If all these myths were true then we’d have to assume women are responsible for all the bad things that happen to them and they are also stupid because they don’t use their mind-reading and future seeing powers. Silly girls!

I went to sleep clothed. I woke up being raped by a completely naked and disgusting male stranger. What should I have done differently? Not gone to sleep?
Should I have known that being asleep as a single young girl is asking for it?

IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE SITUATION…THE RAPIST IS TO BLAME!

You cannot predict a rape…anymore than you can predict getting punched…or murdered….or getting run over by a car. Why are we blaming the victims?

I think men all too often feel lumped into a category. Or maybe some of them have the urge to rape …and when they hear that other men have raped….they sympathize with the rapist…“poor guy got lead on and then just lost control” Rapists are in control of their actions. NOTHING A WOMAN DOES MEANS SHE DESERVES TO BE RAPED!

Are you a man who wouldn’t rape? Are you a man who is angered that your gender is ruining your genders good name? THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

Our culture molds rapists from sexism and misogyny. Don’t let messages go out that degrade women and illustrate them as powerless idiot bodies to be used like trash.
If your friends say misogynistic and degrading things to or about women… Speak out against it. Don’t buy into the porn industry and the sex industry…. Don’t sit by silently as the women of the world are raped.

Rape is an act of terror. It is not only the victims (women and men) that are afraid. It is everyone. One rape makes all people fear for their safety.

Only Rapists have the power to stop rape. STOP VICITM BLAMING!

GET INVOLVED. GET INFORMED.

TAKE THE RAPE QUIZ…
Talk About Rape, the Quiz

The mistake is that there are socially-acceptable instances in which what Alex described up until the rape IS the correct behavior.

Man and woman go out on a date. Woman agrees to be designated driver. Man drinks, woman is sober. Woman drive drunk boyfriend home. So far, so good. Man decides he “deserves” sex because of those $3.00 Virgin Daiquiris. Woman winds up being raped.

How does that differ from the scenario Alex presented? Me — I don’t sleep fully clothed.

What’s the socially realistic alternative here? No one ever drinks? Women leave drunk men in bars? Drunk men drive themselves home? Men and women stop living together?

All conditions aside…if a woman doesn’t want to have sex and the man decides his choice is more important than hers….it is rape …and no one asks to be raped.

See how deep these rape myths run in our culture. Don’t be a rape apologist.
I can see an feel the deep tug of war inside of people where they want to believe that it is wrong….but they still just can’t help themselves from holding on tight to the myth that the woman asks for it and is responsible.

Placing the responsibility for rape on women is the cornerstone of the problems surrounding rape. Please let go of all your “what if’s” If a woman is raped… it is wrong… and it is the man’s responsibility and fault for committing the rape. I am sick of the “he couldn’t control himself” crap.

Placing responsibility on the woman continues in many ugly ways out side of the rape and leads to other sad occurrences such as victim blaming.

I am a rape victim and your little scenario was not the scenario…. but even if it was it would not be my fault. Men have control over their actions.

In your scenario would the woman still be considered “cruising for a bruising” if the guy snapped because he didn’t get what he thought he had coming to him…and angered so that he kills her? Is it really ok to lose control like that?

“Rape really is a way of killing a person, but then asking
them to get up afterwards. So it’s a way of stealing one’s spirit,
but you’re supposed to somehow keep going.”
-Salamishah Tillet

I have also recently encountered Victim Blaming. It is a surprising and painful second to the actual rape. This kind of blaming the victim must stop!

I want to ask rape victims who have suffered victim blaming to talk with me on my blog. http://anallegoryofthecave.blogspot.com/

to me, it’s that easy.

How can it be more complicated?

But this example is so interesting,

Is it a good habit for a woman to bring a drunk man that high up the defcon while alone, in a bed,in the dark, with no pants on *then* cordially inform him that he isn’t getting any? (if it’s spur of the moment, that’s justifiable)

What If he snaps from johnny football hero to a raping rapist who rapes her out of sheer drunken indulgence in temptation/ knowledge that his reputation/her wish to maintain hers will save him? (It’s still 100% his fault, legally and morally..in my view, without consent) but still, such scandelous behavior on the part of a woman is …cruising for a brusing, so to speak.

