It is a novelty society can live without, really. I agree in whole, the author’s analysis and stance on these products.

I found the stats hard to grasp and links hard to make too, and I’m a woman. One thing that might help your “remapping” is, for a few weeks, every time you are in a room with 4 or more women (or more than 10 men), try to say to yourself, “Someone in this room has been raped”. If 2 women (or 5 men), “There is a 50% chance someone in this room has been raped.” If you do this for just a while the ability to make the link from rape joke to rape apologism in a more instinctive way will come. Only when I did this did I quite get my head around how ubiquitous and real this obscenity is.

The pen holder is a very worrying example of how rape is becoming desensitised in modern society, with the dialogue, “Help! Help!” and, “Get out you dirty old man!”. It really worries me that this was able to sell.

However, I must disagree with your analysis of the sharpener. Crude, yes, perhaps a novelty joke for some, but the nails really don’t show rape at all. I understand we’re you are arguing from but the leap between their and reality is a great one. The ‘nails’ are simply a method of construction, used to hold the figure in place. The didn’t use glue instead (costs more) or paint it (costs more, and frankly, doesn’t need it to look professionally made).

By making the connection between the ‘nails’ and real life rape, one must also make the connection that if someone did take this seriously, and that it promoted rape, the culprit would also saw off the victims head and attack a crank to it no doubt. Also, I’m quite sure nailing someone to the ground isn’t exactly feasible to an insecure rapist (though the connection symbolically is there).

Apart from that little bit I congratulate you on your efforts to stop rape. It is completely and utterly awful, I wish you the best.

-Dylan

The voice clips are particularly terrible. Awful people.

What about inanimate objects?

When it comes to the pen holder, I’m unequivocally against it. It’s clearly supporting rape. The vocalization of “Help!” when you use it as its function demands–to stick your pen in the vagina–is clear as day.

The only pleasure I could get out of such an object would be the novelty of the taboo, which would quickly pale next to the evil of the repetitious message that rape is acceptable.

I like Cara’s stance that you don’t just go around shoving “Hello, nice to meet you, I think, but I won’t know until you tell me whether you’re sexist” into people’s faces. And I personally agreed with Matt’s stance that, with the sharpener, the naked form catches the eye more than the headlessness or the screws. It’s clear with the pen holder (“Help!”) that the unwanted nature of the act would be one of the first things to get your attention. I didn’t have such a strong aversion to the sharpener, though it is nasty once I think about it for a bit. So if I saw the pencil sharpener in someone’s house, I’d assume they were pretty crude, and I’d probably ask them about it. And I’d hope they’d say, “My dad got that for me from Cuba. I laughed the first time I saw it, but after that it just seemed kind of weird, so I put it in that drawer. I only keep it around so I don’t have to gum up my electric sharpener when I’m sharpening my grease pens.”

had a discussion not too long ago with a couple of guys I know about rape. I cited the common stat that 1 in 4 women have been raped. they didn’t believe me. they refused to believe that that many men are rapists. they insisted that MOST MEN AREN’T RAPISTS. I said there was no way I would ever support that statement — that a small percentage of the population of men in the world are raping all the women who have been raped is highly unlikely.

anyway, just wanted to toss that out there. We DO ABSOLUTELY have a PERSONAL responsibilty to do what we can to denounce violence against women and not participate in the culture of violence against women that is our society. non-participation is not enough.

by the way, I likely won’t follow this comment up… I’m a drive-by commenter these days, but I’m happy to have found this site.

best, TG

The reason I am posting is to say: Cara, congratulations on this fantastic, brave and searing piece of writing. Thank you.