INTENSITY²
Politics, Mature and taboo => Political Pundits => Topic started by: El on December 18, 2017, 12:19:23 PM
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Five years ago, on Dec. 16, 2012, Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapist intern living in New Delhi, was headed home after watching the movie Life of Pi with a male friend. They got on a bus. Six males were on board, including the driver.
In the moving bus, all six assaulted the couple. Singh was gang-raped, and her friend beaten severely.
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Singh sustained severe damage to her abdomen and intestines. She was airlifted to a hospital in Singapore for treatment but died from her injuries nearly two weeks later.
Five of the rapists were convicted and sentenced to death. The youngest, who was a minor, was sent to a reform facility for three years and later released. One of the rapists died in prison under mysterious circumstances.
For Madhumita Pandey, who was then completing her master's degree in clinical psychology at Bangor University in North Wales, news of the attack was overwhelming.
"It was heartbreaking and I was outraged," she says. "I had always seen the city in a different light prior to this." She was aware of how, almost overnight, perceptions of India had changed. Suddenly, it was dubbed the world's "rape capital" — although statistics are problematic. The stigma around rape means that many women do not report it.
More women seem to be speaking up. According to figures released by the National Crime Records Bureau, the total number of rape cases reported in India increased from 24,923 in 2012 to 34,651 cases last year. But experts say the actual figures are likely much higher.
Pandey had a burning need to know what these rapists were thinking.
She decided to ask the rapists themselves.
In March 2013, three months after the attack, Pandey applied for permission to speak to more than 100 convicted rapists in Delhi's Tihar Central Jail. Going by the ethical guidelines set out by the British Psychological Society, she said she would only interview willing participants.
What she hadn't quite anticipated was how eager they would be to share their side of the story — and the mindsets that would be unveiled.
Pandey assigned numbers to each rapist and did not use their names. Her interviews reinforced the views that rapists had a poor opinion of women in general, but their utter lack of remorse came as a surprise to her. One exception was Participant 49. He is a middle-age man convicted of raping a 5-year-old and had served five years when she interviewed him. He said he felt remorse. But it was not the kind of remorse one might expect.
"He expressed his remorse by saying that now that the girl carries the stigma of rape [and thus is no longer a virgin] and would not find a suitable husband; he would repent for his actions by marrying her when he was released," says Pandey. "He didn't realize that this is not what any rape victim would want. His mindset highlighted a very regressive thought that a woman has to be chaste till marriage or else she is damaged goods."
Pandey was particularly interested in exploring myths about rape — inaccuracies or untruths that put blame on the victim. When a woman is out late, unaccompanied, wearing skimpy clothing or seen drinking or partying, there are many who believe that her behavior could lead to being raped. But in the case of Jyoti Singh, the physiotherapist intern, these rape myths were shattered. "She wasn't out very late, she was traveling with a male companion. She was a city girl who knew Delhi well. She was intelligent, educated, dressed modestly. She didn't fall in line with any of these myths and yet was still raped," says Pandey.
In three phases spanning several months, Pandey spoke to 122 men convicted of rape. In addition to her interviews, she asked them to fill out two questionnaires. The Attitudes Towards Women Test would reveal how they felt about women in general, and the MMIS would gauge their cultural understanding of how men should act or behave.
Pandey was not able to discuss all of her analysis or anecdotes because she is currently in the process of defending her doctoral thesis. But she did say she saw a pattern of "cognitive distortion" — they had created their own version of the crime that allowed them to justify their actions.
"Mukesh Singh [who drove the bus on the night of the Dec. 12 attack] and his brother Ram Singh are classic examples, with attitudes typical of the rapists I spoke to," says Pandey, who was a consulting psychologist for India's Daughter, a BBC documentary about the rape.
In an interview from jail for the documentary, Mukesh Singh claimed that if Jyoti and her male friend had not tried to fight back, the six males on the bus would not have beaten them so severely. He described the incident as an "accident" and stated that women who went out at night had only themselves to blame if they attracted molesters. Like Singh, the rapists interviewed by Pandey shared a lack of awareness of what consent meant.
In an effort to find out whether other criminals convicted for crimes other than rape were as unrepentant as the rapists she spoke to, Pandey interviewed 65 convicted murderers in the same jail. She found that their attitudes were notably different.
