This is the position paper I wrote in my English 101 class in Community College.  We were told that we would be given a topic and would have to pick a side to defend.  When I got rape, my first reaction was: “There’s two sides?”  So, being the dick that I am, I wrote a Jonathan-Swift-style Pro-Rape paper.  Just to be clear, I am not pro-rape, but find it ridiculous that I was asked to “pick a side” on this topic.  I got an 98% on it.

Nicholas D

English 101

E. B

5 April 2010

Rape: Who’s the Real Victim? 

     The term “rapist” is thrown around a lot these days, usually regarding men who rape women.  It is a word that our culture has demonized to the point that its only connotations are negative.  These men are ostracized, hated, incarcerated, and killed, all for being guilty of the simple crime of loving someone too much.  These men were just impassioned and acting on instincts that are ages old, for rape has been around since the dawn of time.  If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then surely rape must be its oldest hobby.  The men who are accused of these crimes are men in constant conflict; they are internally battling the rules that proper society has put upon them with eons of hormonal impulses.  In other words, their minds are telling them no, but their bodies, I said their bodies are telling them ye-he-hes!  This constant conflict is little understood by a liberal-feminist society that looks on these men with no pity.  I ask you, who is the true victim of rape: the woman who gets raped or the man who has no control of himself and has to pay for a crime of which he is essentially innocent?  Due to influences from pop culture and literature, and reasons both chemical and evolutionary, the crime of rape should be more understood within our society and punished less severely.

     Not only is rape a big part of our society, it’s also everywhere in the world of pop culture.  When men see it every day on television and in movies, it’s more likely to be on their minds.  Even this bit of dialoged from Monty Python’s Life of Brian pokes fun at the idea of rape:

          Mandy:  Your father isn’t Mr. Cohen.

          Brian:    I never thought he was!

          Mandy:  Now none of your cheek!  He was a Roman, Brian.  He was a centurion in the Roman army.

          Brian:    You mean… you were raped?

          Mandy:  Well… at first, yes. 

It’s just this sort of light-hearted ribbing that leads men to rape.  They hear this, they laugh, and then they cannot help themselves.  But the prevalence of rape throughout pop culture only begins there; the commonality of it becomes shocking after you realize how desensitized we’ve become to these images.  Rape takes place in the following films: A Clockwork Orange, The Accused, Irreversible, Boys Don’t Cry, Streetcar Named Desire, and Deliverance.  That is just to name a few.  Television is no different.  My mother told me about a story line on General Hospital involving two characters named Luke and Laura; apparently, Luke raped Laura and later on in the series they got married.  Veronica Mars was raped on her show, and Breaking Bad depicts a scene of rape within marriage.  There is even a special unit of Law and Order that deals with only sex crime dubbed the Special Victims Unit.  With this total saturation, it is no surprise how popular rape has become among young males.  The phrase “monkey see, monkey do” isn’t just for monkeys anymore.

     Some men are more scholarly and spend their time with great poems and works of literature, but they are no freer from stimuli condoning rape.  The famous poem, Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats may seem like a poem about Greek mythology, but it is actually a fantasy that condones the act of rape and leads men to believe that, even if the rapist is a large bird, the woman will enjoy it.  From this excerpt, it doesn’t seem like Leda hates this: 

          A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

          Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

          By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

          He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

          How can those terrified vague fingers push

          The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? 

The use of the words “caressed” and “loosening” lead the reader to assume that this is a sensual rape that began with her saying no and ended up with her consenting during it, much like Brian’s mother.  Joyce Carol Oates wrote a book called Rape: A Love Story.  Even the bard himself, Shakespeare, wrote of rape in his play Titus Andronicus, which concerns the title character’s daughter being sexually assaulted and having both of her hands and her tongue chopped off, and the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece.  If the entire world of entertainment, both literary and pedestrian, is obsessed with rape, how can we expect our men to be any different?

