This understates how mean rape is, how mush it disregards a person’s wishes about their very body. I think the decision to force sex on a person is a very active and conscience decision. I don’t see how it can be otherwise.
People speak of the heat of the moment, but we’ve all been there. You would know if your partner was scared or threatened or unconscious.

I’ve said this before on blogs- but when a woman is alone with a man for any reason, but especially to fool around or have sex, it is an act of trust. We trust those who are bigger or stronger won’t hurt us because most don’t, and to assume otherwise would make life unbearable. Rape abuses that trust, and then she gets blamed or called stupid for it. Prevention should focus on men and how they have to ethically behave with a woman’s trust. I think if we frame the discussion as one of ethics and respect, it may be an easier pill to swallow for many. Same goes for sexual harrassment.

I am actually in a small community to the east of above-mentioned town. What direction from Norwich do you live in?

Alcohol… to be honest, I have to wonder if the problem with alcohol and date rape in North America is not partially cultural. It is taboo until you are XX years of age, therefore you find yourself in college with very little clue of what is a reasonable amount for you, personally, to drink to achieve various levels of alcohol buzz (from a light buzz to “dude, where’s my legs”). Which really comes back to my statement about inexperience.

Are there any European commenters in the crowd with university/college experience? Yes, too much alcohol always plays a role in the morning- after-regrets and aquaintance rape, but is this as common a phenomenon on the other side of the ocean as compared to North America?

I don’t know where you picked up this “poor men” subtext. It wasn’t in the criticisms that I read. I also don’t think it’s exactly a trivial thing to worry that a rapist might kill his target if he was angry enough at her.

Also a sense of entitlement. And alcohol.

Oh, that’s right. Because they’re about ruling class bonding. Silly me.

I’m not sure how recently Fielder’s choice has attended college, but I think there are definate benefits to dormitories over apartments. The student community is an important rite of passage in that first year. It’s symbiotic.

I think somewhere on Pandagon there is a link to the 7 or 8 different kinds of rapists… the violent ones, the ones who are living out a fantasy consentual situation, the ones who can’t quite grasp that girls are real honest to god people instead of objects, there’s a whole spectrum.

The “dangers” of college/university are many, and they aren’t just in the dorms. They’re with your TA’s, occasionally your profs, the frat boys that are drinking on the quad as you’re walking home, the people that you study with and have a creepy secret crush on you, the ones that you drink near at the pub.

The overall problem, I think, is youth and inexperience. Most young people today have very little critical thinking skills when they start college or universtity, and also very little intuition for what’s right or wrong in this new environment. It’s like being tossed into a different world with next to no supervision or responsibilities… a microcosm society (like Lord of the Flies but hopefully without the wild boars and murder). This isn’t the world you’ve lived in for nearly two decades and it’s not the world that you will inhabit for the next six or eight decades. It’s a total cultural shift. Things that when you were a teen might have set off your warning bells (being offered a few beers while studying for a test) are suddenly normative, even if the danger hasn’t really changed.

Which is not kind, but may in some cases have to cover massive property destruction by partying students, so…

I just picked up a 1987 book on Marital Rape and one of the first things the authors say is to cite several surveys showing that marital or aquaintance rape was exponentially more common than the much-talked-about stranger rape (12% of wives had been sexually assaulted by their husbands/acquaintances, only 3% had ever suffered stranger rape) - but most of the wives didn’t think of marital rape as rape, but as their fault for displeasing their husbands, and in any case it wasn’t against the law in most states in the US.

In 1987 - at which time the anti-feminist “backlash” enginered by the Hegemony, and the assertions that feminism was unnecessary because equality had been attained, were just as common, uttered by the same people, as they are today.

Me, I couldn’t stop laughing at it - it was after all a man, Neil Stephenson, who first conceived of this and worked it into the characterization of a fictional heroine. This was potentially better than a Whacking Big Knife, which I used to carry around in my naiver days, terrified of having to use it, of having it taken away from me while trying to use it…but knowing that Women With Knives is a Freudian nightmare of the Sexist Male, long before the name Bobbitt ever hit the news.

It’s a deterrent. What guy is going to chance sticking his dick someplace where it might get bitten hard, with something he can’t get off without surgical help? It’s the whole principle behind big scary eyes and glaring colors on butterflies: what bird is going to take the chance that that’s not *really* a snake, it’s just a big green caterpillar? That’s not really a poisonous monarch, it’s just a lookalike viceroy? Hm, maybe *she* hasn’t got one of those $.25 thingies up her…

eeehhh, maybe I’ll just go home and beat off to bondage porn, instead, and write some Angry Guy rapefic to post online…

I lived in a dorm for four years. It was the best time of my life, and it would not have been nearly as great (or educational) if we all lived in apartments. Although I should add that three of those years was at a women’s college, I would also like to point out that my brother did the same - at a co-ed college - and feels the same way.>>

It also wouldn’t have been as safe, at least not if the guest rules in my university’s dorms can be extrapolated. What apartment complex has an RA?