"With few exceptions, the murderers clearly blamed themselves for their crimes," she says. "Whether it was premeditated or an act committed in a moment of irrational anger, they regretted it and realized how their actions had affected other people or destroyed lives. This was not the case with the rapists."
Perhaps, she says, "when you have a dead body, you are far more accountable."
In November 2016, Pandey presented a paper at the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology held in New Orleans, reporting on the different ways in which convicted rapists presented excuses and justifications for their crimes. In her presentation, she look at a sample of "repentant vs. nonrepentant" rapists from her research. In her interviews, she says, "most convicted rapists presented themselves as nonrepentant and attempted to justify their crimes." They told Pandey that the women they raped had no idea how to dress modestly, that their body language was inviting and that all men raped — they were just the ones who were caught.
"On the other hand, men who were repentant believed that their actions were morally reprehensible [but] were a result of extenuating circumstances that could have been avoided, such as alcohol, drugs, bad company," she says.
The chairman of the session where Pandey presented her paper was impressed. "Pandey's research focuses on a greater understanding of incarcerated people, which is in alignment with much of the research being done by the New School of Convict Criminology," says Grant Tietjen, assistant professor of criminal justice at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa. "Any research of this kind is significant because it provides unique insight into the motivations of a difficult to access or highly stigmatized population, who are often discarded or ignored by mainstream society."
Even though Pandey did not compile statistics about her interviews, he says, her face-to-face observations provide "a valuable resource to the counseling community, policymakers, researchers and legislators when grappling with how to rehabilitate this specific type of sexual offender."
Her study has inspired others in India as well. In Gujarat, professor K. Jaishankar, president of the South Asian Society of Criminology and Victimology, is guiding a doctoral student who has interviewed 55 convicted rapists with the same aim as Pandey's — to find out what motivated them to commit these crimes.
But there has also been a backlash online, with some posters accusing the researcher of supporting rapists. "It's a negative perception that can weigh heavily on the researcher and be a deterrent," says Jaishankar.
"In spite of our disgust at sexual violence and those who perpetrate it, we need to psychologically evaluate the rapist to stop escalating crimes against women," says Pandey in defense of her work.
Painted on the walls of Tihar, amid the artwork and graffiti by inmates, were words that Pandey took to heart: "It is better to light a candle of reform than to curse the darkness of crime."
The obtuse, unhelpful absolutism of "we can't even retrospectively research this" pisses me off. We damn fucking well should research this. This is important. Pretending all rapists are amoral monsters who live in the shadows supports rapists far more than trying to better understand what their thought processes are so that we can at least take a shot at changing those thought processes. Some are amoral monsters who would commit violence regardless of societal permission- violence, including sexual violence, will never be totally removed from the human behavior set. This kind of research could help with the in-between people, who do terrible things because they know those terrible things are, to some extend, socially sanctioned by the people they're surrounded by, the people they respect, and the society they live in.
I wonder what answers would have come up if the interviewer had been male (I would guess that interviewer gender must affect the data in this kind of study- but, that would be something that would need to be studied, if it hasn't).
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Rapists - both men and women (not sure how many female rapists she interviewed and guessing it was somewhere south of "one") are amoral. You do not rape someone and think it something you would want happen to you or to your loved ones and it is not something you would do brazenly around public and there is a reason. They know it is illegal and morally wrong. They can excuse and justify it all they like but they are animals.
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Rapists - both men and women (not sure how many female rapists she interviewed and guessing it was somewhere south of "one") are amoral. You do not rape someone and think it something you would want happen to you or to your loved ones and it is not something you would do brazenly around public and there is a reason. They know it is illegal and morally wrong. They can excuse and justify it all they like but they are animals.
so you disagree with the following?
"It is better to light a candle of reform than to curse the darkness of crime."
How do you explain the fact that some cultures, apparently, breed more "animals" than do other cultures? Not interested?
By asking these men about their attitudes, the researcher was trying to answer that question , in hope of finding ways to prevent rapes in the future . Prevalent Indian attitudes to women woulld seem to a factor. That would suggest that appropriate education could have a positive effect.
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I am amused to see the "all men are rapists" line used in this manner by convicted rapists.
