Stop Telling Women to Shoot Men

It doesn’t fix anything. It was never going to fix anything.

“That guy just needs a good killin’,” was a refrain the men of my family constantly repeated.

Every time any sort of violent crime came on the news, whether it was an assault, a rape, a robbery, or a murder, my grandfathers, uncles, father, and their friends always lamented, “if only.”

If only the victim had had a gun. If only they’d known how to defend themselves. If only everyone walked around armed all the time, then no one would dare commit crimes. After all, an armed society is a polite society.

They went on and on about all the people they’d heard of who’d allegedly saved themselves from violent crime by carrying concealed or just walking around with a gun displayed on their hips.

Of course, none of them saw any of the complications surrounding the gun issue, like the fact that only white people can expect to walk around openly armed without being accosted by law enforcement or the myriad of problems that arise when a horde of untrained, unstable people all go out in public with guns.

Nope. Armed society = polite society. In their minds, it really was that simple.

The rape problem

Rape was a heavy focus of my male relatives’ gun-toting fantasies. They wanted every woman everywhere to have a pretty pink purse pistol she could pull on all the ski mask-wearing serial rapists hiding in every alley and under every car. That was their solution to the sexual violence epidemic — their only solution.

They’re also not anywhere near the only ones I’ve heard make the argument that guns prevent violent crime, and specifically rape. I’ve noticed the pattern of good, ole patriarchal Americans calling for women to shoot men just about everywhere.

Often, when women write online articles telling men to stop abusing and raping us, some (almost always male) commenter responds with the tired, old adage that men aren’t going to change their supposed “biological hard wiring,” so women should learn to protect ourselves by buying a gun, carrying it all the time, and becoming Annie Oakley.

Theoretically, that might occasionally work for a certain type of rape, the type of rape where a strange man jumps out of an alleyway to grab a woman walking alone at night or breaks into her hotel room or traps her in an elevator. You know, the type of rape that conservative men consider “legitimate rape.”

The reality, though, is that “legitimate rape” isn’t all that common. The overwhelming majority of rapes and sexual assaults (80+%) are of the “illegitimate” variety — the kind where the victim knew the attacker and therefore “definitely shares some responsibility.”

She was too drunk. She was immodestly dressed. She went back to his apartment too quickly. She got into his car alone. She did this. She did that. She did. She did. She did.

Naturally, you don’t hear many men claiming a woman should have shot her date or shot her boyfriend as a response to his sexual coercion. Those bullets might hit a little too close to home for a lot of dates and boyfriends out there.

So these men keep pretending that no rape or sexual assault is “real” unless it’s a stranger ambushing a woman in an alley. That way, they can keep pretending guns are the answer to rape — once again putting the onus on women to avoid rape and absolving themselves of any past missteps or any responsibility to change their future behavior.

A gun-toting Southern gal

I’m living proof that guns are no solution to sexual abuse. I was born and raised in Southern Appalachia. Thus, as everyone can probably guess, I was trained in the use of weapons from the time I was strong enough to hold one.

I was barely out of kindergarten when I started target shooting a BB gun and, later, a .22 rifle, and I was downright deadly by middle school.

I got a Weatherby Vanguard and a Swarovski scope for my eighteenth birthday. I could drop a deer from well over 100 yards with that thing.

I didn’t get drunk on my 21st birthday. I got fingerprinted for a concealed carry permit and went out to the field to test drive my new high-capacity 9mm. Throughout most of my 20s, I regularly carried an S&W Bodyguard in my purse or a strut holster.

Heaven help the stranger who attacked me in an alleyway.

Thing is, no stranger ever did attack me in an alleyway. My guns didn’t protect me from being sexually assaulted because, like most sexual assault survivors, I was assaulted and coerced by men I knew, men I mistakenly thought cared about my wellbeing.

In the real world, not the Wild West fantasy world, women are almost never attacked by strangers. The stranger rape concept is another weapon wielded against women to maintain social control over us. Fear of the strange male rapist keeps us in our place — both physically and psychologically.

Stranger rape is also another tool used by men to relieve themselves of any need to analyze or alter their own beliefs or behavior. Most men would never attack a woman with a knife in a dark alleyway. Thus, they feel they can wash their hands of the whole violence against women thing because only “those other men” are part of the problem.

However, for the most part, the back-alley ambush rape myth is just that — a myth. It happens, to be sure, but this type of forcible, public-place stranger rape makes up a small percentage of sexual assault incidents, a drop in the bucket compared to far more common scenarios like acquaintance and date rape, familial sexual abuse, and intimate partner sexual violence.

