The reason that people blame Rihanna or any victim of a gender-based hate crime is that the supposed protection of the patriarchy is only extended to good girls.

The

creepy stalking and ambush of journalist Amanda Terkel by "O’Reilly

Factor" producer Jesse Watters

was notable not because it was unusual. Sadly, O’Reilly’s staff frequently

uses this schtick — using harassment tactics to silence journalists

who say things that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t like, especially those

who criticize O’Reilly. Terkel had pointed

out that it was inappropriate for O’Reilly to speak on behalf of an

anti-rape organization

when he engaged in rape apologism, and for that, he sent out the bully

patrol to harass Terkel for the viewing pleasure of his wannabe bully

audience.

But the stalking was notable because of the context.

The producer followed Terkel from her home and ambushed her in the town in which she was vacationing because she dared to defend rape/murder

victims against O’Reilly’s insinuation that they have it coming

if they break one of O’Reilly’s Rules For Young Ladies involving

alcohol consumption, curfew, or clothing choices. You can’t blame Terkel for being shaken.

After all, O’Reilly has implied that women who break

a rule he wrote for them are asking to be raped and murdered, and now

she’s got a group of men following her around because she broke a

rule O’Reilly wrote for her. The context elevates the usual ambushing

tactics of the "O’Reilly Factor"

straight into creepy territory, as Terkel noted:

Since I’m a 5 ft, 100

pound woman with an opinion that he doesn’t like, perhaps O’Reilly

believes I deserve to be treated this way.

Unsurprisingly, bloggers who

wrote in support of Terkel drew

the ire of O’Reilly fans, who, as I’ve noted before, are huge fans of

virtual bullying.

The endless cycles of lashing out and virtual (or real life) bullying

in an attempt (often unsuccessful) to silence truth-tellers is the point

of another post, though. What I find interesting in all this is

that O’Reilly is framing his attack on Terkel as a defense

of rape victims, because he’s claiming that his speaking gig at the

Alexa Foundation is well-deserved because he goes to bat for rape victims.

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How can that be, one may ask, when he says things

like:

Now Moore, Jennifer Moore,

18, on her way to college. She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt

and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again, there you go. So every

predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in the morning.

If O’Reilly has trouble grasping

that the fault for rape and murder belongs 100% on the rapist-murdered,

then he has no business identifying himself as an advocate for victims.

That alone should disqualify him, but the fact that he’s had his own

problems harassing

women should have

made it beyond the pale to treat him as an advocate against sexual violence.

But I suspect that O’Reilly

does think he’s a good guy who deplores rape, so long as it’s "real"

rape, i.e. rape committed against a young woman who follows O’Reilly’s

Rules For Young Ladies. If you stay in at night and accept male

authority over your movements, and get raped anyway, he probably does

feel bad for you. Isn’t that the selling point of the patriarchy–you’ll

be safe and under male protection if you behave yourself and follow

all the rules?

This fantasy that male dominance

is better for women (at least good girls!) is explicitly stated in Kathryn

Jean Lopez’s deplorable

essay blaming feminism for Chris Brown beating Rihanna. Instead of Chris Brown, who

continues to enjoy varied, colorful excuses for his behavior offered

free of charge from the public. Lopez would like to believe that

putting a man in complete control of you means he’ll never use violence

to enforce his authority–which is actually very close to what abusers

often say to their victims, that if they didn’t buck authority, they

wouldn’t get beaten. (Somehow, she also finds lesbians to blame

for this.)

We’ve so confused ourselves

that now many teenagers in Boston are excusing Chris Brown. Why wouldn’t

they? He and Rihanna are equal, and we expect no more from men – in

fact, we’ve conditioned a generation or two now to expect less.

I’m not sure what world she

lives in where a straight man is permitted to deliver a hospitalization-requiring

beat-down to another straight man because he complained about a broken

promise. In fact, that sort of thing is indisputably a crime and

always has been. It’s domestic violence–violence aimed at

women to keep them submissive, a role Lopez assumes women should just

take on voluntarily–that was treated and still is treated as a private

manner. Because, in the world Lopez longs for, women are considered

property and men have certain rights to dispose of their property as

they see fit. Lopez, with her grade A levels of misogyny, probably

wouldn’t even consider wife-battering a problem if feminism hadn’t

forced the issue.

No, the reason that people

blame Rihanna or Jennifer Moore or any victim of a gender hate crime

is that the supposed protection of the patriarchy is only extended to

good girls. Then, in a version of the post hoc fallacy, we assume

that anyone who gets raped or beaten must have been asking for it, because

we believe good girls don’t get raped or beaten. It’s a tight

loop, and a victim must bring extraordinary amounts of evidence of submissiveness

and chastity to even be considered for an exception–levels pretty

much no woman can meet.

Sadly, anecdotal evidence shows

that other controlling men are absorbing the message that Rihanna is

to blame for getting beaten, and are using that as moral support for

their own behavior. Tracy

Clark-Flory saw a disturbing example.

Just the other day, riding

the train home from work, I heard a teenage couple seated behind

me fighting. The girl pleaded to her boyfriend: "Let me see it!"

She had caught a glimpse of a sexy photo of another girl on his phone.

With mounting outrage, her voice catching in her throat, she shrieked,

"You promised me you deleted all of ’em!" He paused

and then, with smirking confidence, threw down his trump card: "Don’t

go all Rihanna on me, now." With that, the conversation ended.

The question for those who

believe male dominance is good for women (as long as they behave themselves)

is this: do you think this teenage girl was "asking for it"?