Academic feminist Dee L.R. Graham has theorized that women only want to have sex with men because of male violence and rape culture. Essentially, Graham says that women suffer from a form of Stockholm Syndrome at the hands of men, their oppressive “captors,” and only feel affection or attraction to men as a means of survival.
Graham is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. The feminist published a book called “Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives” in 1994, along with co-authors Edna I. Rawlings and Roberta K. Rigsby. Graham’s batsh*t crazy theory was recently brought back to life in a Twitter post, exposing a piece of insanity from her book:
“Until male violence toward women stops and women feel safe with (and safe from) men, it is impossible to say whether women’s femininity, love for men, and heterosexual identity are anything other than survival responses…Looking at the issue from another angle, women’s femininity, love for men, and heterosexuality are attempts at individual solutions to oppression, even though they are individual solutions adopted by massive numbers of women,” reads the passage.
Let me present to you academic feminist theory. Yes, this is from a university professor pic.twitter.com/hYwzVqfsHo
— Yeyo (@YeyoZa) January 3, 2017
An online description of “Loving to Survive” dives deeper into the feminist conspiracy theory: “Why some women stay with men who abuse them? Loving to Survive addresses just these issues and poses a surprising answer. Likening women’s situation to that of hostages, Dee L. R. Graham and her co- authors argue that women bond with men and adopt men’s perspective in an effort to escape the threat of men’s violence against them.”
It continues: “Loving to Survive explores women’s bonding to men as it relates to men’s violence against women. It proposes that, like hostages who work to placate their captors lest they kill them, women work to please men, and from this springs women’s femininity. Femininity describes a set of behaviors that please men because they communicate a woman’s acceptance of her subordinate status. Thus, feminine behaviors are, in essence, survival strategies. Like hostages who bond to their captors, women bond to men in an effort to survive.”
Of course, this is all complete nonsense. If heterosexual love is merely a symptom of individualized male oppression, wouldn’t lesbians be the only women who have not been abused by men? This is, of course, not the case. In fact, I’m a woman who has never experienced any physical or sexual abuse from men, and I’m 100 percent heterosexual.
Further, how exactly would Graham account for higher abuse rates in same-sex relationships? The Advocate reports:
The National Violence Against Women survey found that 21.5 percent of men and 35.4 percent of women living with a same-sex partner experienced intimate-partner physical violence in their lifetimes, compared with 7.1 percent and 20.4 percent for men and women, respectively, with a history of only opposite-sex cohabitation.
By Graham’s logic, due to these rates, more women would be homosexuals because of their fear of women. This is also nonsense.
And what about all the women living in countries in Europe, or Canada and the United States, statistically free from any over-exaggerated “rape culture” or male oppression this feminist author speaks of? Wouldn’t we see huge numbers of lesbianism, or asexuality at the least? But we don’t because women aren’t merely attracted to men because of manifestations of fear; instead biology and evolution play a massive role here.
But at least Graham isn’t off teaching her loony theories to our impressionable youth. Oh, wait.