A trans Green MSP has claimed rape exists on a “spectrum”.
Q Manivannan said the “demonisation of rape” led to an overly simplistic idea about what kind of people committed the offence.
The act, the Indian-born poet and academic argued, instead exists on a “spectrum” and is dependent on different “contexts”. Anyone, he said, can commit the offence – including women.
Well, no, because “rape” means what it means. If you want to talk about sexual misconduct that’s not rape then you need a different word. Rape means rape in much the same way women means women.
Isn’t it interesting that it’s the words women need that are getting all this chin-scratching over do we really mean rape when we talk about rape my dear chap?
Rape is rape. Consensual sex in which one person gets violent without consent is something else. Rape is still rape.
Manivannan said the remarks were intended to highlight how society has too narrow a definition of what counts as rape and of the people who are likely to commit it.
No, because if you want to talk about abuse or violent consensual sex or a host of other variations you can, but you don’t need to change the meaning of “rape” to do that. Also, men aren’t the ideal sex to do it.
Susan Smith, co-director of feminist campaign group For Women Scotland, said: “We were very disturbed to hear the comments from Manivannan which betrayed such utter ignorance of the trauma and violation of rape.
“This will be a test of the determination of the Greens to ‘queer’ all boundaries.
“Having decided that gender is fluid and that ‘women’ can have penises, will they now defend the notion that consent and sexual violence are fluid, mutable concepts and that women have to accept rapists’ self-assessment that they are great lads and not to be ‘demonised’?”
This is why Manivannan is not the right person to talk about this. At all.
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