An Ode to the Zombies of My Youth

by James Landrith

I do not like zombies with guns.
I do not when fast they runs.

I would not like zombies that fly.
I do not like when they zoom on by.

I would not like zombies that talk.
I do not like when they jaywalk.

I wish zombies would follow the rules.
I wish they would stop using devious tools.

I miss all my old zombie friends.
I wonder if we can make amends.

(My apologies to Dr. Seuss, I couldn't help myself.)

Wow, my survivor story "I've Got the T-Shirt..." was chosen as one of The Best of GMP's Men's Stories: http://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/the-best-of-gmps-mens-stories/ 

When I wrote it, I truly did not expect the level of response it would receive, nor did I expect it to be as popular as it was for so many weeks on their weekly stats. Believe it or not, it helps to know that so many people were able to learn more about an overlooked, denied and often mocked form of sexual violence.  It is truly validating to see that some people actually understand and care.  There are far too many who don't or feel the need to bury their compassion under a mountain of ideology and double-standards.

Thank you to the editors of GMP for including my article on this list.  I did not expect this mention and I greatly appreciate it.

I've been having an interesting discussion with artist M.K. Hajdin on male rape survivors.  She linked to a blog commentary by Wayne Myers - On Being A Male Rape Survivor.   Read Wayne's commentary.  You'll find it interesting and I'm always happy to see another male survivor find his voice.  We don't all have to agree all the time, but we really do need to speak out more.

Hajdin had this to say about male rape survivors after reading Wayne's commentary:

I confess I was feeling apprehensive when I began to read.  I was waiting for the inevitable “What About The Menz?” moment.  Thankfully, this guy gets it.  He tells his story while acknowledging that the vast majority of rape is male-on-female, and doesn’t try to persuade us that his experience was worse than those of female victims.

I am a male rape survivor. No one, male OR female has any business claiming their rape is worse than anyone else’s experience. I’ve never seen any male rape survivors make such claims in the past so I find it odd that this is being praised as if it rare for a male rape survivor to care about his sister’s pain.

It isn’t male survivors claiming that their rapes are worse. The problem is people who have NOT been raped trying to speak for those of us who have been raped whether male OR female. If you haven’t experienced it, you really don’t know as much about it as you think.

Because you’re a rape victim and deserve support for it, I’m going to approve your comment, provisionally.

I’m not sure what part of my post you had a problem with, but you seem to be drawing false conclusions about what I said.

Be aware that this is a feminist blog. As the proprietor of such, I don’t have much patience for men who come around mansplaining, picking fights, or showing any other kind of hostility. Victim or not, you will be civil, or you will be gone.

Hello, thanks for approving the comment. I took issue solely with the implication that male survivors think their rapes are worse than what happens to female survivors. That is how I read this statement: “doesn’t try to persuade us that his experience was worse than those of female victims”. I don’t see that as something that male survivors spend their time doing.

That is something I see OTHERS doing sometimes while talking about us and our experiences. That is what I took issue with in your posting. As a male survivor, I encounter such themes often and a LOT of people regardless of ideology and gender are constantly putting words into our mouths or defining our experiences for us. It just gets really, really old. If I have misinterpreted your meaning then I apologize.

I believe I have been civil. I’ve just disagreed with that implication. I realize that this is a feminist blog and that this is your space. I’ve been an online publisher for over 15 years with the requisite death threats, denial of service attacks and outright character assassinations to go along with it. I get how content controls work and I exercise the same type on my own pubs. A little more about me so you’ll know what I am about and what I stand for as a person. I’m a long-time, established civil liberties activist who cut my teeth on ending Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial dating/marriages and expanded into many other areas of advocacy over the years.

I’m also a member of the RAINN Speakers’ Bureau and a trainer/speaker for my state’s survivor caucus and state-wide umbrella organization for sexual violence issues. There is nothing more thrilling than seeing someone who has suffered sexual or domestic violence find their voice after years and begin to vocalize their fears, anger and rage in whatever form they deem appropriate.

Thank you.

My statement about males was based on the fact that they, having male privilege as they do (even when they are victims) tend to assume their experiences are more important than women’s.

