This analogy is wrong. Driving drunk is like raping, getting hit by a drunk driver is like being raped. So, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” is like “Friends don’t let friends rape,” not “Friends don’t let friends get raped.” You’re treating like it’s the latter.
Let’s compare rape to running a red light. Arguing about what a woman is wearing or how she’s acting to prevent rape is like saying you are blaming the red light for being red, not for you not stopping. Saying that you thought it was yellow or you’re color-blind and can’t tell the difference between red and green or you were driving too fast and couldn’t slow down when the light changed are just excuses.
These are still stranger crimes, LoHD. The cashier and shopkeeper are not acquaintances of the person they’re stealing from. There are no human relationships involved in any of these scenarios, so they are not comparable to most rapes.
You don’t have to invent any outlandish scenarios here. Make the mugger the guy in your physics class who you sometimes share notes with and is coming over tonight to study. Or a friend of your next door neighbor who has given you rides a couple of times and sometimes hangs outside to smoke. Or the socially inept bagger at the grocery store who won’t stop asking you out on dates even though you’ve told him no several times. What meaningful messages do you tell people to avoid getting mugged by these people, who 99 times out of 100 are perfectly harmless?
The thing is, we’re not in any dire need of more advice for women. There’s plenty of it out there. Women are constantly told to modify their behavior already. This blog parodies this very well.
So campus women’s centers harp about women protecting themselves. Okay, I don’t get why you think that’s meaningful (I’ve noticed you mentioned it multiple times). These centers are attached to institutions that are products of society, and our society has long had an obsession with instilling fear into women, so that’s not surprising.
Yes, this is my point. I mean, in this very thread, there’s a male poster who has suggested that having sex with a woman who is resisting him the entire time isn’t necessarily rape…and where is the SDMB to eradicate this ignorance? He’s probably not going to listen to the points of “emotional” women, but he’d probably listen to men. But I don’t see any men, using their collective power as peers, to show this guy how loserly it is to have sex with an unwilling participant. Rape aside, it’s just pathetic that someone would delude themselves into thinking this constitutes seduction. But that’s apparently with the belief is. It’s right in front of our eyes, and yet we’re talking hypotheticals about women dressing like sluts and getting raped because of it.
If men–not just women–would speak up and tell other men to check themselves, wake up and have some self-respect, then I suspect we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now. Men most prone to rape probably don’t listen to women as a rule, so if it’s only women who are speaking up…well then there you go. This is what we get.
The thing is, you ARE suggesting outlandish scenarios, and because they’re so outlandish, I don’t know how to respond to them, because I don’t know what the triggers are.
You’re a product of society, too. Pointing out that something in our society is a product of our society is scarcely meaningful. I’ve mentioned these groups several times because of certain folks in this thread who seem to suggest that suggesting ways to minimize risk of rape is tantamount to telling women to stay indoors at all times, or treating women like objects. That’s idiotic, and that’s not true.
I think you missed two things:
I said I skipped over a lot of posts because of the tremendous amount of stupid in the first couple of sentences (I’m responding to yours because they don’t have a tremendous amount of stupid in them). I’m guessing that the guy you’re referencing in the first paragraph above struck me as far too stupid to read, but sure, if there’s someone in this thread suggesting that having sex with a woman who’s resisting isn’t necessarily rape, I can’t say much about that person outside of the pit.
I absolutely agree that men need to tell other men to check themselves, etc., and I went on about that at length in my last post. I think that’s absolutely necessary. I just don’t think that’s sufficient.
Has anyone actually defined what 'Dressing like a slut." is?
I mean, a couple of men have popped in to say they know it when they see it, but that’s not particularly helpful, is it? I assume that a man may enjoy his wife in a slinky dress but may think his teenaged daughter looks like a slut in the same outfit.
A modern, urban fellow may think a miniskirt with a t-shirt is perfectly ok whereas an old fashioned, church going rural fellow may be scandalized and think the same outfit is slutty.
Well, assuming the actual OP is still relevant to the thread. Now it seems to have devolved to the point where women dressed sluttily in back allies in the middle of the night are stupid. Personally, I think ANYONE of either sex, wearing anything hanging around in dark allies in the middle of the night has made a very bad choice.
Why do you think those are outlandish scenarios, when the same kind of scenarios are associated with rape? I don’t even know why you thought that what you typed made sense, when those scenarios don’t resemble typical rape situations nor robberies, for that matter. Might as well have concocted something about space aliens mugging bonobo chimps in the Congo.
And I’m saying if you agree that men need to tell other men to check themselves, you could take the time to read the stupidity that you’ve skipped over in this thread and put your words into action.
