt themselves.
2. Some girls walk around in short-shorts . . . showing their body off . . . It just starts a man thinking that if he gets something like that, what can he do with it?
3. A girl may like anal sex because it makes her feel incredibly naughty and she likes feeling like a dirty slut. If this is the case, you can try all sorts of humiliating acts to help live out her filthy fantasy.
4. Mascara running down the cheeks means they've just been crying, and it was probably your fault . . . but you can cheer up the miserable beauty with a bit of the old in and out.
5. What burns me up sometimes about girls is dick-teasers. They lead a man on and then shut him off right there.
6. Filthy talk can be such a turn on for a girl . . . no one wants to be shagged by a mouse . . . A few compliments won't do any harm either . . . ‘I bet you want it from behind you dirty whore' . . .
7. You know girls in general are all right. But some of them are bitches . . . The bitches are the type that . . . need to have it stuffed to them hard and heavy.
8. Escorts . . . they know exactly how to turn a man on. I've given up on girlfriends. They don't know how to satisfy me, but escorts do.
9. You'll find most girls will be reluctant about going to bed with somebody or crawling in the back seat of a car . . . But you can usually seduce them, and they'll do it willingly.
10. There's nothing quite like a woman standing in the dock accused of murder in a sex game gone wrong . . . The possibility of murder does bring a certain frisson to the bedroom.
11. Girls ask for it by wearing these mini-skirts and hotpants . . . they're just displaying their body . . . Whether they realise it or not they're saying, ‘Hey, I've got a beautiful body, and it's yours if you want it.'
12. You do not want to be caught red-handed . . . go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick.
13. Some women are domineering, but I think it's more or less the man who should put his foot down. The man is supposed to be the man. If he acts the man, the woman won't be domineering.
14. I think if a law is passed, there should be a dress code . . . When girls dress in those short skirts and things like that, they're just asking for it.
15. Girls love being tied up . . . it gives them the chance to be the helpless victim.
16. I think girls are like plasticine, if you warm them up you can do anything you want with them.
Answers after the OP!
Hey, if you can't tell the difference, don't worry, you're not alone. In a recent study by University of Sussex and Middlesex University researchers, neither could a group of men between the ages of 18 and 46: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/mediacentre/press/2011/69535_are_sex_offenders_and_lads_mags_using_the_same_language.htm
To quote the researchers,
Dr Miranda Horvath and Dr Peter Hegarty argue that the findings are consistent with the possibility that lads’ mags normalise hostile sexism, by making it seem more acceptable when its source is a popular magazine.
Dr Horvath, lead researcher from Middlesex University, said: “We were surprised that participants identified more with the rapists’ quotes, and we are concerned that the legitimisation strategies that rapists deploy when they talk about women are more familiar to these young men than we had anticipated.”
When the participants of the study were asked to say which lines they identified with more, they tended to sympathize with the rapists' quotes more. However, when the participants of the study were told explicitly that certain quotes came from interviews with rapists, they tended to sympathize less with those quotes - even if those attributions were actually false and simply randomly assigned.
This validates a suspicion that I've held for quite a long time. The vast majority of people understand that rape is wrong. However, we don't necessarily accept that the sexist attitudes that rapists use to legitimize those actions are wrong. We want to believe, for whatever reason, that rape is an anomaly rather than a direct product of cultural sexism. We want to believe that rapists are a unique class of people - aberrant, damaged, monstrous people - rather than face the possibility that rapists are just acting upon particularly extreme versions of sexist attitudes that are also expressed by non-rapists.
We hate rapists, but we don't particularly hate rape-y ideas.
Since I promised you the answers to the pop quiz:
Answers. 1. Rapist, 2. Rapist, 3. Lad mag, 4. Lad mag, 5. Rapist, 6. Lad mag, 7. Rapist, 8. Lad mag, 9. Rapist, 10. Lad mag, 11. Rapist, 12. Lad mag, 13. Rapist, 14. Rapist, 15. Lad mag, 16. Lad mag
Source links:
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/mediacentre/press/2011/69535_are_sex_offenders_and_lads_mags_using_the_same_language.htm
http://jezebel.com/5866602/can-you-tell-the-difference-between-a-mens-magazine-and-a-rapist
The actual journal article hasn't been published yet; it's going to be in the British Journal of Psychology. I'm hoping to get a PDF of it once it becomes publicly available.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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It's kind of sad that it isn't a given for most people that stuff like this is fairly prevalent.