My own experience on other feminist blogs has confirmed this. There’ll be a lot of women talking about some issue, and a dude will show up and talk about how the issue affected him, and all the attention will shift to the dude. I don’t want this happening on my blog. Some feminist blogs solve the problem by banning males altogether, but I don’t want to go that far unless I have to.

So the lack of “what about the menz?” focus in the male-rape post I linked to was important, both for me personally and for the other women who read my site. They will know that this story doesn’t try to diminish what happens to women, as so many other male-written pieces do.

I appreciate your civil response and your work on behalf of victims.

I have to disagree with the generalization that male survivors assume their experiences are more important than those of female survivors.  I know far too many who never tell anyone - for fear of being told their experiences were not important - at all.  Or, because they have already been told that their traumas are lesser, unimportant or worse - deserved.  Many male survivors feel guilty for even feeling bad about what happened to them - let alone EVER saying anything to anyone outside of a therapist's office, when they can even muster the courage or resources to get that far.

What SOME male survivors post on feminist blogs is hardly representative of the male survivor population at large.  Further, I've read plenty of feminist blogs over the years and I've seen plenty of male survivors who actually downplayed their traumas, rather than believing they were even important, let alone MORE important.  Hell, I've even seen some feminists attack other feminists for bothering to mention us at all on their own blogs.  Really. REALLY. 

It boggles the mind.

As a group, we don't feel our experiences are more important.  We don't speak as a group, nor do we think as a group - same as female survivors.  We are individuals with our own experiences and beliefs and personalities and baggage - just like feminists and redheads and people who actually pay money to see Pauly Shore movies or anyone else regardless of what arbitrary distinctions can be made to create such a grouping.  How does it fight sexism to promote generalizations about a group of individuals based solely on their gender and some cherry-picked observations?

I waited over 18 years to even acknowledge what happened to me, while spending that time serving as a secondary survivor to another person.  I'd say that was the exact opposite of believing that my experience is more important.  I believe my own experience is just AS important, not more important.  There is more than a sublte difference in the two concepts.  We all deserve the right to heal and express our frustrations and challenges without being made to feel guilty or expected to hold our tongues in order to make disinterested third parties happy.

I'm really, fucking really, getting annoyed with people who believe that they can speak for all male or female survivors, constantly put words in our mouths, thoughts in our brains, co-opt our traumas for their exploitative agendas and then tell us to shut the fuck up unless we agree to their terms when we discuss our own experiences - even on our own blogs or in survivor spaces.  Clearly, unless we make it all about Teh Womynz All Teh Timez - even when breaking our own silences - male survivors are still viewed by some as nothing but a thug monolith oppressing women - even when we were raped or sexually abused by a woman.

I truly never knew that talking about my own experience honestly and vulnerably - even on my own blog or in response to articles about male survivors - was somehow preventing female survivors from healing or was making their lives worse.  I missed the memo that the only survivors who are important are those with vaginas.  Or maybe I deleted it when the Gender Kops were distributing it.  I think I put them on the spam blacklist a while ago.  Funny thing though, the female survivors I know well truly reject this form of collectivist and sexist thinking.

Perhaps it is time for those who are interested in ending sexual violence to actually start listening to those of us - male and female - who have lived it.  The realities of our experiences are far more complex than one would think.  Simply visiting some feminist blogs and holding those observations as truly representative of the entire world is hardly objective, nor is it fair to the hundreds of millions of female and male survivors who don't frequent those circles of the internet (which is the overwhelming vast majority).

Really, the world of sexual violence advocacy and the survivor community is a fuckload bigger and far more diverse than a few feminist blogs might have you believe.  While SOME internet feminists are very involved in actual survivor advocacy and prevention efforts (beyond just talking loudly on the internet), they are hardly the vast majority of individuals involved in this work, nor are they the sole authorities on the subject.  The world is far more complex and wonderful and scary and invalidating and confusing and yet still more worthwhile than a person can truly comprehend from reading a few thousand characters lit up on a monitor on a narrowly selected reading list.

Seriously.