     The problem may seem like it stems from outside stimuli, both those things just may be fueling an already raging fire.  There is evidence to suggest that the male proclivity for rape may actually be chemical and stemming from hormones natural to the human body.  A test done in Sweden by famed biologist Dr. Olweus and others showed that “there was a significant association (r = 0.44) between plasma testosterone levels and self-reports of physical and verbal aggression, mainly reflecting responsiveness to provocation and threat” (Olweus).  This test shows that the simple act of being a male means that your body is constantly flooded with testosterone; the same chemical that stimulates the male libido is also responsible for physical aggression.  When a man gets excited and his glands start secreting that powerful stuff, he needs sexual release.  If he can’t come by it in a normal way, that aggression kicks in.  Emilie Buchwald and the other editors of the book Transforming a Rape Culture claim that there were “171,420 rapes for 1991. That’s 469 rapes each day of the year, or 19 each hour, or 1 rape every 3.5 minutes” (Buchwald).  Forced or otherwise, that’s a whole lotta love.  Rape must be this commonplace because every man has within him the chemical code that makes copulation such a primary act that the male mind compels them to do so by any means necessary.  It’s the chemicals within male bodies that should be on trial from rape, not the men themselves.

     But even more so, the desperate need for sex in males might go even deeper than the biological; it may be evolutionary.  Since the days of the Neanderthal, mankind has loved rape.  Keeping in line with Charles Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, it is this act that has helped man to survive throughout the centuries.  The strongest men reproduce by force and thereby cause strong offspring to be born, while the weaker men who don’t have that ability died off.  Therefore, all men living today are the direct descendants of strong caveman rapists.  Randy Thornhill is a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and has written several articles claiming that the need for rape runs deeper than previously thought.  In his article, “Men Are Biologically Inclined to Rape,” Thornhill states that there is “one hypothesis about how evolution and human rape are related is that men have rape-specific adaptation, but located in the brain,” and that “rape not only appears to occur in all known cultures, but in a wide variety of other species where there is certainly no cultural encouragement of such behavior” (Men Are Biologically).  This is startling news, as it lessens the impact of outside sources as a cause for rape.  Perhaps it isn’t life that is imitating art, but art that is imitating life.  In his other article, “The Evolutionary Basis of Rape,” Thornhill really drives the survival of the fittest idea home: 

          From a Darwinian perspective, every kind of animal—whether grasshopper

          or gorilla, German or Ghanaian—has evolved to produce healthy children

          that will survive to pass along their parents’ genetic legacy. The mechanics

          of the phenomenon are simple: animals born without traits that led to

          reproduction died out, whereas the ones that reproduced the most

          succeeded in conveying their genes to posterity.  Crudely speaking, sex feels

          good because over evolutionary time the animals that liked having sex

          created more offspring than the animals that didn’t.

What chance does a man have fighting against millions of years of adaptation?  Rapists are guilty of one thing: succumbing to the evolutionary pressure to help the human race survive.  They are only trying to make sure that we don’t all die out!  How can we judge them for such a noble gesture?  They throw away their reputations, freedoms, and indeed, their very lives for this one simple cause, and we do nothing but despise them.

     Some critics may argue that there is no excuse for rape and it is the most deplorable act of violence that man has yet found to commit.  To these people I ask, where is your empathy?  You use it all up on the supposed victim of rape and have none left for the true victim: the rapist.  Here is a lonely man who wishes he had someone to love him.  Alas, he has no one in the world.  His depressions and frustrations mount and are tripled when added to the persistence of rape in the media showing him how easy and attractive the act of rape is.  That combined with his testosterone fueled libido and millions of years of evolution telling his body that he needs relief immediately, what chance does this man have?  Also, are women’s hands truly clean if they dress in a provocative manner?  Thornhill points out that “a person’s appearance and behavior might have some influence on these risk factors,” meaning that if you don’t want to be hunted, you shouldn’t dress like bait (Men Are Biologically).  All of these things combined leave us little choice but to accept that men have little control over committing the act of rape.  If I may quote Jesus, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

     Of course, every one of these reasons and excuses for rape would be negated if civility, empathy, chivalry, and morality ever occurred to men.  Unfortunately, we know that they never do.  Men are hopelessly doomed to wallow in a pit of depravity and frustration forevermore and there is no hope for them.  This is why rape should be more understood and less severely punished in the courts; men are essentially brutish animals with no capacity for goodness or kindness.  Therefore, the best thing to do is to just lie back and just let it happen.  Just remember, you can’t rape the willing; so if you are always willing, you can never be raped!

