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Cornell William Brooks on the Ferguson decision

Glenn Beck thinks asking questions is rape

Rush Limbaugh making excuses for Bill Cosby

Long list of Cosby accusers

Don Lemon victim-blaming

Don Lemon apologizes

Jessica Valenti abortion speakout

Favianna’s story

Talking with protesters

Nick Conrad mansplains rape

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be speaking to Cristina Aguilar of COLOR about their fight against the personhood amendment in Colorado. The Bill Cosby rape allegations bring the worst out of the usual suspects and I compare women’s actual abortion stories with the myths that anti-choicers churn out about them.

This is a little out of my wheelhouse on this podcast, but I thought I would take note of what has become one of the biggest stories of the year: the lack of an indictment for Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Mike Brown, an unarmed teenager, in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. Here’s a comment from Cornell William Brooks, the head of the NAACP.

• Ferguson *

Many people have spoken more eloquently on this than I could, but, simply put, part of the blanket of reproductive rights people should enjoy is the right to raise the children you want without fear of violence taking their lives for no good reason. For Black parents in this country, they do not have that right. That must be changed. This is inexcusable.

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There’s this widespread notion on the right that feminists just made up the idea of “rape culture.” They would have you believe that women who allege sexual assault are generally taken seriously and that if any questions arise, it’s because of the individual specifics of the case and not because of a knee-jerk, widespread tendency to disregard any rape allegations or to blame the victim and tell her she brought it on herself. If it was true, however, that there was no such thing as rape culture, then having people dog-pile an accuser with claims that she’s just making it up for attention and/or money would be the exception to the rule. The fact that you can predict with 99 percent certainty that a rape allegation against a popular, rich, or famous man will be immediately denounced as lies made by crazy women suggests that we have, you guessed it, a pattern. A pattern resulting from a culture. A culture that systematically refuses to take rape seriously. I do believe it’s getting better in many ways, but the fact remains that it’s impossible to come out in public about a famous man raping you and not have tons of people claim, without a shred of evidence, that you are a fantasist and a liar. If we didn’t have a rape culture, the absolute certainty that this will happen to you simply wouldn’t exist.

I bring this up, you will not be surprised to hear, because of the reaction to the reemergence of long-standing rape allegations against Bill Cosby. A theme emerged from many corners, and there’s no nice way to put it: Many commentators basically seemed to believe the media interest in exposing the alleged rapes was illicit and, well, that Cosby is the real victim here. Some commentators didn’t even bother mounting arguments about how the victims are supposedly lying, which is hard to do when you have over 17 of them, many of whom are public. No, the narrative that emerged in some corners was that media interest in this story is somehow just as bad, if not worse, than raping someone. Like Glenn Beck here, who is furious at an AP reporter for asking Cosby a question that Cosby didn’t want to answer.

• Cosby 1 *

Conservatives are always accusing feminists, absolutely falsely, of trying to turn all sorts of things into sexual abuse, from consensual sex to flirting. That’s all a lie, of course, but it also appears to be a bit of projection. Because here is Glenn Beck suggesting that it’s rape, perhaps worse than rape, to be asked a question you don’t want to answer. Which you can say no to, and Cosby does, by the way. Saying no comment is definitely easier than trying to escape when you’re drugged and a man is holding you down and forcing sex on you.

Rush Limbaugh was singing a similar tune, suggesting that no one actually cares about rape, but is only using it to push some kind of weird agenda.

• Cosby 2 *

Breaking in to remind you that it’s not one woman. There are over 17 separate accusers as I’m writing this. There’s not much need to speculate on why Limbaugh would ignore the many other accusations of sexual assault here, because it’s just a lot easier to write it off as a single crazy woman if it’s just one. So that’s what he’s going to pretend happened.

• Cosby 3 *

It’s tempting to write all this off as just right wing talk radio stuff, though I have never understood the urge to write off media that millions of influential voters listen to as if it doesn’t matter. But this sense that the accusations shouldn’t be taken seriously infected even Don Lemon’s interview on CNN with one of the accusers, Joan Tarshis.

