Second Best

Over at World O'Crap, there's a discussion going on prompted by a post made by Ace of Spades, and I'm not linking there because I don't actually give the faintest fuck about him. It's the discussion at Wo'C that's got my interest, in particular the comments by Hysterical Woman and by Bill S., who has been an extraordinary voice in the wilderness on this issue for as long as I've known him.

In essence, California is now allowing conjugal visitation for prisoners who are gay. This seems like only common sense, to me. Regardless of what their system is, it should be applied to everyone.

This has prompted Ace of Spades to remark, in an incredibly callous manner:

"Eh, why not? They’ve been allowing involuntary shower-room gay conjugal visits for hundreds of years."

followed by the cute little joke,

They should stop calling it "prison" and start calling it "The Most Wonderful Place In The World."

Blogger Scott at Wo'C, and the commenters there, are justly appalled by this. Rape jokes are comprehensively revolting to begin with, but most people either understand that, or at least accept that other people will regard them as creeps for making them and keep it to themselves.

There are, it seems to me, a couple of distinct attitudes underlying a comment like Ace's. The obvious one is that people deserve what they get. This is a pretty standard view among conservatives and libertarians. If you're poor, it's because you haven't worked hard enough, rather than outsourcing or disability. If you're in prison, it's because you're guilty, nothing to do with selective enforcement of laws or a justice system that favors the wealthy. If the bologna you gave your family caused food poisoning, it's your fault for not cooking it first. The general assumption there is that luck plays very little role in how your life unfolds, or at least that you can overcome bad luck well enough to achieve as much success as those who started out with better circumstances.

So if you're in prison being raped, it's because you deserve it, and I'm not in prison being raped because I don't deserve it. So there's really no need for empathy, and no basis for it. I don't have to wonder what it would be like to be that person, because that person is fundamentally different from me. There is no circumstance under which I would need to be defended against this, so there's no need for me to defend anyone else from it. They're getting what they deserve, and I'm getting what I deserve, and why should anyone interfere with that?

Well, perhaps we should because people don't go to prison exclusively because they are guilty. There is no legitimate way to dispute the fact that innocent people go to prison, and even guilty people go to prison for crimes that are greater than those they actually committed. But that's easy--up until about six years ago, it wouldn't really have occurred to me that a significant portion of my fellow citizens would feel anything other than outrage for a wrongly-imprisoned innocent person. Now, of course, I know that a lot of my fellow citizens think it's perfectly acceptable to torture the innocent, but in general it takes a certain level of cruelty to feel no compassion for the wrongfully imprisoned.

What's harder is the notion that even the guilty, and even those guilty of truly vicious crimes, even those guilty of, for example, child rape and murder, have not been handed a sentence of rape, torture, and possible eventual death by disease. For whatever reason, this isn't a sentence we hand out, and it seems like we have an obligation, therefore, to make sure it doesn't happen. Even people who absolutely do deserve to be imprisoned are at the mercy of the society holding them captive, and when people are at your mercy there are rules about how it is acceptable to treat them. Rape as a routine feature of imprisonment is a human rights violation, and it is so for a reason.

As with torture, it's something we do not, or should not, sanction because of what it says about us, what it does to us, even more than what it does to our victims. I've been raped. I have no empathy for rapists. I don't even have much in the way of empathy for rapists who have been raped. There are some people I like to believe I could cheerfully kill, and over whose death and suffering I do not grieve. But to say, as some people do, that rapists deserve what's coming to them in prison, strikes me as a way of doing to them what they did to us, even if only by proxy. And having been a rape victim, I am not willing to be a rapist, even in a technical way.

I could say they deserve it, but I won't. Because all rapists think their victims deserve it, and will come up with any necessary justification to make it not their fault but that of their victims. And sanctioning prison rape as some sort of "Well, they should have known not to go there in the first place" bonus deterrent is not in any significant way different from "Well, she should have known not to go there in the first place".

The other underlying attitude I sense in Ace's comment is a view that homosexuality is not about love, or that rape is. I'm not going to guess at which one is in play there, and people far smarter than I have spent a lot of words trying to deal with the attitude that rape is a compliment paid by someone who finds you sexually attractive.

But there are an awful lot of otherwise well-meaning people, not to mention a lot of assholes, who don't seem able to understand that a sexual relationship they don't find appealing is, consent being present, equal to their own. There's a tendency to dehumanize anything that is not a straight relationship. A tendency to believe that since you could not personally be attracted to a specific type of person, nobody normal could.

So gay relationships are linked in the public mind with pedophilia, or bestiality, or when the Freepers really get going on the subject, chair-fucking. The conclusion there seems to be that at least one of the participants is not a real person, and that there couldn't possibly be any sort of genuine love there, but only a mental disorder that results in a pathological sexual attraction to dogs, or to children, or to teddy bears.

Needless to say, this is a horribly offensive thing to say to anyone about the people they love. Not just offensive to say that you are a pervert for loving them, but that they are not, somehow, fully human. Personally, I'd rather people called me a pervert than suggested my partner was the moral equivalent of a blow-up doll, but these statements inextricably do both, and are all the more cruel for it.

It is, nonetheless, a very common attitude. Gay sex isn't love. It's just a mental disorder. And therefore, is there really any difference between gay love and gay rape? You might think I'm going too far with that interpretation, but at least one of the "ex-gay" organizations explicitly makes the point that gay sex is mutual rape, and nothing to do with love even if the participants are delusional enough to think they love each other.

So as far as I can tell, that's what Ace is saying here. Not just "Ha! Suffering is funny!" but also "Rape, sex, what's the difference to a pervert anyway?" And I'd like to contend that in a world less founded on a complete lack of empathy towards other humans, that either of those views would not be acceptable.