Don't forget PUA shit too!
Perhaps this attitude is a reaction against women entering the workplace/being equal but we've had that for -ages- now. I blame the rise of rap music and the glorification of despicable lifestyles and people, such as pimps and drug dealers, for this change in our culture. Like Playboy back in the 50s didn't have this shit. Or at least it wasn't as gross and disgusting as this.
Yes, blame it on hip hop.
Please tell me you're kidding.
?
Yeah, it was bad, but I don't think it was "agree with rapists" bad. Or maybe I am unreasonably saying this generation is worse than others.
Oh. Wonderful. So instead of this crap going on behind closed doors or during martini lunches, it is now openly discussed and shared in men's magazines and on television. All of those quotes are sickening and awful, and I would gladly trade some of the sexual awareness we have now for this crap to get out of our popular media.
Pretty much a defence mechanism. Since rape is one of those weird crimes that seems to be defined by the most monstrous examples of it you get a nice big abyss between the idea of what rape is and those sexist attitudes. It also has the effect of creating lesser versions of rape such as date rape which is based on "misunderstandings" as opposed to actual rape which comes from the realm of demonic hunchbacked psychopaths which with whom we have nothing in common.
As long as no one comments on the sexist attitude then it must be ok since we would all know truly rape-y comments when we heard them, they are after all a special kind of evil. Except of course that we don't.
Ahahaha.
No it totally was that bad, worse, the thing is that those were unspoken assumptions that weren't even worth a mention most of the time.
Can I repeat my thesis about how literally all contemporary English-language invective is centered of feminization/emasculation?
But really, a whole lot of it can be traced back to emasculating/feminizing intent.
"Cunt" and "bitch" are the obvious ones. "Motherfucker" (ie. you're so impotent you have to fuck your own mother) is a little more subtle.
Wow. So you'd rather not hear about horrible things so you can pretend it is all okay instead of knowing about and trying to change it?
I'm not sure that the fact that presumably `normal' males relate to the rapist's reasoning is sign of a sexist cultural agenda being imposed on society, but in fact is a sign that the gender-neutral cultural agenda imposed on society is not entirely effective.
Well, there are non-conscious behaviors and perceptions that aren't instinctive - habits, operant conditioning, internalized attitudes, for instance.
But, to answer the gist of your question, no, sexism does not include only conscious acts.
"Gender-neutered" and "non-sexism" aren't the same concept, and nobody here has suggested that gender-neutrality is normal for human beings.
The rest of your post appears to be tilting at a windmill of your own construction.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
-People have sexual urges and are attracted to others
-Everyone, regardless of gender or societal position, has basic human rights, like the right to say no to unwanted advances
-Consensus regarding rapist logic does not justify it under the banner of instincts
The right way to do it is to popularize a culture of healthy sexuality. Where people are valued as individuals but the ability to state and honestly pursue your own desires in an ethical way is championed. Have fun fighting the fundies in a culture war to do it though.
People are sexual animals and repressing that sexuality doesn't make it go away, if they can't express it openly then they'll do it privately and quite possibly in harmful ways.
It's not that I 'want' to believe that; all of the evidence I'm aware of shows a very clear link between psychopathology and rape perpetrators who target adult victims (the correlation breaks down when you encompass things like date rape, but date rape has a much different dynamic), while there is no evidence to support that western civilization supports a 'rape culture' (a term which isn't even clearly defined). We see rates of violent sexual attacks on a steep decline (the trend is most obvious when you look at a decade-long scale), and an increasing number of support groups, awareness campaigns, etc to help victims. Moreover, there's been a very sharp change in outlook regarding victim support vs victim blaming.