• Cosby 4 *

Despite what Don Lemon might think, there is actually a pretty good reason not to bite someone who has already demonstrated he’s a violent person by sexually assaulting you. Odds are he’s not going to take it well. But I don’t need to belabor the point, as this is classic victim-blaming, and regardless of Lemon’s intentions, this line of inquiry fuels the notion that women are lying when they say they’re raped, because the insinuations that real rape victims would fight back even at the cost of their own safety or even lives. Lemon’s line of inquiry isn’t as offensive as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh openly suggesting this isn’t a big deal, but it serves the same purpose of suggesting that the alleged crime isn’t as serious as the accuser says it is. Lemon apologized, though it was one of those mealy-mouthed if-you-were-offended apologies.

• Cosby 5 *

Every time a big rape story gets in the news, we see the same kind of things happen over and over. And every time, feminists point out the problems with it. So it can’t just be that people are randomly screwing up. There’s a pattern here, and that’s what you might call rape culture.

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Interview

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Advocates for Youth has had a long-running campaign called the 1 in 3 Campaign, which I’ve covered for Reality Cast before. The idea is to educate people on how common abortion is and, because it’s so common, the experiences of women are rather interesting and diverse but always very human. Anti-choicers stereotype and paint women who have abortions as either selfish sluts who abort to fit in prom dresses or, if they’re trying to be “compassionate”, they instead stereotype them as stupid sluts who have to be saved from their own supposed inability to make good choices. So to fight back, the 1 in 3 Campaign held an eight-hour livestream of women speaking out about their own abortions. Since it was a livestream, I don’t have anything to pull from it, but feminist writer Jessica Valenti made a separate video talking about her abortion experiences.

• Abortion 1 *

She goes on to explain that she had to abort a second pregnancy in her 30s because, after her first daughter was born and it nearly killed her, the doctors told her no more pregnancies. So she aborted that rather than run the risk of leaving her daughter without a mother and her husband without a wife. She notes that her second abortion is often considered the more “justified” one by the public, but suggests that’s not how it should be.

• Abortion 2 *

That’s the video from the speakout that’s up at the website, but there’s another that’s just a little over a couple of months old from a woman identified as Favianna, who also has a compelling story.

• Abortion 3 *

Both of these stories really reflect what you hear from women who are telling their own, actual, abortion stories. It does cause pain and reflection, but not how anti-choicers imagine it to be, with women regretting the fact that they aren’t virgins or that they’re not going to have a baby. It’s more about thinking about your life and your choices and really assessing what your priorities are, and yes, you hear very little regret about the abortion itself. In fact, abortion is what it has always been: A solution to a problem, not the problem. In light of these complex, personal stories, it’s doubly weird listening to the anti-choice protesters that Jill Filipovic of Cosmopolitan interviewed in the Boston area.

• Abortion 4 *
• Abortion 5 *
• Abortion 6 *

The gulf here is just tremendous. You have pro-choicers believing that women are human beings, with all the complexity and diversity that implies, and that we need to be able to decide for ourselves what our lives will be. But then you have anti-choicers who believe there’s one single path for all women, all the billions of women on earth: Abstinence until marriage, very little sex within it, not having a career and instead dedicating your life to raising children with no control over when you have them. One side simply sees women as people and the other as appliances for baby-making that have little use outside of that function.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, British rape apologist edition. BBC host Nick Conrad got criticized recently for resorting to the very old, very discredited argument that women bring rape on themselves by teasing men sexually and then not giving up the goods.

• Nick Conrad *

Self-flattery about how men have this sexual rapaciousness that mere women cannot understand aside, this is simply a discredited theory about rape. Research done by David Lisak has shown, beyond any quibbling or whining, that rapists aren’t ordinary men who get carried away, but a small subset of sexual predators who deliberately set out to rape women. Often, they use the promise of consensual sex to get a woman alone and then spring a rape on her. Or they target women who are too drunk to consent. But one thing that doesn’t actually happen much, if at all, is men thinking they’re going to get laid and then being denied at the last minute, and, too horny to stop themselves, violently assault a person. That’s not how it works, and telling women they are obliged to get a guy off after making out a little, or else they have it coming, is pure nonsense and misogynist as all hell. It’s not just that we all have a right to change our minds. It’s also that men generally respect that, and those who don’t were probably going to rape anyway.