We’re not talking about being less upset because someone elses mother or sister or wife or daughter is raped than if ones own mother, sister, wife or daughter is raped, we’re talking about men who’d be upset if it happened to their own family member, but who do it to someone elses.

Being less concerned is, as you say, understandable. We all have our own lives close to home complete with our own problems. But to create a problem for someone else? Sorry, that’s just disgusting.

No, that’s just human psychology. I can read you the news from China where a flood has killed 100,000 people, and - after decent expressions of grief and sorrow and perhaps a philosophical thought about the fragility of life - you’ll sleep like a baby. If I inform you that your Anglo brother visiting China is starving and ill, you’ll toss and turn all night. This isn’t because you hate Chinese people or because there’s something wrong with you; it’s our natural behavior to be more concerned about Bad Things the closer they are to us either biologically or in terms of emotional bonds.

Men understand that rape is a bad thing intellectually; to get it in the gut, it has to be in the gut, and that means people they (we) care about.

But there’s someting seriously wrong if men don’t understand that rape is a bad thing unless it happens to a woman in relation to himself.

But if it gets turned into “You’ll hurt her feelings” education, I think rape is going to turn into a decision between two different people’s feelings and someone deciding rape is okay because their feelings (or, more likely, “needs”) are more important than the other person’s feelings. Or worse, “What about my feelings when she keeps saying ‘No’?” I’ve seen enough of those discussions on-line to know where that one is going to go.

Something to ponder as I bow out of this discussion.

I’d like to thank Charles and humbition for moving things away from a legalistic model. I can’t remember if this is something I’ve addressed explicitly - but always coming back to ‘what should his punishment be’ is a very perpetrator focused approach.

It appears to be almost impossible to get people to think about women who have been raped, rather than men who rape, and I find that really depressing.

As far as men…

who will doubtfully ever be raped…. wondering at what kind of rape is worse… “I envy you and your ignorance…I hear that it is bliss” - Ani Difranco

Apparently in this day and age…you need not beat a woman into submission when you can drug her and rape her repeatedly…and when she wakes up and can’t move…just keep raping her and tell her all about how you raped and humiliated her the whole night. And…She can’t fight back. She wishes she could have fought back.

My heart was destroyed. If you have never been raped you will NEVER ever know that no matter how it goes down….you have been crushed. “Rape really is a way of killing a person, but then asking them to get up afterwards. So it’s a way of stealing one’s spirit, but you’re supposed to somehow keep going.” -Salamishah Tillet

I will struggle the rest of my life with it. I think you should all see this site The Truth About Rape… Truthaboutrape

Rape of one woman makes others question and worry for themselves and it affects everyone. I sing the praises of BritGirlSF on this thread. Thank you.

Take the Rape Quiz
Talk About Rape, the Quiz

As far as me… who will doubtfully ever be raped…. wondering at what kind of rape is worse… “I envy you and your ignorance…I hear that it is bliss” - Ani Difranco

I am not discouraging men from being involved in the fight against rape.
Just try to get the story straight.

Lastly an excerpt from “ I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” – Andrea Dworkin
I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape

“What’s involved in doing something about all of this? The men’s movement seems to stay stuck on two points. The first is that men don’t really feel very good about themselves. How could you? The second is that men come to me or to other feminists and say: “What you’re saying about men isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.”

And I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues. Tell the novelists who think that rape is wonderful. Tell Larry Flynt. Tell Hugh Hefner. There’s no point in telling me. I’m only a woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. These men presume to speak for you. They are in the public arena saying that they represent you. If they don’t, then you had better let them know.

Then there is the private world of misogyny: what you know about each other; what you say in private life; the exploitation that you see in the private sphere; the relationships called love, based on exploitation. It’s not enough to find some traveling feminist on the road and go up to her and say: “Gee, I hate it.”