Both Jacob Taylor of Toy Soldiers and Danny of Danny's Corner have commented on this topic as well:

• http://dannyscorneroftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2012/09/weekly-mashup-brainy-style.html

• http://toysoldier.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/youre-not-helping-v9/
  

Relevant Links:

• http://exiledstardust.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/on-being-a-male-rape-victim/
• http://conniptions.posterous.com/on-being-a-male-rape-victim  
• http://vaslittlecrow.com/blog/2011/10/27/let-me-explain-why-mansplaining-isnt-cool-in-a-condescending-and-long-winded-manner/
  

 About James A. Landrith

James Landrith is a healing rape survivor, public speaker (RAINN and VSDVAA) on sexual violence and civil liberties, internationally syndicated blogger, civil liberties activist and the notorious editor and publisher of The Multiracial Activist (ISSN: 1552-3446) and The Abolitionist Examiner (ISSN: 1552-2881). Landrith can be reached by email at:  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  or at his personal website/blog.

Dear Huffington Post: Cherry Picked Rape Myths Do Not Equal Innocence

by Matt Atkinson

David Protess, writing for the Huffington Post on Did Oklahoma Wrongfully Convict a Chicago Hoops Standout?

"Oh my Jesus God," Darrell Williams cried out as he heard the verdicts. Turning to the jury, Williams exclaimed: "I didn't do it!"

The jury had just found Williams, a basketball player at Oklahoma State University, guilty of two counts of rape by instrumentation. Two women had testified that Williams had groped them at an off-campus party by reaching inside their pants. And the Stillwater, Oklahoma jury had believed them.

For 15 years I've been a specialist in sexual assault prevention, education, and treatment, have written a curriculum for sexual assault victim response that's used nationwide, won a national award for excellence from the National Sexual Violence Resource Council, and have been a staff director for a state Sexual Assault Coalition. I only say this so people won't think I'm just "Joe public" with a pile of opinions.

Williams became a suspect when the two complaining witnesses picked out his photo for police, according to news reports. But the women weren't shown the usual photo spread of mug shots. That wasn't possible -- because Williams had no criminal record.

Instead, since the alleged offender was wearing an OSU Cowboys warm-up suit, the cops showed the women a photo of the basketball team. Williams was the perp, they declared.

When Williams was brought in for questioning, however, he immediately professed his innocence. "I don't know what happened [to the women]," Williams said in an audio-recorded interview. "I was probably misidentified." To prove his innocence, he agreed to take a lie detector test -- and passed. No doubt thinking the first test was a fluke, the authorities asked him to take another one. Passed it, too.

I'm sorry, but this article is replete with rape myths. Starting with the notion that because the accused proclaims his innocence (and the penalty for sex offenses is severe), we ought to heed that. Well, don't ALL accused rapists proclaim their innocence? The old chestnut that "these alleged victims could ruin his life with their accusations" is one of the most pathetic (and predictable) reactions to rape. The author is calling for sympathy for the convicted rapist as the real victim here because those women "ruined his life." That is the worst swill of anti-victim rhetoric I can imagine in a rape case, and I can't believe HuffPo would publish such a classic example of it. How many rape victims have to put up with that same venom--"Why would you accuse him? You'll ruin HIS life!"

Witnesses at the party told police they had not heard anyone scream or seen any inappropriate behavior. Neither of the women suffered cuts or scratches, and their clothing was not torn. Both had been drinking before they arrived at the dimly lit party. Most important, several party-goers were OSU players wearing warm-up suits just like the kind donned by Williams.

Next, we have the myth that if the victims aren't physically brutalized, there's grounds for skepticism about the crime itself. Such a comment does nothing to exonerate Williams, and instead is a typical tactic of questioning the veracity of the victims' allegations entirely: their rape claims are phony. It's the classic belief that "she might not have actually been raped, because she's not obviously injured and her clothing isn't torn." Again, this is a pathetic response that MANY rape victims face by people who don't have the slightest education about sexual assault dynamics (yet decide to mouth off about it anyway), and it's unfortunate when these biases make in into the media like this. For the record, a majority of sexual assaults do not result in obvious external wounding, and the nature of the assaults being alleged in this case wouldn't. So to call out the victims on this basis reveals nothing about the case, and everything about the author's maintenance of trite, longstanding rape myths. In an article titled "Sexual Assault: What Juries Don't Know" (dynamic.uoregon.edu/~jjf/articles/freydjury2008.pdf) this very myth is exposed as a classic prejudice by the misinformed and ignorant.

