Why I’m a feminist who feels sorry for rapists.

This post comes with a heavy trigger warning. Please proceed with caution.

First the girl, always the girl. The survivor, the fighter, the one who paid for a broken society with her body and her image of self, with her future sex-life and her ability to trust. I hope that she has someone, women and men, who take her in their arms and tell her that she is not alone and they are proud of her – for speaking up, for going through something as jarring if not more than the actual rape by talking, by answering disgusting questions, by being talked about like a thing. Like a victim, like a statistic, like a non-human. I hope they hold her and tell her that it will get better, that there is badness in the world but we can come together and push it out of our little bubbles, where only we exist: people who open up, who share, who are connected. I want her to have that. I want someone there to teach her how we can turn horrible experiences into kindness and a softened heart, an ability for empathy and love. I hope she is not alone in her head.

My heart goes out to her. I want to embrace her with the millions and millions of women who were raped and who still will be. All of us. I want that wave of empathy to come and sweep the world and we cry out that this is not okay. One woman in five is not okay and something is wrong, terribly wrong in our world.

And still I sit here, and I also feel sorry for the two young men. How can I not? When they, too, are victims of this fucked up society in which we know exactly that stealing is wrong, in which every movie loudly proclaims that piracy is wrong. But in which, somehow, a drunk woman in skimpy clothes is still a mixed message. How is that possible?

One woman in five. I think about the women. And then I think about the men. One man in five is a rapist? Maybe one in ten? I know a lot of rapists. You know a lot of rapists. We look in their eyes every day and we have no idea.  Just like you know women who were raped, you know rapists. They are our first boyfriends, our cousins, fathers, uncles, brothers, the nice family friends who always brought us candy. They are our friends, our acquaintances, the men we love. They are our politicians, our judges, our journalists and the celebrities we lust after.

We know these men and yet, our justice system puts up two of them – randomly – up for the ritual media slaughter every couple of months and we call it justice.  We send them to prison, some blame the girl, some blame the rapist, a few more drops of articles and blog entries and then we forget. Until the circle starts anew. Nothing changes.

I don’t feel sorry for them because they will go to prison, or because this will haunt their entire life. They have committed a crime, they had a choice – the girl did not. I make no excuses for them. And I think that the media coverage was despicable – as it always is. Always teaching, always teaching wrong. But I feel sorry for them because they live in a society where two normal teenagers turn into rapists. Not because they were punished – but because they raped. Not the punishment changes their life forever, the act of becoming an aggressor does – and they need help, too.

We think of criminals, of murderers and rapists and something other. They are not like us, something is wrong in their head, they are those dark figures, looming, alien. Surely we would be able to see the evil glinting in their eyes if we ever came across them. Maybe that is case for murderers or mass rapists, even. Although I doubt the clichéd looks.

But the massive, the overwhelming majority of rapist are only vaguely aware they are doing anything wrong. They are inundated by their fathers calling girls sluts who are asking for it, friends who prove their masculinity not through kindness or acts of charity, but by rating girl’s tits and asses like wares on a market, who call them cock-teases and see women as the obstacle they have to overcome to get to sex. Mothers are no better, they teach their boys to go for the nice girls, the “good” girls, not the ones who let it all hang out. The easy ones. Daughters listen, too. We all perpetuate the cycle. Every day.

Women are the enemy. They withhold sex. They are smarter than us. They wear clothes that make us feel insecure because our breasts aren’t as pretty. And we call them sluts. They are the enemy if they are loud and set an example we disagree with. They are the enemy when they are quiet and endure abuse without giving the man up to the police. Women are the enemy always.

And boys grow up knowing no better.

So these young men, I wish them no harm in prison. I am sick and tired of looking at the world like this: an eye for an eye. I wish that someone embraces them, too. That someone teaches them how you can turn a great bad experience, a horrible thing you have done into kindness and empathy. I hope someone thinks about getting them a really good therapist, a kind person, someone who can explain to them exactly what they did and how they can work to be better. To come out of prison and help other young men understand how fucking easy it is to slip up in this world and do something that changes a young woman’s life forever.

I hope that someone teaches them how they can work on making it harder to slip up. On raising the awareness that consent is everything, that women are not the enemy. On getting our society to understand rape as a real crime, in everybody and not just the few they turn into a spectacle.

I don’t wish them ill. And yes, I feel sorry for them – I feel sorry for boys that are born into a world in which all too early our media, our parents, our friends turn them into potential rapists and lower and lower the bar that it takes to climb into becoming an aggressor, a rapist. A piece of shit. And I feel sorry for the men who only just manage to stay on this side of the bar, always holding back – unable to see women as real people, as anything other than purveyors of their sex organs. The “nice guys” who think that makes them good – and who still see nothing but tits and asses when they look at the girls they don’t rape.

I want to live in a world where a male feminist is not a refreshing and happy surprise. Where men understand how to be men, beautiful and strong and wise and where they learn how to love because they were loved, where they can teach their sons because they have been taught.  I want to live in a world where rape is a crime, a real crime, committed by real criminals with criminal energy – not an inevitability of life that sucks us dry, men and women, aggressors and victims.

One in five. I can’t live in a world in which I have to hate so many.

Feeling sorry for someone, thinking that they are a victim, too, is not the same as excusing their actions. But putting everything only on them, my opinion, is ignoring the real cause, is helplessly flinging at hatred at symptoms. They need help, too. For all our sakes. We all need help.