The rationale for justification seems odd though. I mean, plenty of murderers justify their
actions, no? You would think that the same mechanisms to evoke an expression of guilt and
repentance would be in place for stealing pussy - except that maybe there's an underlying shame
that isn't present. It would be interesting to see if child rapists show a greater or lesser distribution
for lack of contrition.
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... and it is not something you would do brazenly around public and there is a reason.
But, in some cultures and circumstances, it IS public and justified within the social circle.
You don't have to reach into a war situation either - even the headline case: sharing a
gang raping with strangers strikes me as taking this to a disturbingly public willingness.
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Rapists - both men and women (not sure how many female rapists she interviewed and guessing it was somewhere south of "one") are amoral. You do not rape someone and think it something you would want happen to you or to your loved ones and it is not something you would do brazenly around public and there is a reason. They know it is illegal and morally wrong. They can excuse and justify it all they like but they are animals.
so you disagree with the following?
"It is better to light a candle of reform than to curse the darkness of crime."
How do you explain the fact that some cultures, apparently, breed more "animals" than do other cultures? Not interested?
By asking these men about their attitudes, the researcher was trying to answer that question , in hope of finding ways to prevent rapes in the future . Prevalent Indian attitudes to women woulld seem to a factor. That would suggest that appropriate education could have a positive effect.
Okay. "No one told me it was not a good thing to tear the heads off babies and strangle children, now that I know I have all the compassion in the world for both babies and children. It was all a misunderstanding and I have been educated now."
Sorry, just do not buy it.
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There are cultures where it is considered the responsibility of a woman to not get raped, rather than the responsibility of men to not commit rape.
There are even prominent people within our cultures who make statements that appear to support that position. Donna Karan springs to mind.
And it's not just a matter of telling people what is and isn't appropriate behaviour when it comes to gender relations. When you are dealing with entrenched cultural attitudes, trying to explain things like consent can feel like trying to teach a dog card tricks.
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Al, consider the inhuman treatment of African slaves, in the past. Consider Nazi German's inhuman treatment of Jews, gypsies, autistic people etc. How was this possible? Because people of white European descent are monsters? No,but rather because those victims had all been portrayed as less than human by social stereotyping and/or propaganda.
In some cultures , women are pretty much the equvalent of those African slaves. They exist to do men's bidding. They are not persons so much as a man's property. That enables men to act monstrously towards them. As MoSW says, that kind of cultaral conditioning is not easily undone.
Now you're taking the attitude of "Rapists are inhuman monsters, so we needn't consider their point of view" . Umm, well okay that's clearly fair , but it's actually the exact same damned attitude all over again, isn't it? And that's not gonna help the situation. Without understanding the psychology behind it, we have no way to take effective preventative action. And more women get raped . Well , thanks a million for your help, Al [irony]
By the way, I'm ignoring the case of women raping men, because I've yet to hear of marauding gangs of women pillaging a village and forcing themselves on all the helpless men, whilst history is littered with cases of role-reversal. I think it's safe to assume that the psychological factors behind female-male rape are substantially different; so it just muddies the waters to raise it here.
Ofc , if it's all just because "Some people are inhuman monsters" then it's all the same. But nobody here is agreeing with your dismissive approach to it, are they?
Let me say again: the idea that some people are not human is part of the problem ; no way will it solve the problem.
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There are cultures where it is considered the responsibility of a woman to not get raped, rather than the responsibility of men to not commit rape.
There are even prominent people within our cultures who make statements that appear to support that position. Donna Karan springs to mind.
And it's not just a matter of telling people what is and isn't appropriate behaviour when it comes to gender relations. When you are dealing with entrenched cultural attitudes, trying to explain things like consent can feel like trying to teach a dog card tricks.
Unfortunately, there are grey areas in responsibility.
Women DO have to take some responsibility for protecting themselves and not putting themselves in harm's way.
If I as a young man jumped into a car as a passenger, of a friend I KNEW was well over the limit and I TRUST he will get me home okay, I have increased my risk of potential harm. IF he kills me, HE is responsible (I was not the driver), however If he was under the limit and we were tee-boned by a drunk and I was killed I have not put myself at increased risk AND I am still not responsible.
If I wander through a bad neighbourhood by myself late at night and am beaten up I am not responsible for the beating but I have chosen to put myself at great risk of something bad happening.
