‘After stumbling out of the bathroom, Gamby kissed his coworker on the neck, took off her shirt, and began approaching her again, telling her “I just want to kiss you.”’
'In one case he approached a 48-year-old woman who was removing packages from a parked car, grabbed her groin area and fled.
Police say he also opened the passenger side car door where a 44-year-old woman was sitting and began touching her breasts and groin area.’
I’m not saying that forced kissing is not sexual assault in some US jurisdictions, but I’ve never seen it prosecuted as such. If it has been, I would be happy to learn where. Overjoyed, in fact, since I’ve been trying to find examples for several years.
(Should this topic be split off from the rest of this thread?)
Kissing is not considered sexual. Not lip-to-lip kissing, anyway.
It’s really not a matter of interpretation. There are fixed statutes in place. Most don’t mention kissing at all. A few specifically remove kissing from the range of sexual assaults. But the real yardstick is prosecutions. Have there been any?
I think we’re down too many layers of hypothetical-situations here for me to meaningfully respond, but… IF we lived in some imagined universe in which somehow we had accurate stats about how much safer not-wearing-revealing-clothes-in-public made you and IF some group of women therefore made the choice to limit their wearing of revealing clothes in public, well, I, as a man, sure as hell wouldn’t feel it was my place to tell them they were being unreasonable in making that choice. If I did, I would absolutely expect to be lambasted up one side and down the other for presumption. (Of course, I also wouldn’t tell women who didn’t make that choice that they were being unreasonable).
If it was your wife (let’s say you’re married), would you be OK with her dressing up in a nun habit to reduce her likelihood of being dragged-into-the-bushes-raped?
I don’t think you’d be lambasted by anyone if you were to post a thread asking if you’re right to be concerned about your wife’s mental health. Because hypothetical universe or not, making a drastic change to ones style of dress to limit the likelihood of an already rare event is always going to be questionable. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman making that decision.
The name of the page I’ve linked to is "“Exactly What is Sexual Assault?” What you consider sexual and what the Marine Corp considers sexual are obviously two different things.
Of course it is.
Kissing doesn’t have to be explicitly mentioned in order to be covered by the statute. Murder statutes don’t cover each and every way you can murder someone, sexual assault statutes don’t have to cover each and every way you can sexually assault someone.
No the yardstick isn’t prosecutions. You are simply moving the goalposts from what you asserted earlier in the thread.
Adults, probably. If you include children, the stats are probably much closer, and boys may even be more likely to have been molested than girls. Of course, we don’t have accurate numbers because most of the time, it still isn’t reported.
Apparently, modern society considers #1 to be helpful advice, and #2 a vicious personal attack on the person.
Personally I feel that if the person did indeed NOT look before crossing, then #2 is a perfectly appropriate and FACTUALLY CORRECT statement.
Let me give you and alternate set of statements, to make this clear.
Thou shalt not kill
You murdered your wife in her sleep, and now you are sitting on Death Row awaiting execution.
Is this STILL victim blaming?
No. Of course not.
It is the logical and correct consequence of a chosen action.
So… just how is this different for the first example, where the injury was ALSO the logical result of a chosen action?
But we aren’t talking about what can change, we are talking about what is.
I agree that changes should be made, and the focus of the change should be to decrease the likelihood of it happening at all, BUT it would not change the advice I give my daughter.
As long as you frame it in a non-victim blaming way, and as long as you explain the monumental injustice that such advice is required, I don’t have any more of a problem with this (in concept, anyway – some pieces of advice might be better or worse (or even harmful!) than others) than I do with parents of black boys explaining to them how they might reduce their chances of being killed by law enforcement.
What good does it do to tell someone with their leg broken in 3 places that it was their fault? Does it make you feel better to tell someone that? Do you think it makes them feel better? If no to both, then why do it?
The real difference here is that police are agents of the government, the state, with the power of the nation in their hands, whereas most rapists are ordinary guys. How do you guard against your boss, your coworker, neighbor, doctor, lawyer, guy on the bus, uncle, cousin, and so on?
As an aside, does everybody remember the “stolen celeb photos” and various “stolen womens’ photos” scandals? There was one involving male Marines preying on female Marines.
The striking thing about these incidents was that a lot of the photos weren’t nudes, especially in the case of the Marines. People said, “there’s so much explicit,* consensual,* free, porn out there, what’s the allure?”
The allure was the lack of consent. The allure was doing something they knew was against the woman’s wishes, against her consent. When say it’s power, not sex, that’s what they’re talking about. When they say, “he’s a rich/good-looking/famous guy, he doesn’t need to rape anybody,” they’re saying he can get womens’ consent instead of forcing them…
Advice to live in a safer neighborhood is much different than advice to avoid going outside alone.
People are generally bad at assessing risk, so people are more scared of sharks than horses, school shootings than swimming pools, and being pulled into the bushes than going on a date with the wrong guy.
That’s an interesting, if disturbing-to-think-about, question. As a thought experiment, imagine that for every rape, we travel back in time two hours beforehand, then administer a truth serum to the to-be-rapist, and ask him what he believes he will be doing for the next few hours. Some presumably do fully intend to be committing a rape, likely because for them the gratification comes from the violation and control. But some, I suspect (and here’s where I may be WAY off base), hope and intend to go out to a bar or a club, meet a woman, charm her with their handsome male studliness, and then have some vigorous and gratifying but totally consensual sex. And it’s only after they have been rejected a few times, and had several drinks too many, and are stumbling home muttering resentfully to themself about how feminists have ruined all women (or whatever ridiculous incel-adjacent bullshit they might come up with), and then they see one of the women who rejected them walking home alone, or a woman who reminds them of one of the women who rejected them…
Do any of the frequently-discussed “common sense” bits of safety advice women so often receive change their likelihood of being victimized by a man with the second mindset, assuming such men exist with any frequency? Again, I don’t know. But I can’t dismiss the possibility out of hand.
Speaking as a straight man, it’s absolutely the case that a significant part of my brain is VERY aware of women who are wearing revealing, or form-hugging, clothing. Even if it’s a woman who I would never flirt with or hit on or have any interest in whatsoever, it’s not something I can ignore or look past. It just doesn’t seem plausible to me that that level of instinctive impact would NOT have an effect on a potential rapist, with potentially terrible consequences.
