Short Post 4/12

I was going to start my blog by posting some statistics of rape and domestic violence but I quickly gave up because they are hard to find and I knew that whatever I did find was probably not very accurate due to the over and under-reporting of such crimes. I found one list of how prevalent rape was in each country but I realized that reporting rape may be considered much more taboo in some countries so they would just have a very large degree of underreporting which tells us nothing about the real prevalence of rape in that country.

Brownmiller's essay was very passionate and I admire her for brining up the issues surrounding rape. However, I don't quite follow her argument that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear..." (312).

I think I could agree with her if she left out the word conscious. Thats where I get confused. I honestly don't think that every man (or very many men at all) consciously choose to intimidate women with the threat of rape.

Crenshaw brings up a lot of good points and I learned a lot from her article. There isn't really any particular issue that I want to address from her article. She has so many different points that it was a little hard to follow sometimes but her simple message that women of color are losing out in the battle against domestic violence because feminism and domestic violence activism do not take women of color into account in the way that they should. She also emphasizes that women of color are most prone to domestic violence and often don't have the resources to get out.

I guess my biggest issue with these two readings is that I still can't understand why men would want to hurt their wives or girlfriends or rape any woman at all. I can see how it is an act of aggression, but I don't think that performing these violent acts could make a man feel better in any way afterwards. I was especially disgusted when I did research online and found that many rapes are planned out ahead of time.