What kind of psychopathic little assholes post rape pictures on Facebook?

By Dominique Millette

**TRIGGERS FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT AND GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS.**

As of now, the news has been splashed all over Canadian media, and I’m feeling sick just thinking about it. It’s hard to read and very hard to discuss, but holy fuck, what the hell is going on with teenage boys in our world?

A 16-year-old girl British Columbia girl was drugged and gang-raped at a weekend rave. Police say her attackers were both minors and adults.

It gets worse (as if the gang rape wasn’t enough): a 16-year-old boy posted photos of the assault to Facebook. They went viral and have spread across cyberspace. Police have stated they will prosecute anyone pinpointed as responsible for distributing these photos with child pornography, but have not been able to have them all taken down.

Referring to the victim, another teenage boy interviewed on camera by a national news network said “I don’t think she was raped.”

What the hell created these little psychopaths?

That same national network had an expert analyze the causes of such callous, brutal, vicious attitudes. The main culprit: exposure to pornography.

She isn’t alone in her assertion. In a disturbing coincidence, an article posted just this September 11 on AlterNet quoted scholar Gail Dines (author of Adventures in Pornland) as saying the porn teenagers watch today is a lot worse than what used to be available 20 years ago: cruelty is being sold as sex. And boys are starting to watch it, on average, at age 11.

In what passes for mainstream material, women get brutally penetrated by three men at a time, orally, anally and vaginally, so roughly that in many cases their anuses drop out of their bodies and have to be sewn back in, explains the activist researcher.  “Ass-to-mouth” action, where male actors penetrate the women anally then orally, give the women fecal bacterial infections of the mouth and throat.

Some of these porn “stars” don’t last longer than three months, because of the physical damage their bodies sustain, Dines says. She points out that if a few women such as Jenna Jameson manage to empower themselves or have a career they really want, this isn’t the case for the majority of women working in porn.

Now: I thought I’d watched porn in the past, but apparently, the stuff I looked at wasn’t even close. I was looking at erotica. What young teen boys watch, by comparison, appears to be a lot more violent and degrading.

In the interview, the scholar asserts that both research studies and her own interviews indicate the more men watch pornography, the less they are able to maintain intimate relationships and the less interested they are in real women. The process of desensitization gets worse over time.

If teenage boys are watching hardcore porn now being sold as mainstream from the time they’re 11, is it any wonder they can rape a girl their age or post pictures of this rape online? Or say “she wasn’t raped” despite numerous eyewitnesses?

What about in the majority of cases, when the rape has no witnesses?

The Yes means Yes post on compulsory heterosexuality and rape culture clearly outlines the power dynamics at play. Within the first two paragraphs, we learn from Dr. C.J. Pascoe that “as a feminist researcher, I was saddened and quite frankly surprised to discover the extent to which this type of sexual harassment constituted an average high school day for youth at River High.” Boys believe they must dominate and control girl’s bodies in order to assert their masculinity and achieve dominance. The girl’s body parts become a means to an end.

These boys are befriending and dating our girls. And lest we forget: they will be the jurors of the next generation.

Meanwhile, the B.C. gang-rape case is exceptional. Acquaintance rape is the most common form of sexual assault. “What I found in my interviews with young women was that many of these men wanted to play out porn sex on their bodies,” Gail Dines observes. “They wanted anal sex, they wanted all sorts of other things that they’d seen in pornography… And a lot of the women, they don’t want to do it, but they don’t have the vocabulary to express why they don’t want to do it because everywhere they go in this society they’re told, “If you don’t do it, you’re a prude.” And what teenager or adolescent do you know wants to be defined as a prude? So the boys are pushing, nagging, cajoling girls into performing porn sex.”

It should be disturbing to absolutely everyone that “a lot of the women, they don’t want to do it.” That sounds like the word NO. The word “prude” sounds like emotional blackmail. At what point can “pushing, nagging” and “cajoling” become rape? I know that as a young woman I felt bullied into sex more than once. Now, when a man nags me for sex, I feel harassed but I just keep repeating “no”. If he never wants to see me again, it’s good riddance to him: I don’t need that low quality of highly irritating social contact.

Many young women will not feel that they have this freedom. I wouldn’t be surprised if young men blackmail them in all sorts of subtle but effective ways, with threats ranging from ostracism to gossip. The best way to get around “no means no” is to make sure the girl is so intimidated and ashamed, she won’t actually dare to say the word. I’m afraid the tactic appears to work quite often.

It seems the best way to defeat the most pervasive form of rape culture is, indeed, to empower girls – not the way the culture purports to do it, through pole-dancing antics atop ice cream trucks, but in a timelessly healthy manner, by knowing their own worth regardless of how “sexy” they may be. Not having to live up to “sexy” would be one of the greatest freedoms we could give our girls as a legacy.

As to defeating the culture of gang-rape that created the nightmare in B.C.: that will take serious and sustained intervention, likely with the boys themselves. I can only hope for hope.

(Cross-posted at The Delphiad Blog).