The lady at the start of the article did NOT put herself at greater risk and like the example of me getting killed because a drunk teeboned the car that was being driven by a sober friend, it was NOT in any way an outcome resulting from bad choices best avoided.
There are a lot of very unhelpful and dangerous pushes in society whereby even suggesting that women have some agency and ability to mitigate risk and make good choices is seen as sexist and misogynist and I think it harmful. Say women have any responsibility for their own actions and you are an oppressive victim-blamer.
Some men and some women are simply animals and rape because they think they can get away with it and whatever they get out of it is of more value than what they do to their victims. Personally I think that all women ought to have instilled in them ways to mitigate and reduce risk of being put in very bad situations NOT to completely eliminate, but to reduce teh chance of them being attacked.
Men? They should have instilled into them the importance and dignity of using their greater size and strength to protect and defend women and children and NOT to use their greater physicality to attack women whether sexually or not. Decency and manners go a long way.
If every male had an abhorrence to physically harming women and children and every women had an aversion to choices that placed them in dangerous situations I would be a lot happier. It is not a coverall and animal men and women will continue to exist and rape others and do all kinds of terrible things but there would be a lot less of it I would think.
That may make me an out of touch dinosaur, or perhaps a misogynist or a sexist. BUT if yuo think it does, then I think you should ask me on whether drunken sex = rape, whether regretting sex =rape or whether the whole signing contracts with potential sex partners to affirm consent is viable. Because then we will really be off to the races and I would be pleased to see that kind of reaction.
Sadly, I think you may disappoint me by agreeing with much of this and being normal.
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Al, consider the inhuman treatment of African slaves, in the past. Consider Nazi German's inhuman treatment of Jews, gypsies, autistic people etc. How was this possible? Because people of white European descent are monsters? No,but rather because those victims had all been portrayed as less than human by social stereotyping and/or propaganda.
In some cultures , women are pretty much the equvalent of those African slaves. They exist to do men's bidding. They are not persons so much as a man's property. That enables men to act monstrously towards them. As MoSW says, that kind of cultaral conditioning is not easily undone.
Now you're taking the attitude of "Rapists are inhuman monsters, so we needn't consider their point of view" . Umm, well okay that's clearly fair , but it's actually the exact same damned attitude all over again, isn't it? And that's not gonna help the situation. Without understanding the psychology behind it, we have no way to take effective preventative action. And more women get raped . Well , thanks a million for your help, Al [irony]
By the way, I'm ignoring the case of women raping men, because I've yet to hear of marauding gangs of women pillaging a village and forcing themselves on all the helpless men, whilst history is littered with cases of role-reversal. I think it's safe to assume that the psychological factors behind female-male rape are substantially different; so it just muddies the waters to raise it here.
Ofc , if it's all just because "Some people are inhuman monsters" then it's all the same. But nobody here is agreeing with your dismissive approach to it, are they?
Let me say again: the idea that some people are not human is part of the problem ; no way will it solve the problem.
Let me say again then:
""No one told me it was not a good thing to tear the heads off babies and strangle children, now that I know I have all the compassion in the world for both babies and children. It was all a misunderstanding and I have been educated now.""
There. You would consider that wouldn't you? You are a Psychologist trying to figure me out and I now have an audience in my solitary cell and I am willing to spill and appease your sense of me reforming and having some element of humanity. So do I pass the human test? I am not all bad? Perhaps given some more reflection I can go bad into society....maybe work in a Day Care Centre? Why not?
If you (not you, you, but anyone) look at a fellow human and on the basis of some immutable part of them, see a monster, that is an internal failing. Man's inhumanity to man is a more than a fancy phrase. If you dehumanise and mistreat and torture, a fellow human, you do not get to wipe your hands clean with a - that is how I was raised.
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If you (not you, you, but anyone) look at a fellow human and on the basis of some immutable part of them, see a monster, that is an internal failing.
In many cases, it's also (and even primarily) a societal failing that can be usefully adressed by counter-propaganda etc.
. If you dehumanise and mistreat and torture, a fellow human, you do not get to wipe your hands clean with a - that is how I was raised.
There is a difference between a reason and an excuse. Some reasons also serve as excuses, some don't. Looking at the reasons behind people's behaviour is not about providing nor accepting excuses; no more than the mechanic in a garage is looking to excuse a car for it's failings. It's about being pro-active. It's about taking responsibilty, rather than just moaning about the evils of human nature.
