You Say Tomato, I Say Toma-toh, You Say Accuser, I Say Victim, So Shut Your Victim-Blaming Rape-Excusing Mouthhole

shutterstock_103659515The Steubenville gang rape case, or what some victim-blaming, rape-excusing gentlemen wish us to refer to as the “Case Of The Girl Who May Have Been Sexually Promiscuous And May Have Gotten Drunk At A Party And May Have Consented To Being Allegedly Penetrated And Photographed While She Was Allegedly Not Really Passed Out And Being Lugged Around Like An Alleged Dead Body So She Obviously Allegedly Deserved It” have requested that we stop referring to the 16-year-old Jane Doe in this case as the “victim” and instead refer to her as the “accuser.”

Are ya’ll familiar with this thing that people say lately when they are confronted with something unpleasant and they want to comment on it but because it’s either offensive or they feel that if they start discussing it they will never be able to stop discussing it because it is that objectionable or infuriating or otherwise soul-poaching, so instead they simply reply:

I just can’t.

I just can’t. I get to use that term now. I just can’t. I have a root canal scheduled today. I hardly slept last night. Yesterday I spent all day conducting an amazingly sad and terrifying interview that will be on Mommyish soon that basically broke my brain and it seems like every single day I have to deal with yet another episode in the story of my life which is “Fuck you and your thinly veiled attempts at victim blaming.

From the Daily Mail:

A lawyer for one of the two Ohio high school football players accused of raping a 16-year-old girl has sparked outrage by claiming she should not be called a ‘victim,’ it was revealed today.

Walter Madison, who is representing Ma’lik Richmond, has asked Judge Thomas Lipps to order all parties to refer to the teenage girl as the ‘accuser’ and not the ‘victim.’

‘The ultimate question in this case is whether a crime was committed. Only after any such determination can a person be declared a ‘victim,’ Madison wrote in papers that were filed on Friday in Steubenville.

 

As I have stated a million times before, none of us know the entire facts in the Steubenville gang rape case. When the case goes to trial, hopefully justice will be served. We can read as much as we can about the case and draw our own conclusions. I believe Jane Doe is a victim. She is a victim of nonconsensual sexual activity and and she is a victim of cyber-bullying. She is a rape victim, because in my opinion, rape isn’t limited to intercourse involving penetration by a penis into a vagina. The boys allegedly involved in this case are also victims, victims of intense public scrutiny and from what I have witnessed, victims of extremely bad parenting. It is also my opinion that all boys can understand that when a girl is vomiting all over, she probably isn’t in the right mental, physical or emotional state to agree to a sexual encounter.

So that’s that. Feel free to express your opinions on this, because right at this moment, I just can’t.

(photo: Rob Stark/shutterstock)

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