Zerlina Maxwell says women being armed won't prevent rape, gets a flood of monstrous threats
To paraphrase, "If having guns prevented rape, women in the Armed Forces would never get raped, which is the opposite of what actually happens."
There is a scary thing happening right now in the Public White Male Psyche that is internet comment boards and cable news. The stranglehold white guys have held on culture is being challenged by women demanding respect, gay people demanding respect, and brown people demanding respect. The reaction to this perceived assault on their hegemony is ugly. As ugly as can be. Witness Anita Sarkeesian's year of abuse for wondering whether some games are sexist. Or this awful attack on Zerlina.
The way I read it is: these guys know in their cores that sexism and racism and homophobia is bad, but they still enjoy it viscerally. Having culture cater to these -isms with portrayals of mincing weak faggots, pretty subservient women, and all the other stereotypes is flattering to them. Their media reflects a world where they and those like them are kings and heroes and funny and where the Other is weird and dumb and objectified.
But these guys--the smart ones--they know that when their empire of prejudice gets challenged it will crumble. It will dissolve like a sand castle at high tide. Social justice builds in increments, but it builds. And the time of puerile sexist media is ending.
Their fun is ending. And to them, it's uppity women like these that are behind it.
The question at issue is whether women should carry or have the right to carry firearms to protect themselves against rape and sexual violence. The gist of Zerlina’s argument was that it should be on men and the culture in general to make rape and sexual assault unacceptable rather than on women to arm themselves to not be raped. In other words, don’t put it on her to carry a gun any more than you tell her to dress a particular way or anything else. The underlying point of debate was whether rape is just something like murder or robbery — something that will always exist to some, hopefully limited, degree — or something that is bound up in and encouraged or discouraged by our culture. In other words, whether men can be taught not to rape.
As you’ll see if you watch it, Zerlina reveals in the segment that she is herself a rape survivor.
The pros and cons of the specific argument about guns speak for themselves and Zerlina makes it better than I can. What I’m interested in focusing on is the sort of digital lynch mob, seemingly churned up by a post on the segment at The Blaze and other sites, the segment generated.