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If you (not you, you, but anyone) look at a fellow human and on the basis of some immutable part of them, see a monster, that is an internal failing.
In many cases, it's also (and even primarily) a societal failing that can be usefully adressed by counter-propaganda etc.
. If you dehumanise and mistreat and torture, a fellow human, you do not get to wipe your hands clean with a - that is how I was raised.
There is a difference between a reason and an excuse. Some reasons also serve as excuses, some don't. Looking at the reasons behind people's behaviour is not about providing nor accepting excuses; no more than the mechanic in a garage is looking to excuse a car for it's failings. It's about being pro-active. It's about taking responsibilty, rather than just moaning about the evils of human nature.
""No one told me it was not a good thing to tear the heads off babies and strangle children, now that I know I have all the compassion in the world for both babies and children. It was all a misunderstanding and I have been educated now.""
I say this straight faced in my prison cell.
I seem to show remorse and am being honest. Based on this reason or excuse what do you make of this and do you use this to form an opinion that I am merely a product of ill-education and societal indifference or lack of value in small children and babies? Perhaps I could moan about being unloved or having a rough childhood. Maybe that could pad the theory that I was misguided and did not appreciate the value of children?
Me? I would say that this is simply a sociopathic remorsely monster telling you what I thought you wanted to hear and that I was simply a dehumanising monster.
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'one died in prison, in suspicious circumstances'
Oh, isn't that just awful. Such a tragic, piteous, rotten loss to the world. I hope it was as slow, painful and vicious as it most likely was, stuck in a little metal box packed to bursting with the vilest, most thuggish, scum of the earth vicious-like-a-ferret little noxious cunts...they'd likely have quite a long time to do what it is that kind of vermin does to rapist filth too, before any screws came along.
As for the understanding, studying etc. My stance on it is yes, do try to understand the motivations, using studies written by known to be female questioners, known to be male ones, and ones generated by computer. Study the results, but don't give any of the little fuckers any credit as being reformed based on the results, for the exact reasons that yes, they are likely to be self-serving for just that, yes, they are likely to go and do it again, and yes, they are fucking animals for the most part that deserve every karmic kick in the face that ever comes their way.
But psychological vivisection of the creatures in question is, IMO a good idea. Just because you study the filthy things doesn't mean you need to forgive or to justify them. Just examine the psychology and do what can be done to reduce the incidence of rape.
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I say this straight faced in my prison cell.
I seem to show remorse and am being honest. Based on this reason or excuse what do you make of this and do you use this to form an opinion that I am merely a product of ill-education and societal indifference
Did you actuallly read the article? Of the 122 men, only one showed any remorse. So nobody's basing any conclusions on that. But, hang on, remorse and honesty are neither reasons nor excuses are they, Al? Heck, I don't know why I'm bothering to argue with you. You're obviously completely talking out of your ass.
Me? I would say that this is simply a sociopathic remorsely monster telling you what I thought you wanted to hear and that I was simply a dehumanising monste
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intersting point. Actually, to turn your argument around, (to fit the observed facts) the fact they didn't pretend to be remorseful argues againsst them being sociopathic. Hmm . And , no, that's not want I want to hear. That is scary.
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I say this straight faced in my prison cell.
I seem to show remorse and am being honest. Based on this reason or excuse what do you make of this and do you use this to form an opinion that I am merely a product of ill-education and societal indifference
Did you actuallly read the article? Of the 122 men, only one showed any remorse. So nobody's basing any conclusions on that. But, hang on, remorse and honesty are neither reasons nor excuses are they, Al? Heck, I don't know why I'm bothering to argue with you. You're obviously completely talking out of your ass.
Me? I would say that this is simply a sociopathic remorsely monster telling you what I thought you wanted to hear and that I was simply a dehumanising monste
.
intersting point. Actually, to turn your argument around, (to fit the observed facts) the fact they didn't pretend to be remorseful argues againsst them being sociopathic. Hmm . And , no, that's not want I want to hear. That is scary.
The poor me is just as bad.