Most women outside of active war zones are not assaulted in a manner in which being trained in weaponry or martial arts could save them. They’re assaulted by husbands, boyfriends, male relatives, caregivers, authority figures, friends, dates, and coworkers. That’s why guns won’t help us.

The men who sexually assaulted me weren’t strangers whom I could just kill and then cry “stand your ground.” They were men I cared about and trusted.

They were also men I couldn’t theoretically shoot in self-defense. Just ask Marissa Alexander how it goes for women who use guns to fight back against our abusers.

Gun violence won’t save us from the overwhelming majority of male sexual violence because the overwhelming majority of male sexual violence isn’t the sort of violence one would traditionally use a gun to defend against.

That’s why it’s important to stop focusing on teaching women to avoid stranger danger and start focusing on teaching them how to recognize the real threat: the men already in their lives.

Women and girls (and boys too) must be taught from an early age to understand what sexual abuse looks like and what appropriate and inappropriate sexual behavior is. They also need to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that they will be listened to and protected if abuse happens to them.

It’s also exceedingly important to teach men, from the time they’re young boys, how to control their tempers, how to process their emotions, how to handle rejection, and how to appropriately seek and maintain consent in their sexual relationships.

Saying “no” — and taking it for an answer

Another vital solution to this problem is helping men overcome their own trauma. Many abusers were abused themselves, and many rapists become rapists unintentionally, often because sexual and physical violence is normalized in their families and their communities.

My sexual assailant didn’t know he was abusive. He believed it was acceptable to use coercive tactics to pressure me into submitting to things I had already expressly told him I did not want to do. He thought this behavior was normal, and nobody had ever told me otherwise, either.

My rapist doesn’t know he’s a rapist. He was my boyfriend at the time, and he thought that entitled him to take what he wanted. He mistook my freeze response for consent because he was conditioned to be entitled to women’s bodies and to take the absence of a no as a yes rather than seeking affirmative consent.

Like me, both of them hail from backgrounds where men’s violence against women and children is so normalized it is accepted and routine. I was so young that I didn’t question their behavior, nor did they.

And because nobody had ever disabused me of the notion that rape was anything other than a stranger trapping me in an alley, I didn’t realize either of these men had assaulted me until years later, though I suffered the traumatic effects regardless.

In both cases, the two of us were conditioned to accept the man’s sexual aggression as inevitable. Both of us were conditioned to dismiss his behavior as normal. So my guns didn’t save me. They could never have saved me, nor could they have saved the millions of other women who’ve endured the same.

Shoot ’em up?

I don’t think any reasonable person, man or woman, wants to see every man who’s ever committed any act of sexual aggression whatsoever shot dead.

Furthermore, I’m certain that no man wants to live in a world where women use guns to police all forms of sexual misconduct. That would leave a lot of men with a lot of bullet holes.

Men don’t really want women to make the world as unsafe for them as they make it for us. They don’t actually want to hear a pair of high heels coming down the sidewalk behind them and wonder if this is the last time their brains are going to be inside their skulls.

They don’t want to have to think twice every time they get into an elevator with a woman wearing a jacket or carrying a purse. They don’t want to wonder if their female Uber driver is going to take them out to a secluded area and shoot them. Nobody wants to live like that.

Thus, the burden isn’t on women to start cramming their purses full of guns. It’s on men to make the world safer for women instead of chiding us about how we ought to make it more dangerous for them every time we bring up the unfortunate frequency of male sexual violence.

That’s why adult men and women alike need to analyze and overhaul the toxic notions of consent we were all raised to believe. It’s why we must raise the next generation of boys without the sexual entitlement and emotional handicaps of their fathers.

Sure, we also need to do a better job of teaching women how to say no. We condition girls to appease and comply from the first minute of their lives, greatly enhancing the likelihood they will freeze and submit instead of resisting when they do not want to have a sexual encounter.

However, it’s even more urgent to teach men how to give women the opportunity to say no and how to take it for an answer. It’s vital to teach boys that they must ask for consent each and every time and that they are not entitled to sex, affection, or anything else from girls.

It’s imperative to teach boys how to become men who don’t rape instead of teaching girls how to become women who don’t get raped. The onus to avoid becoming victims is not on us. The onus to avoid becoming victimizers is on them.

Therefore, telling women to shoot our rapists and abusers is not helpful — not when our rapists and abusers are our husbands, fathers, boyfriends, bosses, and friends.

But many men don’t want to implement alternatives that could actually work because that would require them to overhaul their own behavior and a whole slew of cultural rules that benefit themselves.

So a large chunk of them would prefer it if we just shoot a bastard in a dark alley every now and again and keep quiet about all those other rapes that aren’t “real” rapes anyhow.

That way, nothing has to change.