If you don’t feel like doing this, okay. But it makes no sense to talk in earnest about the importance of preventing rape, but then ignoring true elephants in the room because they are too stupid to read.
If you’ll give me at least the name of the poster who made this suggestion (preferably a link to the post, but at least their name), I’ll take the time to read it, and will respond accordingly.
Well, in all fairness, you are talking about a guy who (non-ironically) opened his 1st ever SDMB post with “My name is XXX, and I AM A PICK-UP ARTIST” and seemed to actually think he was impressing people with that magnificent declaration…
How could anyone give any credence to anything someone that self-deluded has to say?
But those aren’t outlandish scenarios. They are most common. Most people are raped by people they know, so it doesn’t really make sense to give women advice like, “Don’t go out alone” if they want to avoid getting raped. What advice do you give to the woman whose date wants to have sex when she doesn’t or who invites someone over who ends up raping her? You can’t very well tell women to avoid all men or to have a chaperon standing by at all times.
ETA: alice, no, I don’t think anyone has defined what dressing “slutty” is either. I asked earlier and in the other thread and haven’t received any answer. I don’t think there is one.
You misunderstand–when I say they’re outlandish, they’re not outlandish because they don’t happen with rape, they’re outlandish because they happen with money. In reality they don’t happen with money, and it’s difficult to understand what motives people would have for treating money that way. (It’s not difficult to understand acquaintance rape, I don’t think: understanding evil motives is often trivial).
The advice commonly given to women regarding acquaintance rape is to watch for signs that the acquaintance might be rapist, and avoid such people. Obviously it’s not a 100% perfect method for avoiding rape–no crime prevention method is 100% perfect.
There isn’t any reason why advice has to be all encompassing. It is about minimizing risk, not eliminating it; which is as we’ve all agreed, impossible. Good guidelines might include: Not being alone in a private place with someone you don’t know well, Not inviting a romantic partner back to your home, or going to theirs until you are reasonably ready for sex. * Going out with a friend, rather than alone to places where it’s common to troll for partners, (particularly so in places like dance and night clubs), Always erring on the side of caution rather than trusting you first instinct, If going out drinking, go with a friend or friends and designate a DD who can also keep an eye out.
None of these are particularly onerous, and are good advice to people of either sex to help them keep safe from crime in general.
Many men have a corollary rule to this one aimed at preventing false accusations or winding up with a crazy one night stand: If you aren’t sure about her intentions don’t get alone with her under any circumstances until you ARE.
The motivation behind mugging an acquaintance would be identical to that of mugging a stranger: To steal someone else’s money. The only difference is that instead of the crime taking place between strangers (as is typical for muggings in reality), they’d take place within the context of relationships (which is typical for rapes in reality). Why does that strike you as outlandish? You might as well be scratching your head, struggling to imagine motives for people who rape their friends and acquantainces.
In this discussion, all I’m asking you to do is imagine what advice you’d give people if most muggings mirrored most rapes with respect to the players involved. If rape and theft are as comparable as you insist they are, then you wouldn’t have any problems doing this.
So the fact you are finding it so difficult supports my point, in a way. “Don’t form relationships with people who look like muggers” is ridiculously useless advice. If muggers were easily identifiable, there would be little risk in the first place of people befriending them.
I have no doubt that there are people who do give him credence. It is not at all obvious to me that his delusions of awesomeness are universally recognized as what they are. Delusions.
It was TheWhotoTheWhatNow, on the page preceding this one. The money quote is here:
Which is frankly one of the creepiest, and simultaneously most outright pathetic, things I’ve ever read on this board. I’m not exactly Casanova or anything, but I would like to believe that the women with whom I’ve had sexual encounters have more-or-less enjoyed (or at least freaking consented to) the experience, not just the aftermath.
But you are assuming that “sexual attention” = “having sex,” which at least in my experience is not true for everyone, or even most people. Flirting, for it’s own sake, is fun. People can flirt without the slightest intention of going any further than that.
Sure, there’s a message when a girl dresses in a sexy way: look at me. It’s an open invitation to look but not necessarily to touch, and there is nothing wrong with this. Nearly everybody, male and female, enjoys looking at attractive people. Nearly everybody, male and female, enjoys an occassional flirtatious or mildly sexually-charged conversation… even, and in some cases especially, if nothing further is intended or expected. By insisting that every girl who is showing cleavage is sending an “I want sex” message to literally every man in the room, you are, frankly, ruining the fun for everyone who can understand that the one doesn’t always imply the other.
No, rape comes down to whether the person consents at the time. There are no other factors. This is should be so obvious as to be tautological - hell, it is tautological. There is no retrospective element - rape is sex without consent.
She’d be wrong. If you have sex with a girl and she’s protesting the entire time, it’s rape. And just to be clear, “you” would be a rapist. A rapist who’d successfully manipulated his victim into a state of denial, but unquestionably a rapist.