"Poor me, I was put into a terrible situation and made a bad choice. How was I to know that it was wrong to physically abuse someone. Who would have thought struggling and crying was not consent? I needed to be educated against this and no one pointed out what a human in anguish and pain looks like, how was I to know? It's society's fault. Poor me"
Psychologist jots down "Society's fault. Poorly educated"
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I honestly wonder what Al's reaction to this article would be if someone he hadn't shitlisted as too liberal/SJW/feminist/whatevs had posted it, or if I'd posted it without stating my opinion about the importance of researching this.
The weird thing to me is I feel like he's falling more on the angry-hysterical-feminist side of this than I am, which isn't what I'd have predicted.
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Rape is a highly emotionally charged topic, for pretty much anybody except the unrepentent stone cold rapist type, I presume, not being one I cannot comment upon what goes on inside my head when I rape someone, because I don't and never will, of course, but it is the type of thing which easily arouses both a righteous anger and a visceral disgust in decent, normally functioning human beings, especially an example of a violent, brutal gang-rape. I do not pretend to be able to speak for women regarding their inner emotional processes, (I can guess, in the case of those who have been raped, but only approximate, without being told firsthand, of course) but of those who have not, but read the article, there is perhaps one factor which I could forsee differing in the case of men, and women.
We have to deal (on being a third party hearing of an attack in either a man or woman's case, without directly being involved) with the revulsion that something that at least looked, walked, dressed and talked like an example of the species, so to speak, as us, did such a thing. Perhaps an added amount of emotional response could be stimulated via the 'uncanny valley' effect. Something that looks just like a man, at all other times, but which is not, and which is as close to pure evil as your going to get. (I'll say right now about cultural conditioning and my stance on it-yes it exists, and where resistance to change occurs it must simultaneously have those outside the culture attempt to educate it out, and where this is met with frank refusal to change then force should, IMO be used to bring about an end to it. It might not be possible to drag a group with the morals of a Homo Erectus out of the lithic era, but in such a case, if they go around raping women, then nevertheless, cultural values can go to hell, beat it out of them if you have to)
Which is exactly an example of what I was trying to speak of, regarding the uncanny valley effect. Similar to, perhaps the androcentric witch-burnings of the middle ages. Women being (in this case falsely, due to religiose superstition) regarded as being not-woman, that which walks in the skin of a woman, and speaks, eats, drinks, breathes like a woman, but which in their 'reality' when seen in a cultural milleau as being a possible entity, in those times, as a living embodiment of the devil and hellfire, wrapped in a female-shaped package, it triggered off a shitstorm, a presumably equally visceral loathing and hatred, with consequent violent effects.
(no part of this, btw, is intended to imply that a woman would or should feel less revulsion about a rapist, rather, its my hypothesis that there may be some manner of a qualitative difference in the nature of it, for a woman, the hostile, evil piece of shit rapist is just that, a noxious piece of evil shit, but the difference I hypothesize between a male and female perception of the same thing (the rapist/rapists) is that for a female, the actor (rapist/s) are 'other' but are known 'other', a knowable quantity (male, in the context of un-female, distinct, and at least identifiable as POTENTIAL threats, whereas a man sees a 'man', who is a rapist, and there is also that element of a viper in one's own nest (the nest, being an analogy for maleness, being a member of the same group as has such filth sneaking and skulking around within, looking like real men, like man, but not man and unidentifiable as not-man), having all the same body parts and physical makeup as real, male people, whereas for a female, the difference is quite obvious, of course, and with female rapists being much less likely, there is the fellow female segment of the populace at large who is largely safe to assign the category of non-rapist. You at least KNOW someone has a dick and a Y chromosome.
(and no, to both the men and women here, I am not in any way trying to portray all men as in actuality, potential rapists, most, hopefully, don't have it in them. Rather, I am attempting to dissect qualitative differences in the motivations for, and type of hate that such trash so rightfully receive.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
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Actually, that's an interesting point to compare it to witch trials in that way. Both are movements of intense cultural hatred that provoke(d) a visceral reaction of disgust in the people calling them out - but the modern conclusions strikingly different. The witches' accusation now being judged as obviously false due to superstition. It's hard to imagine that two hundred years from now, people would be exonerating rapists in the same way as they do witches now. Still possible, maybe. Also makes me wonder whether any of those witches had committed crimes - maybe not of the spellcasting and cursing sort, but if the community dislike was ever justified or whether it was all mob nonsense.