But that doesn’t solve the problem for the vast numbers of adults in the U.S. who don’t go to a 4-year live-on-campus institution of higher education. Rape prevention education has to happen in middle school, before kids can drop out of formal education and while their hormones are getting sorted out, so that the lesson sticks. Lotsa luck getting it past the parents who don’t want their kids even thinking about sex, though.

Jane–this is getting at exactly what I was talking about. When I was running the sexual assault awareness group on my campus, I liked to say that a true, long-term solution to rape wouldn’t occur until we taught women to say “yes” as well as “no”. Why? Because right now, there really isn’t the expectation of verbal consent–women aren’t expected to say yes (I think both men and women don’t expect it). I think this really goes back to a shitload of socialization (not even necessarily about sex) as children.

I know that compared to my brothers, compared to my male friends, compared to my boyfriend, I always feel very very uncomfortable in awkward social situations and I have an urge to smooth things over. Even when I didn’t cause it. Even when it has nothing to do with me. I think this isn’t unique among women–a lot of us were told to “be nice” and “play nice” and when people said mean things to us, it’s because “they like you” and “let it roll off your shoulders.” Women aren’t socialized to take a stand and risk being unpopular. That’s still considered a very masculine, John Wayne thing to do. And this certainly has an effect on sexual encounters 10 years down the road–OK, so we’re making out, and his hands are going somewhere that make me uncomfortable, but there’s this block that’s *really* hard to overcome that tells me to not create a scene. To not make things awkward. So you kinda twist away from him–or you freeze up–or whatever. Do non-verbal, non-confrontational things to try to slow down or stop what’s going on.

Rape is just the most extreme manifestation of a profoundly fucked-up way that men and women have learned to sexually interact. I do think a long-term solution to it is going to have to come from a revamp of these social scripts (particularly teaching boys to be active and girls to be passive, nice and avoid conflict at all costs). When I talked earlier about sexual interactions being on a continuum–simply educating men (and women) about where we draw the line between “sketchy, manipulative, unhealthy, but legal sex” and “rape” isn’t going to fundamentally change a lot of things.

Caveat: all this above isn’t going to change shit for a small subset of violent rapists. Kind of like serial killers, serial child molesters, or arsonists–there’s always going to be those random, f-up’d predators. But they represent a relatively small portion of the problem, and it’s kind of like trying to prevent being hit by a piano from the sky–not much you can do about it, other than lock the sickos up forever.

I lived in a dorm for four years. It was the best time of my life, and it would not have been nearly as great (or educational) if we all lived in apartments. Although I should add that three of those years was at a women’s college, I would also like to point out that my brother did the same - at a co-ed college - and feels the same way.

I’ve also lived in apartments (grad school). Since this included living with men as well as women, simply moving to an apartment doesn’t really solve the problem does it? Especially since I didn’t know much of anything about any of the people I was moving in with, it mostly just happened to be places I could afford. I also didn’t really notice much of a difference in the maturity level. I don’t remember student housing being much more expensive either, just scarce, and (for grad students) designed for couples, not singles. I got the impression that a lot of the apartments (student housing and otherwise) were just like the dorms anyway.

Seems to me the problem you are really talking about about is lack of community, not proximity. More affordable housing options and not building so many high rise dorms on big universities would do much more to solve this than making everyone live in apartments instead of dorms. So would more programs and support for incoming freshmen, like ya, know, discussing rape prevention.

jane, since I’m sure you don’t think that telling girls to speak up is all that is needed to prevent rape, you shouldn’t feel guilty. To me, destroying the feminine = passive and masculine = assertive stereotype falls exactly into what we’ve been talking about regarding educating boys and men as well as girls and women. As Amanda at Pandagon posted a while ago, it’s also the one bit of rape “prevention” advice endorsed by the officials that make it their job to study rape and rapists. All of which makes “acting like you own the place” type of advice a little different in my book than the “don’t walk alone at night” type.

unfortunately, two of my best female friends have really bad taste in men, and one has a guy who tells her things like she can’t have other male friends over, etc- and she goes along with it! why? i don’t know, but it might be because her mom also has bad taste in men, and she doesn’t realize that the relationship doesn’t have to be that way. my dad cooks and sews, and although she doesn’t really fix things, my mom makes most of the money. overall, i think they have a pretty equal relationship. but even so, i let boys have their way in junior high, because of the social pressure. i actually felt pressure from boys to be LESS sexual- because otherwise i’d be a slut.