EDIT: The remarks from the magazines in the OP are fucking disgusting. Do they print that same garbage in rags like Maxim?
I'm not disagreeing with the goals, just the framing of the OP.
So lets add...
- The urge to force sex is an animal instinct that is older than civilization
- Related to the above, at some level there are instincts relating to rape in every human.
- `Human rights' are an artificial construct that are an admirable ideal.
- A world in which rapists are actually uniformly punished is not current and is a departure from most of law & history.
I think that it could be argued that the Lad's Mags diatribe addresses `uncivilised' concepts that apply on an instinctive level to males, and that this directly works against the ground work that the gender-neutralising cultural trend has gained.
I don't agree that the Lads Mags are introducing a foreign concept that is against the natural state of asexual society.
I disagree.
Can you name a violent rapist in the U.S. who was caught, and was not given the maximum penalty within their state (up to and including the death penalty)?
EDIT: Let's say within the past 30 years.
Ted Bundy was arrested & convicted for assaulting, raping and killing exclusively women victims back in 1978. So these weren't exactly the most progressive of times.
So, did our allegedly rape-insensitive, anti-woman society decide to let Bundy off easy? After all, he exclusively had killed females.
No. The state put him on death row, and in 1989 they strapped his ass to a chair upon which he was cooked until well done with high voltage electricity.
That doesn't seem to be a very rape-friendly gesture, in my opinion.
It's important to consider this though. Some argument can be misinterpreted as exactly that, especially if talking to a group that isn't receptive to it.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Rape culture isn't "RAPE IS AWESOME, LET'S NEVER PUNISH A RAPIST!" Rape culture is a culture in which the idea that wearing revealing clothing means you are "asking for it" is an alarmingly common opinion. Rape culture is a culture in which women who have been sexually assaulted are afraid to come forward because they know there will be negative consequences, and as a result, the majority of rapes go unreported. Rape culture is a culture in which men like Julian Assange and DSK are vehemently defended and their accusers are vilified, simply because they dared to point fingers at powerful men. Rape culture is a culture in which Congress tries to redefine the legal definition of "rape" to "violent rape". And so on.
Yes, clearly the way to a better future is for everyone to show as little respect for each others' gender / sexuality as possible.
Equality!
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Why not called it a 'crime culture', then? Assault & robbery carry all of the same baggage you just listed (I myself was on the receiving end of some mild victim blaming when I got mugged in Edmonton, because, "I shouldn't have gone walking in that area at that time of the day,").
Assange was defended because it was extremely suspicious that the assault allegations happened right as Wikileaks was releasing sensitive U.S. documents. DSK did not rape the hotel staff member, by any reasonable analysis, and until the matter was cleared-up he was incredibly demonized in the print press (I don't know about the televised press).
And there is a very important distinction between violent rape and date rape. Date rape is also repulsive, but it is not the same thing at all as beating a woman nearly to death and penetrating her until she's laying in a pool of her own blood.
Right, and that's more or less exactly the dynamic being talked about here.
EDIT: I mean, shit, your posts later pretty much confirm that you are missing the point. Violent serial killer rape isn't what's being talked about here nor is it the most common type.
No, it doesn't. Not even close.
Yes, but no one is talking about the second kind, nor is the second kind super common or a cause of concern. And date rape is still rape.
Then why the quotation block in the OP? Those are from convicted violent rapists.
what in the fuck is that thing?
You deny that there is inconvenience, victim blame and reluctance to report when it comes to robbery & assault?
They have the option to wear it. I DON'T have the option of being aroused by it. It can be incredibly frustrating. Not to the point of rape of course, but still; ow.
And can any women reading this (however unlikely
Hey i'm a prude, who knew!
Where there is actual visible assault damage done (bruises, lacerations), that usually is punished because the evidence is...evident. But how many rape cases get dumped because the victim didn't get their head caved in, but instead tried not to get hurt and stopped resisting at some point, leaving no significant evidence other than a semen sample? There would be plenty.
The OP is referring directly to violent rape. Did you not bother to read it the source material the quotes are from?