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What MIGHT be possible is to stop differentiating rape from other violent assaults.
Taking the sexual weight out of the equation.
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I honestly wonder what Al's reaction to this article would be if someone he hadn't shitlisted as too liberal/SJW/feminist/whatevs had posted it, or if I'd posted it without stating my opinion about the importance of researching this.
The weird thing to me is I feel like he's falling more on the angry-hysterical-feminist side of this than I am, which isn't what I'd have predicted.
Why would you imagine that? No, honestly El? Do you imagine my stance on rapists or a particular rapist would be softer if told by someone else? Really? On what basis? How would it change? How shy hae I ever ben on expressing an unpopular opinion?
Are you being honest, or are you being completely full of shit, for some reason?
I am falling more on the angry Feminist side of this? How so?
Getting men and women responsible for their own agency is a very traditional response and not at all Feminist.
So again, are you full of shit again, or.....are you full of shit?
Curious what your own assessment is?
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What MIGHT be possible is to stop differentiating rape from other violent assaults.
Taking the sexual weight out of the equation.
Reflex was to disagree, but unable to come up with a decent argument. The reflex could be because it suggests challenging the long established laws and mindset of my own society, rather than critiquing some other culture; or a natural reflex to disagree. Either way, good call.
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What MIGHT be possible is to stop differentiating rape from other violent assaults.
Taking the sexual weight out of the equation.
In examining the psychology of sexual vs. nonsexual assaults, or in prosecuting them? Because I wouldn't assume the psychology was the same (though, I suppose, that's something to research, if it hasn't been yet).
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What MIGHT be possible is to stop differentiating rape from other violent assaults.
Taking the sexual weight out of the equation.
In examining the psychology of sexual vs. nonsexual assaults, or in prosecuting them? Because I wouldn't assume the psychology was the same (though, I suppose, that's something to research, if it hasn't been yet).
Have understood the accepted psychology of sexual assault isn't about sex, but rather power and dominance.
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Indeed, jack. And one would assume in some cases of extreme misogyny, in sleazebags like those socalled 'men' who just look at it as 'pussy is just fucking property', could be born out of their contempt for women. Fucking disgusting trash types that look at women as little more than conveniently shaped, moving pieces of meat.
In prosecuting them, certainly, just lock the bastards up,and I've really no sympathy should a rapist get some inside justice meted out to them, so to speak. But in attempting to prevent future rapes by as-yet-free people with the potential to rape, but who have not done so, IMO it is important to understand the psychology as efficiently as possible. It is worth it if even one rape is prevented by such efforts.
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What MIGHT be possible is to stop differentiating rape from other violent assaults.
Taking the sexual weight out of the equation.
In examining the psychology of sexual vs. nonsexual assaults, or in prosecuting them? Because I wouldn't assume the psychology was the same (though, I suppose, that's something to research, if it hasn't been yet).
The former, for the most part - though obviously, without all the pitchfork waving and emotional trauma to the victim
(compared to other forms of assault), the law would likely change too.
I remember a story about a female pilot (might even be Tammy Duckworth) who was shot down, badly
injured, and then proceeded to be gang raped. She recalled thinking something along the lines of, "and
this is supposed to injure me more somehow," so I think we're progressing to a more rational view - one
which incidentally should help reduce the amount of rape, if it no longer has a special connotation.
In prosecuting them, certainly, just lock the bastards up,and I've really no sympathy should a rapist get some inside justice meted out to them, so to speak. But in attempting to prevent future rapes by as-yet-free people with the potential to rape, but who have not done so, IMO it is important to understand the psychology as efficiently as possible. It is worth it if even one rape is prevented by such efforts.
Of course, there are probably more regressives than rationalists out there....
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What MIGHT be possible is to stop differentiating rape from other violent assaults.
Taking the sexual weight out of the equation.
In examining the psychology of sexual vs. nonsexual assaults, or in prosecuting them? Because I wouldn't assume the psychology was the same (though, I suppose, that's something to research, if it hasn't been yet).
The former, for the most part - though obviously, without all the pitchfork waving and emotional trauma to the victim
(compared to other forms of assault), the law would likely change too.
