The Frog

I thought it was time my friend's baby had an official nickname - so in the future I am going to call him the frog.

I told the frog that men all over the internet were feeling sorry for him and he laughed hysterically. Although that probably had more to do the fact that he was playing with a cellphone than anything I said (he loves playing with cellphones and computers - I think he wants to be a grown-up).

My post about the frog got a lot of attention, Span has summarised it so I don't have to. I thought about ignoring the furore, but there are two ideas, that almost every right-wing male blogger who wrote about this made, that I thought it might be useful to clarify.

There have been a lot of men who have implied that my worries about what will happen to the frog are my primary, or first thoughts about him, or change the way I look at him. I suspect most of those men haven't spent that much time around 11 month old babies. Here are some of the most frequent thoughts I have about the frog:

'You're just the most cleverest baby that ever was.'
'You've established that the gravity works, so do all the frozen peas need to go on the floor?'
'You want to read 'the very hungry caterpillar' again?'
'Shit I need to tie my hair back.'
'oh no horrid o'clock, what will we do?'

The ridiculousness of the way they overplayed my worries for the frog in an attempt to discredit what I said isn't that a big deal. What is more worrying is that the men who have written about my post have implied that rape is a rare crime. They have compared being afraid that a boy will grow up and rape to being afraid that a woman will commit infanticide.

It should be no surprise that right-wing men have no idea how many men rape women. It's not a tiny percentage, and it's many order of magnitude larger than women who kill their babies. For example 4.5% of American men going to college admitted forcing a woman to have sex with them when that woman didn't want to have sex. That's one in twenty men at university who will admit to having already raped a woman. Then there are the men who don't admit it, or who don't count what they did as force, or think that silence means consent, or that if she's passed out it's fine. Studies show that somewhere between 20% of 60% of men say that they would force a woman to have sex with them, if they knew that there wouldn't be any consequences (the variation depends on how the questions are phrased).

I don't want the frog to be part of that group. I want him to only have sex with people who don't just consent to sex, but actively want sex. I know that if we lived in a world where women were valued, and our desires were considered to be important as men, I wouldn't need to worry about that. I know that if the only influences on the frog were the people around him now then he would always respect the desires of the women who he is having sex with (if he's having sex with women). I'm worried about how the rest of the world will change that.

In the comments thread it was clear that I wasn't the only woman who had this fear. Flea has already written about it, much more eloquently than I ever could. I recommend you read her post.