Pole Vaulting, Public Exposure, Privacy, and Rape Defenses

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Those of you who read and talked about Saturday's and Tuesday's posts might be interested in this absolutely appalling bit of background information: apparently the father of the pole vaulter whose photographs got tossed around (and over) across the internet is, himself, a criminal defense attorney--a noble calling--who, in the course of his duty, has offered up some pretty disgusting defenses of his clients.
defense attorney Al Stokke argued that Park wasn’t responsible for making sticky all over the woman’s sweater (after a traffic stop). He insisted that she made the married patrolman make the mess—after all, she was on her way home from work as a dancer at Captain Cream Cabaret.

“She got what she wanted,” said Stokke. “She’s an overtly sexual person.”
.... A jury . . . found Park not guilty.
And, in another case,
Defense lawyer Al Stokke, who replaced lead trial attorney Joseph G. Cavallo, questioned any link between the rape and the victim's claim of mental anguish. Stokke also mocked the girl's physical injuries, finally conceding she was unconscious but then trying to use that against her. "There's [no pain] that is felt," he said, "because she was unconscious."

Awful stories, but beautifully illustrative of a larger point: the culture that enables people to defend rape by arguing that unconscious women are there for the taking isn't at all cut off from the culture that thinks it's okay to make one's opinions about which women are hot into a public game of male bonding. Both rely on the idea that, in the end, women are things, not people. And if it turns out that a given woman hasn't fully internalized that message, and she has the huevos to complain about being treated like an object, way too many of us will just tell her to toughen up, that it's inescapable, what do you expect?

Same fucking thing. Women don't need to get used to being treated like shit. Guys need to get used to the idea that women are human beings.

Bitch_PhD wants to point out that there are men who get it--but that it was feminist women who did the digging and broke the story.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/culture/21537/Pole-Vaulting-Public-Exposure--Privacy-and-Rape-Defenses/