Rape is 'theft of services"
Just unbelieveable. A judge in Pennsylvania declares that a young prostitute---I refuse to use the coy term sex worker---was raped and instead claims it was 'theft of services.' As a commenter notes at Violet's place, this is the consequence of the attempts to normalize and legalize 'sex work' over the past few years, usually by women who weren't trafficked into the business, and usually by men who want to rape a woman for a small fee. This is what happens when a prostitution is seen as a job and sex a service: the so-called worker stops being human. How long before rape victims get sued for unsatisfactory performance? Don't laugh. We've actually now seen the word 'rape' banned from a rape trial because it was 'prejudicial'. Rape threats are so common online as to be ordinary. Rape captured by videotape does not result in convictions. It's hard not to see a connection between the normalization of rape for money and steadily decreasing rape convictions. In anotehr case, a rape victim was refused a rape test because she was too intoxicated to have such a kit done---even though her intoxication was a facet of the rape.</a> It's clear that the police department and the hospitals involved desperately wanted to not help her, and that some of this may be due to the usual college tendency of denying rapes happen on their campuses. There's something else, too: isn't Howard a traditionally black school? Isn't it entirely possible the victim was black? And aren't black women sexualized by a society that wants to justify its rape of such women? Black women were and are more likely to be raped than white women, and significantly, they're also highly sexualized in the popular myths. This has the effect of making them fair targets for rape. After all, she says yes to everybody, she has to say yes to you. Sexualization defines a woman as a sexual animal, without self determination or humanity, just a thing. It's a way of shoving black women back into a kind of slavery---sexual slavery, just like prostitutes. (Just watch the trolls say I'm calling black women prostitutes.)Their rights don't exist. They become unruly employees who dare to have the temerity to demand to be treated as human beings. With all of society arrayed against them, either actively promoting the stereotype or not resisting it---and thus endorsing it---they struggle just to avoid being treated as those slaves in the first place. Once it's done they're locked into the role. Once you're raped, you become used goods, on the theory that all a woman has to offer is sex and hasn't been sullied by being the sort of loser who gets victimized. Prejudices against women, women of color, and victims all get combined into one vicious ball. (The trolls and the MRAs love to claim that fighting victimization is the same as promoting a victim identity, which is so ludicrous I reccomend simply laughing your head off at them.) It's one thing to fight one prejudice. It's quite anotehr to fight several. You'll notice that this standard also applies to the Duke rape victim. She was black, she was a stripper, and she was a single mother. Nothing else about her made the papers in any way; navy veteran, a daughter, an ex wife so decent that her ex spoke well of her, a college student, a mother, and a previous rape victim. Rather than being sympathized with because of her struggles, these combined with class prejudice and sexism to brand her a liar. Nobody ever considered that the defnese lawyers got all the publicity. The defendants' criminals histories never made much of a dent. That's the other side of all this degradation; it's stuff that men should be blamed for, because it's the result of their actions, yet it bounces off of them because there's such a strong taboo against blaming men for anything. How long before the Howard student gets blamed for going to a party? The judge in the theft of services case obviously didn't see the victim as human. How long before rape itself dehumanizes women entirely? How long before we accept that?

We're already seeing a sharp increase in the use of the phrase 'has sex with' in place of 'raped' in newspaper accounts of rape. Note: it's particularly absent in cases where the victim is a boy. Then the writers go to extra effort to portray the boy as a victim. This is partly homophobia and partly male privilege: men are logical and don't lie. Women are emotional and make shit up. (God help you if you dare and comment on this, too: you have to put male rape victims at the front of line. Note: the trolls will say I claimed that male rape doesn't happen or some such shit.)There's a disparity in sentencing, too. The guy who molested the two boys got a hundred plus years and took pains to exonerate the boys of suspicion they liked it or cooperated. Where's the hundred plus jail term for men who molest girls? How often are those girls blamed for 'asking for it'? There was outrage against Bill O'Reilly when he impugned Shawn Hornbeck. Where's the outrage on behalf of these female victims?