I found this on FB. It's about the existance of cultures that don't have rape. It's our culture that believes in raping the land and raping women. It's a dominence ethic, and it poisons everything.
--Kim
Read this!
"A world without rape is possible. In fact, it has already existed.
We’re taught that rape is universal. We’re taught it has existed from time immemorial, that is it rooted in some kind of biological mandate toward male aggression and dominance, that it is a ubiquitous part of human nature. But it’s not true.
We have known there are cultures where rape is virtually non-existent for a long time. Most famously, as early as 1981 University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Peggy Sanday published research exploring 150 societies that found that 47% of of them were 'rape free,' 36% had some incidence of rape, and 17%, were definitively 'rape prone.'
In other words, rape has not ever been a universal part of what it means to be human. It is a perversion of humanity. It is a learned behavior whose perpetuation and normalization has required we be trained OUT of many of our most human instincts. It does not have to be this way.
In Oceania, rape-free societies were/are the norm. One anthropologist found that her informants on Bougainville could not even conceive of the concept of rape: 'Rape is practically non-existent.' [The community] 'could not quite imagine how it would work' because they believed '(the woman would cry out [and people would help her])' (Nash 1987).
Among the Minangkabau of Indonesia, rape was rare because it would cause the rapist’s 'masculinity [to be] ridiculed.' A rapist 'face assault, perhaps death, or he might be driven from his village never to return' (Sanday 1986). Early colonizers commented often on how the indigenous societies of the Americas did not rape. Other 'rape free' societies have included but are not limited to the Taureg of North Africa, the Pygmy and the Nkundo Mongo of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Jivaro and the Cuna of South America, and the the Gond of India, revealing that these societies exist in all corners of the world.
There are certain attributes these 'rape free' societies have in common. Most view men and women as complementary rather than dichotomous. Their divisions of labor are less binaristic and strict, and women are active and valued in leadership and social discourse.
Many are matrilineal, and ‘mother[ing] takes on a value beyond its biological function...because of its power to define persons, to situate a person within the larger system, and also because of the knowledge associated with that power' (Stoeltje 1997). Men are not taught they must sever their strong bond to their mothers or that masculinity requires them to transcend this world of the feminine.
Importantly, 'rape free' cultures also have a different relationship to the natural world: their attitude is typically one of veneration and interdependence rather than extraction and dominion. Scarcity and the need to compete for resources are not ingrained as foundational values.
'Rape prone' societies are not a reflection of human nature, but what happens when, to paraphrase Sanday, the harmony between humans and their environment, humans and their nature, is severely disrupted by systems that reorient us away from it and toward exploitation and domination.
They want us to believe rape is natural because they want to believe all of their greed, their sadism, their exploitation, their destruction of the earth is the natural order of the world, the only way things can be. But there are other ways. There have always been other ways. There will always be other ways.
We know those other ways in our bones. We have lived bigger truths. We just need to practice remembering them, believing them, teaching them, living them. We need to refuse to cede the world to their stories. It is not theirs to take. It is ours to make."
~ Robina Khalid
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