Register-Her
First and foremost, I’m not going to provide a link to this site and give them any more traffic. I know by mentioning it, I’m going to draw attention to them anyway, but I want to discuss the implications of such a site and where this kind of attitude comes from.
Secondly, I’m going to put a trigger warning here for discussion of rape, and anti-women attitudes.
Register-Her was created from the idea that women get away with crimes and false accusations, while men have their reputation destroyed by those accusations without any compensation. As they say, “The need for register-her.com was born out of the unfortunate social and legal custom of failing to punish female criminals and to safeguard society from their continued criminality.” In other words, the men responsible for this site feel that women need to be punished in ways that they’re not already.
Who do they list among their criminals? Jessica Valenti, for founding the blog Feministing and for what they call “an ongoing pattern of anti-male bigotry and advocacy for the eradication of constitutional rights based primarily on sex.” What is it that Feministing actually discusses? The many big and small ways that women are demoralized, demonized, reduced and dehumanized within our culture. So, pointing out the social constraints that privilege men and marginalize women- and other marginalized groups- is a crime that women (particularly feminists) should be punished for, according to this website. She is listed among rapists, pedophiles, and violent criminals purely because she had the audacity to write against a systematic pattern of anti-woman bigotry and advocacy for the eradication of constitutional rights based primarily on sex- oh, wait, it’s only a crime if men are the supposed target?
What it really comes down to is that our culture privileges men so much, that the point when women start pointing out this privilege, some men (not all, or necessarily even most) take it personally, and see the requests for equality as an attack on their rights; of course, what these men want is the right to be privileged without being challenged. There is no movement to take away the basic rights from men, but to level the playing field a bit so that women aren’t still treated as second-class citizens. These men don’t want to see that women don’t have the same advantages that they do, that we start with a limit on how high we can climb before we start getting treated as aberrant or being torn down again because women don’t do that, women can’t do this, women aren’t science-minded/math-minded/engineering-minded/gaming-minded/rational/logical/any number of excuses. No, when the women start complaining about the disadvantage we’re at, it’s all about infringing on the right of men to be oblivious to their privilege, and that’s the exact same as the crime of rape or pedophilia or assault.
But Register-Her wasn’t really founded for cataloging women for the crimes they’ve already been convicted of. It was founded because there is a disgusting attitude that women are running around falsely accusing men of raping them, and getting away with this. Any time the subject of rape comes up with men like this around to overhear, inevitably someone will point out, “What about the women who falsely accuse men of raping them!? They ruin their reputations and their lives, and that’s just as bad as being raped!! And then they get away with it completely unpunished!”
First of all, going only on reported rape (and not even including the rape that goes unreported because of a hostile environment towards rape victims, which I’ll come back to), 1 in 5 women will be raped in their lifetimes. Many of them will be raped multiple times. 6% of College-Age men , or slightly over 1 in 20, admit to having raped a woman in their lives, based on an anonymous survey, but only when the word “rape” wasn’t used to describe the action. The site only lists 26 women as having falsely accused a man of rape, and excluding the likelihood that some of those cases were turned out because of insufficient evidence or an interrogative process that is unique to victims of rape (“What were you wearing? Were you drinking? Did you lead him to think you were going to have sex with him? Did you travel alone? Did you attempt to defend yourself from attack?”) diminishing the “credibility” of the accusers, 26 counts of “proven” false allegations versus the 1 in 5 (reported) figure hardly accounts for 0.000004% of all cases against rapists (7 billion population, half are women, 3.5 billion by the 1 in 5 figure comes to 601 million, 26 “verified” false allegations creating the 0.000004% figure).
Nevermind that the 26 cases listed on the site are mostly of women already convicted of having lied in court about being raped, and have already been published for their crimes; this site is all about trying to make sure that women don’t get away with “criminal” behavior, EVER, even if they’ve already been punished- they need to be punished time and again, for all eternity, for potentially damaging a man’s reputation.
Let’s ignore the possibility that they were women who were actually raped and had their cases overturned because we live in a society biased against anyone who reports being raped, because that wouldn’t be punishment enough. And let’s ignore that they’re lumping that “crime” in with much more serious crimes. Because what’s important here is that some men feel that women are being too vocal about transgressions against womankind, which makes them feel uncomfortable about the privilege they sit on every day.
To clarify; yes, there are woman criminals who do horrible things. Most men do not take this attitude, though some might take aspects of it seriously.
But we already live in a world where women are afraid to even report being raped, because attitudes like the one creating “Register-Her” are prevalent even (and sometimes especially) in the police department or the courtroom. Rape victims are interrogated mercilessly, in ways that could never be applied to other crimes- questions meant to invalidate the accusation, to discredit the victim, to put the blame on the victim for not protecting herself enough (yes, men are raped too, but so much more often are women raped that I’ll stick with the female pronoun), to try and get an accused rapist off the hook; questions like what I listed earlier, or “Why didn’t you contact the police straight away?” or “Why did you bathe immediately afterwards? You washed away potential evidence!” or “But you say you wanted to have sex, then became uncomfortable and withdrew consent. Isn’t that misleading the man? Can he really be blamed for continuing to have sex with you despite withdrawn consent?” (The answer to that last one is YES ABSOLUTELY HE CAN BE BLAMED MEN ARE NOT MINDLESS ANIMALS— ahem. )
Many women do not report being raped to avoid the inevitable circus, probing into their personal lives, exposing themselves to further danger if the report isn’t taken seriously and the rapist finds out, and because the repugnant behavior of those like the ones who created Register-Her makes them certain they’ll be labeled for the rest of their lives if they do. (And yes, men run into not being able to report being raped out of a similar shaming process, though that ties back into “men can’t be raped, only women can be raped, because women are weak- if a man is raped he’s weak and womanly, and that’s terrible!” It shouldn’t happen, and I want the same for male victims of rape as I do female victims of rape; the freedom to report the crime without feeling ashamed).
But hey, it’s so much more important that a man’s reputation remain intact, right?
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