girls aren’t expected to have sex drives or to be sexually assertive, so the boys are used to steering the sexual situations. boys have to learn that they can’t demand that girls do it on their terms, and girls have to feel empowered enough to remind them of that, even if they need to use force. if women felt like they could say, ‘ok, this is what i want in bed, and this is how i want it,’ men would be less likely to feel that they were entitled to take what they wanted. they’re used to women saying nothing, so when they don’t get consent, it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

i don’t know how to make this not sound like i’m blaming women for not speaking up. it seems icky to me, too. but i know that once i felt like i could speak up and tell boys to fuck off if they thought i was a slut or frigid or whatever, i was less likely to be in situations where i could be coerced into sex or raped by someone i knew. (although maybe i’ve just been lucky, too- no greeks at my college.) until women feel like they can dictate their sexuality, men have to realize that no consent is no consent; men who rape are totally responsible for that rape. but i think the sexes are going to have to travel on parallel paths. men aren’t going to suddenly stop raping unless the culture of men-feeling-entitled-to-sexuality ends. and women have a part in helping that happen, too. we all need to teach the kids what’s right.

if women were allowed to have their own sexuality, i think they might be less likely to be ashamed if they were raped, too. i would like women to feel like they could say “yeah, i wore a short skirt, and i like sex, so what? that fucker raped me, and he needs to be taught a lesson.”

As for dormitories? Apartments are less expensive and more mature. College is not a place suspended between home and the real world. There is no such thing as the right of the State, or a private party even of the learned, to manage a person’s life in loco parentis for 18-21 year old men and women, let alone 40-year-old graduate students, and such a thing encourages infantilization, irresponsibility, idiocy, ignorance, the works. College is for grownups and men and women ought to be treated accordingly, which they’re certainly not when living back to buck in the military.

“All I meant to say about that is that I don’t think a woman ought to feel guilty for employing strategies that may protect her from a stranger rapist.”

Agreed, but women also shouldn’t feel as though this alone is doing much of anything to stop any (stranger) rape but her own. At the very least because it leads to “I’ll be safe because…” (ignoring acquaintance rape) or “she should have….” and eventually even “well, she really was asking for it….” as sort of a phsycological self-defense “it couldn’t happen it me” line of reasoning.

Or, as another example: “…but think acquaintance/stranger rape on college campuses is really a crime of opportunity, and the more wise advice on avoiding such situations, the better”

Because apparently, if “only rapists can stop rape” isn’t literally true in every sense that means that rapists are born to be rapists and will rape if given the opportunity, so decreasing that opportunity is all that needs (or can?) to be done to stop rape. Which means, of course, that woman should never be alone with a man she isn’t willing to fuck, in any way he desires, and it would be a really good idea if women didn’t live in co-ed dorms to begin with, or walk alone (or with a guy they aren’t willing to fuck, in any way he desires), especially at night. The campaign that marissa describes, after all, in no way acknowledges the fact that non-rapists can have an influence on whether or not rape occurs, even if the final decision is the rapist’s. /sarcasm

AB, I agree that most college rape prevention services focus on women and stranger rape because including men and acquaintance rape would mean that the students, and everyone else, would have to ask hard questions of themselves. As some guys have pointed out on other threads, asking such questions of themselves means that men must not only questioning if they could rape, but if they have. It’s hard for many women as well, who like to pretend that “it could never happen to them.” No one likes accepting that something bad could happen to them, or admitting to their faults, or even less that they may have done something wrong. Unfortunately, I think that such programs and campaigns are exactly what we need most at the moment.

Right. Don’t blame women, blame…communism.

College campuses aren’t the playa, and most of the people attending have a pretty good sense of whose bike belongs to whom. Bikes don’t get borrowed by free spirits; they get stolen by mercenary assholes. The distinction was never clearer and more concrete than during my freshman year at school.

Rape works the same way. It’s not some random release of orgiastic energy caused by the cumulative effect of too much fucking. It’s distinct from casual consensual sex except when misogyny equates the two. There are certainly college students who don’t see women as having proprietary rights over their own bodies, but they certainly don’t apply that lack of reserve to their own bodily integrity. They’re violating women because they don’t care about those women.

Acquaintance rape happens more often at colleges because you have a bunch of very green young people living on their own for the first time ever. Some of them don’t yet know how to protect themselves, and some haven’t yet learned that other people deserve respect. No supervision, no support, lots of peer pressure, lots of strangers. That makes it really easy to get into a dangerous and unfamiliar situation, really difficult to find help of any kind, and impossible to depend on your new friends for assistance or protection. It also makes it really easy to find and hurt vulnerable women, if you’re a predator with no moral compass.