(NB for even more clarity, this is the “you” in the hypothesis, not you, TWTTWN.)
Assuming you’re right, it doesn’t make the pimp any less of a pimp, or the abusive parent/husband any less of an abuser. I’m sure you see this. So making a nice breakfast afterwards doesn’t make the rapist any less of a rapist. Right?
No, the difference between the two is consent. The husband isn’t a rapist in precisely the same way that Harrison Ford isn’t an archaeologist. What makes rape rape isn’t the level of aggression, it’s not how you feel afterwards, it’s whether both parties consent. It’s baffling that you could present these two scenarios as if they were materially the same. There is no meaningful point of comparison. If you don’t understand the enormous amount of work the word “roleplay” is doing in your scenario above, you’re not qualified to make “purely analytical” statements of what rape “really comes down to”.
Jesus Christ. Yes, [bWhotoTheWhatNow**, that viewpoint isn’t bordering on insane, it crossed into wackaloon territory three weeks ago and is down to drinking its own urine to survive. If you have sex with a woman who protests the whole time, that’s not sort of like rape, that’s rape by definition.
In a fantasy world maybe you have Presence 4 or some other magical Anne Rice Vampire power that lets you rewrite her memories or emotions about the event. All you’ve done with your seductive vampire glare is make her forget that she was raped, though. You haven’t changed the fact of the rape.
But those magical powers don’t exist, and if you’d stop reading those creepy romance novels and pay attention to the real world, you’d know that in the real world, raped women don’t get romanced out of their memories of rape.
I think that for a lot of men, it’s difficult to understand viscerally what it would be like to be raped, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of men imagine being raped as having sex with a woman they find unattractive, and they shrug and think, “No big deal.” If they imagine being violently penetrated by a stronger attacker, it can help some guys get the visceral horror of rape.
The other thing, though, is the idea that a difference between female and male sexuality makes rape viscerally worse for women. I don’t know if that’s true, I can’t pretend to know. I won’t go into the reasoning behind this argument here, as it’s a tangent; I’ll just say that I find such arguments tentatively persuasive.
But it’s all a sideshow. I don’t need to be able to imagine the horror of rape, I don’t need to be able to understand why it’s so awful, in order to recognize that it really is that awful an experience for victims of rape. I can throw up my hands and say, “I don’t get why people are so freaked out about it,” and still accept that people are so freaked out about it.
Guys that can’t make that intellectual leap, much less that imaginative leap, seem prone to silly L’escat fantasies about raping a woman and then romancing her to acceptance. That attitude is pernicious bullshit, with the emphasis on pernicious.
Thanks for this imagery and thanks for following through.
I predict that TWTTWN is going to say we’re not reading what he’s writing, which is his standard response to criticism. But how exactly he plans to backpedal away from his claim that he’s experienced this and that’s how he knows that rape is an “aftermath” experience based upon rationalization, I have no idea. All I know the whole premise sounds like something a rapist would say to rationalize his behavior.
Glad to, for whatever good it’ll do. I try in GD to avoid the low-hanging fruitcakes, so to speak, and to address my arguments toward people whose posts have a smidgen of insight, and consequently when I see someone start off claiming that rape is all about how the woman feels afterward, my inclination is to use pagedown, because that post clearly isn’t going to get any better. I can see how in this case my “no low-hanging-fruitcakes” philosophy flies in the face of my “men addressing men about how rape isn’t okay” philosophy, though. I can’t promise I’ll read any more of his posts (I just read through that whole one, and good lord, I can’t imagine how someone could possibly pack more creepy wrongness into a single post short of shoving a timecube up a goatse), but I’ll say right here what I think is blatantly bleedin’ obvious to anyone not totally wrapped up in a creepy cultish fascination with manipulation:
Rape isn’t about how folks feel afterward, it’s about how they feel during the act.
The one exception to that rule is folks who cannot give informed consent during the act.
If a woman consents during the act but regrets it afterward and accuses her partner of rape, that’s not rape, that’s a false accusation.
If a woman does not consent during the act but is okay with it afterwards, that’s not okay, that’s a rape, and a rapist who got really lucky to find himself living in a softcore fantasy instead of in the real world.
If you find yourself walking the tightrope between consent and rape, you’re an evil person. That line you think is fuzzy? Staying on the correct side of the line is easy: you just don’t go tightrope walking along it.
If you need to imagine the world around you as a softcore fantasy in order to have sexual self-esteem, you’re a sad, pathetic, dangerous little person. Sad and pathetic because the real world is too harsh for you; dangerous because you project your fantasies onto other people instead of dealing with them as they really are.