A check with OSU officials revealed that Williams was an honors student with a 4.0 grade point average. He left Chicago, where he graduated from Dunbar High School, to escape urban violence after his older brother Derrick was murdered while visiting their grandmother. As a junior at OSU, Williams earned a basketball scholarship and became the Cowboys' starting forward. His coach and fellow players were convinced he was innocent.

Third, the "he's such a good boy" defense is another failure. So what if the accused has a perfect GPA? So what if he doesn't have a prior record? Neither of those has anything to do with the case. Sadly, many rape victims have to face this kind of nonsense all the time--"Oh, he would never do what you're claiming! He's been such a nice boy! He goes to church and gets good grades! why would you say such a thing?" Again, the author is promoting the classic arguments used to disparage victims claims: "They ruined his life." This is coupled with the snide remark that "the victims had been drinking." The reference to a victim's consumption of alcohol is a typical method of invoking latent prejudices against women who are raped. It's meant to bring up the skepticism that a woman who has been drinking is at fault herself, that she forfeits the right to allege rape (indeed, forfeits the right to withhold consent or complain about the violation of that consent in any case), and is the classic "she put herself in that position" chestnut. A writer who had bothered to become educated about sexual assault would know that victim intoxication fortifies a legal case against a perpetrator, it doesn't erode it. But nevermind, it's much easier for a writer to fall back on the age-old anti-victim myths about alcohol making it her fault (or at least, not his fault).

Witnesses at the party told police they had not heard anyone scream or seen any inappropriate behavior. Neither of the women suffered cuts or scratches, and their clothing was not torn. Both had been drinking before they arrived at the dimly lit party. Most important, several party-goers were OSU players wearing warm-up suits just like the kind donned by Williams.

Next, there's the "nobody heard any screaming" thing. This is based on the myth that sexual assaults are raucous, loud, chaotic crimes, because that's how people imagine them to be. In reality, a majority of sexual assaults last less than three minutes, and the most common response by victims is "tonic immobility"--becoming rigid and silent. To fall back on the belief that someone has to be screaming, fighting, beaten, and have her clothes torn up in order to be a "legitimate rape victim" shows no better understanding of sexual assault than the bizarre claims of the man whose phrase I'm invoking to make this point.

A landmark study of wrongful convictions in which prisoners were officially exonerated found that 80 percent of the errors in sexual assault cases were due to false witness identifications. In other words, eight out of 10 complaining witnesses were mistaken -- the highest error rate of any type of wrongful conviction.

Lastly, the article's link to support the claim of 80% misidentification in rape cases actually supports no such claim whatsoever. That link presents 945 cases of exoneration. That's 945 cases SINCE 1989. Given the 125,000+ incidents of rape every year (BJS, Crime Victimization Report), there's not a shred of a basis for the author to make the claim he ascribes to his source. What he CAN say (and I'll correct the record here since the author did just an awful job of understanding his own source), is that 80% of those exonerations were on the basis of misidentification. That's 80% of all 945 exonerations since 1996, or a tiny fraction of a percent of ALL rape convictions in 16 years. What a careless mistake by a lousy, lousy article.

And, yes, race matters profoundly in assessing Darrell Williams claim of innocence. Williams is black. The two women are white. Other black Cowboys basketball players were at the party. At least two black men on the team closely resembled Williams in height, build and skin tone.

But instead of showing the complaining duo a photo of each potential suspect and asking if they could identify it, the authorities made a fatal mistake. They used the team picture -- forcing the witnesses to compare one black player to another. This must have been confusing. In picking Williams, it would have been natural to choose the black player who looked most like the person who groped them, even if he was not necessarily the actual assailant.

I won't even get into the author's nasty point that having two women pick out the same suspect from a group picture is invalid because all black players look too alike for this to be meaningful.

Seriously?

Matt Atkinson is a domestic and sexual violence response professional with a background in work with trauma survivors. He has directed programs to prevent domestic and sexual violence, where he developed and implemented programs with schools, colleges, women's prisons, university sports teams, churches, and Indian tribes. He is the author of the survivor handbook Resurrection After Rape and his 2011 book "Letters To Survivors: Words of Comfort for Women Recovering from Rape" received two prestigious publishing awards. Matt is an accomplished artist, and he is married and has two sons.