Say it to your friends who are doing it. And there are streets out there on which you can say these things loud and dear, so as to affect the actual institutions that maintain these abuses. You don’t like pornography? I wish I could believe it’s true. I will believe it when I see you on the streets. I will believe it when I see an organized political opposition. I will believe it when pimps go out of business because there are no more male consumers.

You want to organize men. You don’t have to search for issues. The issues are part of the fabric of your everyday lives.”

It is one thing for antirape education to just be an explanation of, “here are the laws, these are the consequences.” But Maia seems to want it to accomplish something more.

Not all rapists or potential rapists are reachable. Those who really don’t care about consent — the sociopaths and the extreme “ideological” sexists — are probably not going to be changed by education. But I think there is also a population which could be reachable by a different approach, an approach which honestly approaches the question in terms of the harm that rape causes, which demonstrates convincingly how that harm arises directly out of disregarding the consent of the other person, and which appeals directly to the desire to be a decent person, not to cause harm.

I would argue that such education also has to be compassionate to its target audience, to understand (if not always agree with) its culture and, for example, the pressures it puts on men to be masculine in a certain way.

Let’s not insult the target audience of antirape education by assuming that they are without feelings and compassion themselves, and assuming that they will only respond to commands and legalities. If discussions tend to be derailed in that direction, one (maybe minor) reason for this may be because legalities are so often the focus in the first place. Perhaps taking a break from legalities could be a good strategy.

Everyone else I’m sorry I didn’t notice this conversation yesterday - Maia

I don’t want to give the asshat who insists on posting to this thread any more attention than he’s managed to get, but I’m really uncomfortable with any definition of “rape” that isn’t punishable by law.

Yes, let’s prevent it from happening. Let’s educate men that they don’t have a right to sex. But I don’t want there to be some kinds of rape that are “legal” and other kinds of rape that are “illegal”.

Maybe I’m reading you wrong because asshat keeps barging in, in which case I’m sorry for the misreading. I just don’t see men changing their behavior until the things women know to be “rape” are things that courts of law also know to be “rape”.

There are a lot of actions that have “Bad doggie, bad!” consequences. I don’t think all feminist-definition-of-rape rapes need to result in someone going to the Big House, but I do believe that all feminist-definitions-of-rape acts are rape, even if they don’t mean someone goes to the Big House. I think that’s one of the problems with rape — there aren’t enough “degrees” of rape. There isn’t a “this is rape, sorry, you might not like it, but the legal system recognizes that this is rape.”

If I touch you, and you didn’t want to be touched by me, that’s battery. There’s a point where my touching you on your shoulder against your wishes is going to warrant more than a stern warning from the police, but if you touch me after I’ve told you not to, I can call the police and they will give you that stern warning.

I don’t have a clue how it would work, but there have to be consequences other than wagging a finger disapprovingly and saying “Bad doggie!”

I have a friend who verbally consented (and not under any guessable duress) to have sex with her regular partner, and experienced it as rape

What do you believe should be the court’s position on this, Charles?

You have already been banned from this thread, and at this point, I think you are perilously close to being banned from this site. And this fragment above is exactly why.

I think that my friend shouldn’t have been raped by my other friend. I think we should find ways to change the culture to make rapes like that one not happen. I think both my friends would have been happier people if they hadn’t had sex that night. This isn’t a thread about what the legal definitions of rape should be, or of what sort of evidence should be admissible, but it seems that that is the only way that you can conceptualize rape. As something to be punished by the law, not something to be prevented from happening.

As I said, culture does not change overnight, or by fiat, even in my would-be enlightened head. Which is now firmly hitting the desk about this.

In this era of universalizing human rights, it seems that we rarely make this effort anymore, particularly on behalf of those within our own cultures who hold beliefs we think we understand all too well. And of course we are interested in change, not only understanding. But what seems to happen is that we present, as unarguable and immutable moral standards, a set of principles which is well adapted to the lives and social expectations of “our people,” but one which does not address the problems which arise in the social environment of others. Social environments tend to be self-reinforcing and self-validating, even in the face of regulations imposed from above; we tend to approve of this when colonized peoples retain their cultures, to the extent they do, in the face of colonialism, but we are less approving when we are the ones trying to engage in top-down social reform.

