If you went to college in the last 40 years and learned there was a concept called “the rape culture” that was supposed to drive law and diplomacy. In terms of law the assumption was that all men – or most — were rapists or would be rapists. Along with this, women are weaker, and almost always the victim in male-female interactions. As such the woman has to be believed in all cases of “he-said, she-said.” To do otherwise was “rape-shaming” a form of blaming the victim. Male on female rape is supposed to have infected international affairs as well. War and peace are assumed to be rape situations where no country is assumed to want foreign influence or industry unless they say so, and any demand that you take your embassy or hotel out has to be met with immediate withdrawal. The female country is the weaker in these deals, and where that could not be determined, the raper country was determined by geography. Israel was always the raper country because of its shape and position within the Arab world. Israel was asked to withdraw — cease to exist as a non-Islamic nation — and admit that it was raping the Arab world just by existing.
Before World War I, there was no such thing as a world court. If one country attacked another, the attacked country could appeal to allies, or perhaps to public opinion, but there was no certainty of rescue. Without a world court, and without a world set of laws, claiming victim status did little. Weaker principalities could be divided up, and sometimes sold off or traded. Manhattan went from being a Dutch settlement to being an English settlement when the English traded an island in the Pacific for it. Napoleon acquired Louisiana from the Spanish by trading northern Italy, then promptly sold Louisiana to America. And all this was normal. The international version of human trafficking, I suppose.
After WWI, a world court was created along with a new diplomatic theory: the world should protect the weak and the wronged. In this context, feminist analysis of which country is wronged would have been important except that there was no army to do the enforcing. Woodrow Wilson championed a League of Nations, one of his 19 points. The weak and abused would be protected from the strong; democracy would be protected from the dictator. This is a softer, kinder view of the world, a cooperative world, a feminist world, and in academia it is considered the only good version — a one world order with academics at the top. Still, without an army or much of a budget, it was all academic, as it were. This changed when the United Nations was created with a budget and an army. If the army was to protect the victim, we had to determine who was the aggressor. In 95% of all cases considered before the UN, the aggressor was asserted to be Israel. This in not despite its small size, but because of it. By feminist analysis, the surrounding country is always the victim.
In feminist analysis, there is the need for a third type of person, almost a third gender. This is the male feminist. This is the warlike defender of the weak. Such people are assumed to make up the UN army and its management. When an outsider country appears within the boundaries of another nation, that’s national rape and has to be prevented by this third-gender army. Hitler’s takeover of Europe was rape, not because he was totalitarian (he was elected democratically) but because his was an unwelcome intrusion. The counter-invasion of Germany was/is only justified by assuming that the allies (the good guys) represented, not rape, but some third gender interaction. It all made a certain type of sense in college seminars, if not in life, and men were not quite expected to understand; we were just expected to become this third gender.
Being a Male Feminist is uncomfortable both in personal and international affairs. It is very uncomfortable to have to defend every victim, making every sacrifice no matter how personally objectionable the victim is, or how arbitrary the distinction of victim, or how much the victim hates her savior. In personal affairs, this is a theme in Bob Dylan song “It’s ain’t me, babe.” Dylan agrees with a lady that she has a right to want all sorts of things, but says, “it ain’t me babe,” about him being the guy to provide them all.
In international affairs the discomfort is even worse. We found, with depressing frequency, that we were expected to donate the lives of countless soldiers in support of regimes that were objectionable, and that hated us. Jimmy Carter supported the PLO and Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah because they were weak regimes with incursions: by the oil companies or the CIA. The people we were helping hated us before Jimmy Carter, and they hated us more after. The Ayatollah in Iran captured or killed our diplomatic staff, and beheaded anyone with western sympathies.
I have come to think that a redefinition of rape is what is needed. I note that not all rape is male-on female, and not all wars are won by incursion. The Mongols won by surrounding. Similarly, the game of GO is won by surrounding. I would like to stop assuming that the surrounding nation is always the victim and that the woman is always telling the truth. In personal injury law, I’d like more freedom to try to decide which is right or wrong or maybe both have a case, and we may want to just sit back and wait to offer mediation. Here’s another Bob Dylan song on the difficulty of figuring out who is right or wrong: “God on our sides.”
Robert E. Buxbaum, September 21, 2018