Could it be? Yes, it is the best gift ever from my artist girlfriend.

themonotonousmonster:

Wow, what if they really made Doug:The Movie

Awesome. I have always loved Judy Funny.

Yes.

This is the Christmas Episode I wrote and directed for a show I work for at MSU called Giraffe House.  I’m quite proud of it.

It’s nearly 8:00AM and I’m at work.  I had to wake up at like 5:00AM, but oddly I’m not tired.  I think it’s because last night I had an “Unwind” anti-energy drink, so I got to sleep fast and slept soundly.

At around 4:30AM my air conditioner started rattling and making a really annoying noise that I tried to convince myself was a jackhammer within my dream so I wouldn’t have to get up off the floor and adjust it (chew on that, DiCaprio), but Sofi became fed up with it and got up to fix it (I’m glad she did, cause I would have just turned it off and left myself without any white noise).

At 5:00AM Sofi got up with me, she told about a dream she had and made me tea, and we watched music videos for a while and then listed to smooth jazz while reading.  A very pleasant pre-work morning.

Now that I’m at work on the night of the Sunday Night Funnies, and I find I haven’t written much material this week because I have been otherwise occupied by my literary adventures with both “The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”  Both of which I do not have the power to put down.  Today, I’ll have to write a few things during work, cause our friend Brenna is in town and she’s going to come see me do comedy tonight.  I must attempt to be impressive.

Another thing that I have been distracting myself with is wheresgeorge.com, which is a website where you can see where dollar bills that you have have come from and where the ones you once had eventually end up.  I’ve found one from as far away as Florida and had one of mine go as far away as Arkansas.  It’s pretty awesome, and now that I’ve bought a wheresgeorge stamp, I’ve upped my game to a professional level.  Pretty sweet.

This morning shift is not something I’ll have to be used to for long, as after today I only have one more week left at this job, and then I have the rest of August to get my affairs in order before I move away to East Lansing and start my studenting career at State.

Here are the things I must do before I leave

1. Hire an accompanist to go through the Evil Dead: The Musical score with me.

2. Buy a bike.

3. Decide which books to pack.

4. Pack those books.

5. Get more pills from doctor.

6. Memorize Evil Dead script.

That is all I can think of right now.

ayetherestherub:

Robby’s Birthday Present. Made with pencil and prismas. Prismas are the bomb dot com. 

 Sofi is amazingly awesome.

ayetherestherub:

I’ve got Nic reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. I suggested it actually. It’s great. Creepy, subtle, one of those books that really wrench at your soul. Sort of up there with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer.

And you know sometimes you realize how lucky you are? Sometimes it just hits you from the bottom of your stomach to the base of your neck and the crinkly, shiny feeling forces you to smile? I get this when I read/watch/think about Harry Potter, during Christmas, sitting on the porch on a sunny, calm day, and when my lover tells me to “hurry up with that shower, cutie”. 

(For future reference, whenever I go off on a tangent about how wonderful Nic is it’s because he’s just done something I can’t hide from the world…while I’m already making a post.)

This is part of the reason for my recent silence; Sofi and I went to the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Ontario.  It was amazing, Christopher Plummer as Prospero in the Tempest and also the productions of As You Like It and Jaques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris were incredible.  I also got to meet on of my Comedy heroes: Sean Cullen!

I told him that my life was transformed when I first heard “Wood, Cheese, and Children” and that he brings a theatricality to stand up that I felt was sorely missing.  He smiled and signed an autograph for me.  He was appearing in two shows there: one called “King of Theives” and the other he was Smee in “Peter Pan”.  I saw neither show, but seeing him was enough for me.  Awesome!

Also, I’ve been officially accepted as a student at MSU.  I shall be Jake in Evil Dead: The Musical.  Things are going great.  I’ll do a more in depth and comedy oriented update soon.

This is my set from Sunday Night: 6/6/10.  This was a fun one.  I had a blast that night.  I hope you enjoy watching!