It is easy enough to figure out what is the right answer in a rape prevention scenario. It is not hard to learn that authority has a right answer for your heartfelt dilemmas, and is not really interested in why you find authority’s answers difficult or unworkable. It is a lesson taught to young people by all too many of the institutions which dominate their lives.

It isn’t so much what is taught in the scenario, that fails to take. It is what is taught by the social structure in which the scenarios are presented. For those of the young who do not adopt our ideas, do we really want “feminists” to represent the people who presented them with scenarios which had right answers, who started up discussions which only had right answers, who told them there was either the right way or the highway, and who didn’t deign to listen? Can we expect young people to learn to listen to each other, if we do not listen to them? If we tense up at the merest mention of an idea which might orbit at whatever distance from “rape culture,” and fail to see the utterer, too, as a real, vulnerable, young person, with real problems of learning to manage a reputation and sexual persona within a real social environment?

Masculinity, even for us, is like femininity a performance, something which is not innate but learned. It is learned, and it is reinforced by others. In any particular culture, including our own cultures of “traditional sexuality,” masculinity is reinforced by men and women, as femininity is reinforced by men and women, playing off the expectations of each other. Those in whom masculinity does not take, are not reinforced – and many of these are not “gay,” which is now a recognized status for many people who do not otherwise allow a lot of leeway within the expectations of masculinity for heterosexual men. Those in whom femininity does not take, I need not explain their fate for this audience, whether they remain heterosexual or choose a lesbian identity.

Well, maybe to use the postmodern expression, I am one of those who believe that we are “always already dog training” each other, and this is inescapable. But if our goal is to teach others to avoid giving pain and hurt, I think we can do this, if we model the compassion we want, ourselves. There are those who do not care whether they hurt others, and I don’t think we can always reach them, though some do change. But what about those who do care, and who do not, themselves, rape, but who come up with the wrong answers in the scenarios because their experiences of the world are different than the ones we wish them to have? I think they have to have real options, not just ideal ones, but ones which make sense to them, in their world.

Personally I side with emphasizing rules less. I think there is a big emphasis on consent as rules, not only because of the need to explain regulations and punishments, but also because our culture just doesn’t do emotions well. In what other field of life do we try to encourage people to treat each other without hurt, rather than to grab for whatever they can within the technical limits of the law? The practice of schools enforcing their rules according to mechanical “zero tolerance” principles, rather than by using measure and human judgment, is corrosive to trust and makes young people all the more susceptible to looking at the wording of regulations rather than to human meaning. And in practice, when enlightened practices are motivated by institutional fear of lawsuits, this does not lead to the institutions treating people as human beings either. We have entrusted the kindling of warm, human caring to cold, indifferent institutions.

Nevertheless, if consent is, to us, caring and treating others as human beings, we have to say explicitly and convincingly that that is what it is, over and above its explanation as rules. And we have to model the human treatment of human beings as we do so. I’m not criticizing anyone specifically here; I’m not even saying that the “feminist” education many young people get is even by people who understand feminism. At this point, the legal requirements are such that much “feminist” education is done by people who hardly “get it,” but they do “get” institutional legalistic pressures, and the human factor suffers.

Actually I have faith that consent, presented as part of a basic mutual respect, can appeal to many, who find its presentation as rules more problematic. Particularly if they are allowed to generate the rules themselves, in ways which make sense to their underlying cultural and social realities. The presentation from above, or at any rate from outside, of what looks like a whole new way of life, will often fail; but people can find for themselves how to implement basic human respect, within the frameworks that they understand. And this will itself, from within, make changes that it is harder to make, from without.

There are times when “within this framework” doesn’t mean “right now”.

We’ve had “within this framework” and it resulted in marital rape. That’s not a time we need to be going back to. We need to get men to respect things like “No”, “Not now”, “I’m sorry, but I’m tired”, “Maybe tomorrow — it’s late and I’ve got work in the morning”.

The only permissible context is mutual consent. Each and every time. Not consent the first time, and then it’s okay every time afterwards.