Since I was a little kid, I was taught by both parents to avoid one-to-one contact with males in private places. This was also discussed in my young adult community group at church, where many believe that guys and girls shouldn’t be alone even in public places. They are fans of double-dating.
Of course this is kind of inevitable to avoid this at all times. Before I intentionally spend time with a guy alone, I want to know a lot about him. What is he like? Does he respect women? Is he a control freak? Does it seem like he is hiding something?
I notice that almost none the women my age, approach guys this way. They will go to a guy’s house after meeting him the first time at some bar. Last Friday, there were girls who let guys take them back to their dorms after the party. A few of the girls didn’t even know the guys’ names. Even more girls hang around their guy friends houses and cars without any kind of anxiety.
This concerns me, because most of the women who were raped or sexually assaulted, their perpetrators were guys that they knew or just met. Do young women know about this? Do they care? Do they think “it won’t happen to me”? Or, is my thinking outdated? Or some of both?
Unless you’re a pre- or very young teen, I think your parents and your church group are giving you bad advice. Men are not inherently evil. You need to learn how to interact with ALL people. They’re obviously concerned about you, but it is misdirected. I believe they’re the control freaks in this scenario.
Men are not inherently evil, and they can be lots of fun! What your family is teaching you is old-fashioned. I don’t think you should make a habit of going home with people you’ve just met. I think your first meetings with a new person should be in public. I hate double-dating unless it’s with a very close friend, I want to get to know the new person and that’s hard to do when you’ve got established friendships there, too.
I agree. In fact I have more guy friends than girl friends. It’s just that I have to know more about a guy before I spend time with him alone, compared to most girls my age.
While the majority of men are good, honest, non-violent people, those ladies are playing the odds a bit by going back to the men’s rooms and inviting new acquaintances over. I did the same when I was younger: riding in a car with a man I’d just met in a bar, going to the dorm room of the guy I was about to go out to dinner with the first time, etc. In the first case, the guy was Mr. Grabbyhands, but he didn’t force himself on me. In the second, I realized how foolish I’d been when I was sitting in this room with three total strangers around me. In neither case did anything happen (except that I ended up marrying the dorm room guy), but it was somewhat naive of me to be so trusting.
Young women shouldn’t live in fear that all men are mere seconds from raping them, but they would probably be better served by being taught to be a bit more cautious.
But I bet the odds of hooking up with a creapy dude goes up in bars. I’m no angel, but there are some strange birds in these bars today. I mean, strange!
We aren’t inherently evil, but there are a lot of us who have ulterior motives for being nice. I think a lot of girls can be too quick to trust a guy and can often blur the lines between friend, acquaintance and “guy I just met”. It’s also not a great idea to get so drunk at a party that you pass out or don’t know what’s going on.
I do think that your policy plays it a little too safe… but when I look back, I am sort of horrified by the things I did when I was in college. I feel sort of lucky that nothing awful ever happened.
The only person who ever tried something offensive was, strangely, a longtime (~3 years) friend who had been alone with me many times before. I physically threw him out of my apartment and have refused communication with him since–apparently “just friends” isn’t on his radar.
Depends what bars you go to. I usually go to bars frquented by professional types or recent college grads. For the most part, they are just other people just like me. Regular guys and gals just having some fun after work.
But some of the bars and clubs we would go to definitely contain a lot of strange dudes. People into drugs, drunks, old dudes hitting on innappropriately young girls, guys pretending to be something they aren’t, people who will try to slip stuff into your drinks. And of course just your regular assortment of harmless odd people.
Basically, you just have to be a little careful because bars are basically just a cross section of everyone with alchohol and possibly drugs added into the mix.
You should do what you are most comfortable with. Almost all of the guys out there are decent enough. I would rather live my life prepared instead of expecting the worst to happen all the time.
I was raised a little bit of the same way, but I was a guy that was told not to be alone with a woman until you knew her well enough. The reasoning behind that was my older brother (12 years older) had a woman get mad at him when he decided to break it off with her and she told the police he raped her. It was a mess, but she was eventually charged with filing a false report…
Yes, I would agree with the OP that girls tend to be too trusting. Having been one myself, and looking back on some of the stuff I did in high school and college, I would say that I got lucky; some very bad things could have happened to me. Sure the majority of guys are decent people who are just fun to be with. But, meet up with a bad one and trust him too much–or just one who’s looking for more than you’re willing to give at the moment–and you’ve put yourself in a bad position that might not be easy to get out of.
I live in a town with a big college bar scene. It is so incredibly common for girls to get too drunk with guys they barely know and then wake up to find that bad things have happened to them. Stunningly, local rape-counselor-type people have found that many guys do not think it is wrong to have sex with a girl who is unconscious. It simply has not occurred to them that that might possibly be a bad thing to do; they want sex, she’s right there, what’s the problem?
So yes, I think people should be cautious. Lots of fun can be had without going back to a strange guy’s apartment alone. Why take the risk when you can wait a while and find out more about the guy? (Always noting, of course, that all people have hidden dark sides, and date rape happens with well-known, ‘friend’ guys too.) And, from my experience, the times when I was most vulnerable were not also the most fun times; they were episodes I could have lived without.
It’s a tough call. When Mike Tyson or some other famous sports figure was accused of raping a young woman who had willingly followed him to his hotel room, my dad said she couldn’t possibly not have known what he had in mind. Which is really weird, since my dad never gave me any warnings of any kind about men. So I really wonder who he thought might have warned her about that.
I have walked into places alone with men a great many times and fortunately never been assaulted or raped, except for one date-rape scenario with someone I knew really well.
However, probably the stupidest move I ever made in my life was getting into a car with three young men I had just met, in a foreign country, without telling anyone where I was going. Yes, alcohol was involved. About five seconds after I got in the car I realized what a colossally stupid move that was, but it worked out alright and I got back to my host family’s house safely some time later.
Men seem to think that women must always know what men have in mind. Yet I think women very rarely know what men have in mind. Fortunately, most men turn out to be gentlemen about it. But if one doesn’t, everybody blames the woman for not knowing better, even though they don’t believe she really didn’t know what was what.
So basically, you can’t win. If I had daughters I would want to meet every young man and know him fairly well before letting her be alone with him. I don’t know if that’s practical, though.
Honestly, I never gave any thought to how much time I spend alone with guys. Nearly all of my friends are men and so naturally I spend a lot of time with them. I’ve never had anyone make an (univited) untoward move. Usually it’s more of a “Let’s play World of Warcraft all night!” scenerio than a “Let’s get drunk!” thing, though. I spent a major portion of college sleeping over at my guy friend’s houses, going out on the town with guys or just hanging out with men.
When it involves bars and drinking, usually I won’t go it alone with a guy, but that’s because I’m prone to getting horny and doing something not-well-thought-out.
I grew up being trusting but aware of other motives. If I was introduced to someone by friends, I’d think nothing of going back to their place to talk or watch a movie. Someone I met in a bar … maybe not. I’ve never had a problem and feel no reason to start worrying.
And most rapes are perpetrated by someone the woman knows well, not some random shlub from a bar.