Donna Rotunno,Harvey Weinstein's lawyer,says she's never put herself in the situation where she could be assaulted.Credit:Bloomberg
Because,Rotunno means,men can’t be trusted. If women are drunk,men can’t be trusted not to rape them. Men can’t be trusted to take no for an answer. And men are on the hunt for the vulnerable. This is the saddest apologia for sexual violence I’ve ever read. Rotunno’s world view is that women make themselves victims and men can’t help themselves. Is this where we are in 2020?
There are two significant concerns with Rotunno’s argument. She blames victims for not taking enough care,for putting themselves out there. But worse for men,she says they have no agency,that men have an uncontrollable sex drive and can’t control their needs.
Weinstein’s lawyer is not alone in thinking like that. The National Community Attitudes Survey conducted by ANROWS shows a staggering one-third of Australians believe rape results from “men not being able to control their need for sex”. The sample size was 17,500 Australians aged over 16. More than one in four Australians agree that “when a man is very sexually aroused,he may not even realise that the woman doesn’t want to have sex”.
As if men are so penis-led that they can’t possible function as humans. Michael Flood,associate professor in the law faculty at Queensland University of Technology,says research reveals some men and women still subscribe to the idea that male sexuality is an uncontrollable or barely controllable force. The weird flaw with this argument is that the majority of men are not rapists. They understand the word no. Hell,they’ve even used it themselves,so I hear. Then why do we dehumanise men in this way?
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It’s certainly a way of shifting the responsibility from men,poor haplesswater buffalo,to women,classic victim-blaming,an expression first used by William Ryan in his bookBlaming the Victim,where he writes that it’s a way of “justifying inequality by finding defects in the victims of inequality”. And that’s just the way it is for Rotunno and others who think like her. Those women,they’ve made poor choices. Men are so helpless.