Males are not, as a demographic, brought up to be aware of how pervasive and endemic rape is. There is a paraxodical culture of permissibility (of the perps) and shame (of the victims) surrounding sexual crimes. So when a guy at or approaching adulthood hears for the first time (perhaps at college) how frequently it occurs, they either are driven to seek out more information as to why, or they instinctively deny it. Friction occurs, questions need answered, threads are born. The title of the forum is that fighting ignorance is taking longer than “we” thought. And until rape is an issue that is as widely understood as, say, the '60s civil rights movement, we will continue to have to fight ignorance about it.
Further, many males (here and elsewhere) seem to be under the impression that their friends could not possibly ever rape a woman. “I would never be friends with a rapist!” etc. Well, rapists don’t wear scarlet letters and they don’t look like Quasimodo or Chuck Manson. Deprogramming men who think this is also a large part of why said forum friction exists. This particular misinformed belief is everywhere, because nobody wants to believe their friends might be rapists. But victims of rape didn’t create themselves, and the same small group of guys is not going around raping women everywhere in your city/state/country.
tl;dr–Nobody’s forcing you to click on rape threads. So just avoid them if you don’t like it (or maneuver away from the page if the title wasn’t properly indicative of the topic). Don’t poison legitimate requests for information because of your own personal “rape exhaustion”. I have been there. I have gotten sick of fighting ignorance before, on a variety of topics at different times. That doesn’t mean I go around threadshitting legitimate questions.
And if seeing people mention rape offhandedly, when relevant to a post they’re making, bothers you… you’re the one with a problem, not the poster. Just like you don’t get to live in a world where the holocaust didn’t happen, or gays don’t date other gays, or blacks don’t bother you with their pesky existence.
I know you’ve been through a traumatic experience, and you may be feeling very vulnerable and ashamed, but the important thing is to remember that it’s not your fault. It’s not because of your username, or your sig, or because you were posting in threads you shouldn’t have been in. Rape threads are about power, not sex. Many rape-thread-starters have been subjected to rape threads themselves at some point in their lives. It’s a cycle of violence that’s difficult to break.
And you shouldn’t feel guilty about having “given in” and participated in the rape thread. It doesn’t mean you were “asking for it”; you simply did what you had to do to protect yourself. Don’t think of yourself as a victim---- you’re a survivor.
@tendentiousdudeperson
Rapists generally have friends and family. Those people nearly always vociferously argue that the girl is lying, that she really wanted it and just changed her mind and how could he be expected to stop that far into it, that both parties were drunk and it couldn’t have BEEN rape because they were both drunk, and it wasn’t rape ok? They were drunk.
My attacker was an upstanding member of adult society with friends and close family and a decent job. He doesn’t appear different than any other normal adult. Wouldn’t stick out of a crowd. His friends and family wouldn’t believe what he did any more than the friends and family of a falsely-accused non-rapist would believe it. But life ain’t Shallow Hal and we can’t see a person’s demons from the outside.