Jezebel: dear stabby

That Dear Abby "My Brother Raped My Wife" Thing Actually Happened (And It Was Legal!?)

Moe — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Here's a familiar familial tale! Remember the one about the woman who's fast asleep in her room when suddenly a man she thinks is her husband comes in and they have sex only to at some later point realize that it was actually her husband's perverted brother? Yes, Dear Abby got a query about this a few weeks back, and she didn't believe the story, so we got all ragey about that, and then Dan Savage said he, too, disbelieved the story, and we unleashed some lite venom on him, but by that point our faith in our own instincts was somewhat shaken. So imagine how very gratified we are to report to you now that the media has confirmed it: masquerading as your brother to rape her girl is actually a new trend! It happened — basement apartment and all! — to Marissa Lee-Fuentes.

She's been trying to take her boyfriend's brother to court, and there is some ambiguity in the Massachusetts law that keeps this sort of thing from being an actual crime. Smart rape technique, eh? Anyway it happens a lot with drunk girls at frat parties too. So they're trying to, you know, criminalize it.

If Your Neighbor Poses As Your Husband, Is It Rape? [NPR]
Husband Remains In Dark About Wife's Nighttime Visitor [Detroit News]

Earlier: Dear Abby Strongly Doubts Your Wife's Rape Story

Savage Hate

Anna — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:45:00 EDT

All week, readers have been writing in about advice-giver Dan Savage's latest column, in which Jezebel — specifically our response to that awful 'Dear Abby' feature from last week — gets a negative mention. Personally, I didn't care one way or another about Savage's slam, but Moe sure did! With every email from a reader that came in, she shot off a response to the entire staff. Click on Savage's picture to read her increasingly-irate responses!

March 25 (10:35 am): "Hahahaha so true. Of course, our POST was about Dear Abby's advice, not that weird fucking letter."

March 25 (10:41 am): "It's also really weird that he's calling us for NOT spotting a fake when we spotted the fake who was plagiarizing all his (purportedly real) letters because they seemed so fake. Whatever, dude. Yeah, it was a super phone sex sounding scenario, but...um...nastier true shit happens every day on TV. Jesus fuck, there's a decent chance someone with this selfsame story winds up on Moment Of Truth by the end of this season."

March 26 (9:54 am): "Yeah, Dan Savage can suck it. He just hates blogs. Sure, the letter was a little porny and Penthouse Forum-y — but you know what happens sometimes? People ACT OUT THEIR PORNY FANTASIES. Weirder shit has happened. Seriously, Dan Savage, fuck you."

March 26 (10:28 am): "What annoys me is just that, hello, we are the ones who spotted his plagiarized letters in that NYPress lady's column. We spotted them because they sounded suspiciously fetishy. Because they had been sent into Savage Love, which is a repository of that sort of thing, okay. But then he went and defended the dumbass plagiarist, and I am assuming that's just because he hates blogs, which is annoying because we work fucking hard, and it's weird to imagine fetishists emailing Dear Abby, but she gets points for giving them exactly the sort of response the average incest orgy rape fetishist wants to hear!"

March 26 (10:29 am): "I bet he is one of those queens who is so sweet and fawning to your face and catty behind your back."

March 26 (10:04 pm): "Aaaack! Fuck fan [sic] savage! Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld."

"Dear Abby" Strongly Doubts Your Wife's Rape Story

Moe — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Dear Abby ('s daughter): I've never written you before, but I'm writing you now to ask for your resignation. It's with regards to some advice you recently gave a reader who found himself in an odd predicament. While he was staying at his parents' house, one of his brothers raped his wife. In the darkness, the wife thought it was him. He doesn't know which brother it was. And none of the brothers will rat out the offending brother. It's an insane situation, for sure. You were right to be a little weirded out by it. But when you decided to forego any sort of censure of the offending brothers and get straight to your real suspicion about what happened: that the wife is a lying slut who needs an AIDS test and a strict talking-to. "Please do not accept as gospel that your wife didn't have an inkling that it wasn't you," you wrote. "It's time to have a serious chat with your wife and get chapter and verse on what happened that night." Abby, dear, I understand the skepticism. You're a woman. Women are more suspicious of other women, and the story sounds sketchy.

Maybe it's natural to assume that a guy helpless enough to come to you for advice on what to do about his younger brother raping his wife would be foolish enough to believe anything of his manipulative wench of a wife. Maybe you think this sounds like a pretty good way for a woman to confess a spontaneous dalliance without really confessing it. But to jump to one of those scenarios is not only misogynist, it's FUCKING CLUELESS. Let me tell you a little story about a friend of my mom who is pregnant with her fourth child. Guess how she got pregnant? She woke up in the middle of the night to find her husband fucking her. She didn't know who it was, at first. You know how sleep can be weird that way? People walk in their sleep, initiate sex in their sleep, eat in their sleep, dream they are doing it with Barack Obama in their sleep.

But you know what they don't do in their sleep? Get up out of bed, go downstairs, and start fucking their brother's unconscious wives. No, that takes some hardcore wide-awake premeditation, and while I hate saying this, it's a kind of premeditation that is all too common in modern dudes. Read our site sometimes, you'll see. I'm not sure what it's all about: porn, evil, testosterone, evolutionary biology, alcohol, or just a "culture of impunity" — but I'm pretty sure the last part is the biggest offender. And if telling 110 million readers a woman who says she was raped in her sleep is probably lying isn't fostering that sort of culture, I don't know what is.

Husband Remains In The Dark About Wife's Nighttime Visitor [Yahoo News]
I'm Not A Rapist, I Just Pose As One [Feministing]