alexia

Everyone I’ve ever nannied for has been an awesome parent, and in a lot of cases I actually have to ask them to pay less attention to the kids so I can do my job!

I come to work in the morning to a tired mother, with a full sink of dishes and a boatload of work she has to do (because us maternity leave isn’t nearly long enough), and still while dealing with all of that they still come check on me and baby every hour or so.

So yesterday, the wifi went out for like 20 minutes. And the older kid goes

“This is why I hate lesbians. They always make the wifi go out.”

> “it doesn’t matter if they consented, you’re a bad person if you get off to causing other people pain”

so you agree? you don’t actually care about consent and you just have moral standards for what people do? you don’t think their consent matters because they’re doing something you personally find gross? that’s what you’re saying there?

And men were offended and said I'm conflating the desire for sex with rape and went on to say rape has nothing to do with sex. "Rape is about power and totally unlike real sex", they said.

I find it interesting that men make such a hard distinction between rape and sex. If such a distinction exists in the minds of men, why are so many rapists under the impression that they're having regular sex?

Rape "has nothing to do with sex" yet the #MeToo movement was littered with men expressing that they had zero clue that their sexual expressions were considered rapey or predatory. Time and time again men expressed that they thought it was a natural, healthy expression of male sexuality to rape women. Entire discussions were had about how in the 70s, slipping a woman quaaludes to loosen her up or render her unconscious was normal. That putting your coworker's hand on your erection was flirting etc. In the ongoing rape case in France, where over 70 men raped an unconscious woman on the invite of her husband- many have so far cited in their defense that they did not think it was rape because her husband was there (the idea that a wife's body belongs to her husband clearly still in their mind).

I'm sure many Afghan men taking 10-year-olds for brides right now are under the belief that they're having normal intercourse with a "wife", instead of brutally raping a child.

This is the insidious and very slippery aspect of rape culture, men claim to know what rape is and be horrified by it while at the same time insisting the rapes they're committing are normal sex. Keeping rape distal helps facilitate rape. In this way, rape is always some almost fictional type of sex that only exists hypothetically in some other time or space, for men-it's never what they're doing in the present moment. That way, they don't have to think about what they're doing. "Yes rape is bad but any type of sex I'm having is never rape."