I remember a story about a female pilot (might even be Tammy Duckworth) who was shot down, badly
injured, and then proceeded to be gang raped. She recalled thinking something along the lines of, "and
this is supposed to injure me more somehow," so I think we're progressing to a more rational view - one
which incidentally should help reduce the amount of rape, if it no longer has a special connotation.
In prosecuting them, certainly, just lock the bastards up,and I've really no sympathy should a rapist get some inside justice meted out to them, so to speak. But in attempting to prevent future rapes by as-yet-free people with the potential to rape, but who have not done so, IMO it is important to understand the psychology as efficiently as possible. It is worth it if even one rape is prevented by such efforts.
Of course, there are probably more regressives than rationalists out there....
There are a lot of differences between rape and other forms of assault.
Generally with assault the severity of assault is determined by the extent of physical injury. A woman who has been raped may not be physically injured.
Sexual intercourse is an act that takes place between consenting adults on a fairly regular basis (unless you're me). What makes it rape is lack of consent. This is very different from assault, where if someone is beaten and physically injured the issue of consent is effectively irrelevant except in edge cases.
How would treating rape like any other form of assault reduce the incidence of rape? I can see how it might reduce the incidence of provable rape. Can you expand? I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm actually very interested in your point of view.
The motivations and effects of rape are very different from other forms of assault.
If you meet a woman and put your hand around her arm without consent, it's usually not a big deal. If you put your hand on her shoulder without consent, similar. If you put your hand on her butt or her breast or her upper thigh without consent, she would have every right to feel violated, and you're at serious risk of being charged with sexual assault, even though no injury has occurred. There is an element of very personal violation involved with sexual assault.
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What MIGHT be possible is to stop differentiating rape from other violent assaults.
Taking the sexual weight out of the equation.
In examining the psychology of sexual vs. nonsexual assaults, or in prosecuting them? Because I wouldn't assume the psychology was the same (though, I suppose, that's something to research, if it hasn't been yet).
Have understood the accepted psychology of sexual assault isn't about sex, but rather power and dominance.
I think it's still also about sex, at least in a lot of cases.
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Can't quote chapter and verse (and no time to look this up at present) but I recall (from past study) that aggression and sex are closely related, neurologically , in males; therefore you can't draw a clear line between rape and violent assault; and motivationally speaking rape and other violent assaults are often identical, as pointed out. However, it also follows that you can't draw a clear line betweeen normal sex and aggression; and certainly the aspect of domination is present, and enjoyable to both sexes; witness the enormous popularity of BDSM!
This all makes rape uniquely tricky to define and differentiate. As was pointed out, the issue of consent is crucial, wheras it just doesn't come into other violent assaults; it's assumed that the victim did not consent...oh! unless they get a sexual; kick out of being assalted , of course. (We surely all know that quote a lot of people do? i'm pretty sure some of em have posted on this site)
So, no, you can't just lump rape in with other violent assaults , neither psychologically nor legally. That issue of consent is way too important.
What's more, as Silly Walks pointed out , the rape victim might not be physically injured, just psychologically traumatised. Indeed, the kind of detachment displayed by that pilot Cal cited is unusual (and interesting! Was that detachment due to ingrainedl factors like personality and sexual mores? or was it more the result of the situation she was in? I suspect the latter. I suspect she was so taumatised already that she slipped into a state of dissociation ) And let's not forget the other possible serious repercussions of rape that don't occur with other violent attacks: unwanted pregnancy; veneral disease; social stigma. Somebody can quite literally have their life ruined by rape, even disregarding any physical and psychological injury.
So, from the victim's POV, rape is usually much more than merely a physical assault. And rapists often do understand that. eg in rape associated with acts of war, the intention to infect the victim with HIV has sometimes beena major part of the rapist's motivation.
It's altogether likely that that some rapists don't understand the psychological effects of what they've done. Some obviously wouldn't care, even if they did. Others might, if only the prevailing culture taught them to regard women as human beings... and taught them something about female sexuality!
It's said that , for a man, sex is a meaningless act on a par with blowing his nose; wheras for a woman it's a deeply intimate act. Well, I don't like to proapagate sexual steotypes ( I know people of both sexes who would disagree vehemently with that sterotype as applied to themselves) but there is a lot of trurth in that one. And it's not hard to see that if the man happened to fit that stereotype, he woulld not understand that the woman felt violated by that act, not even if he empathised with her as an equal human being. His remorse (if he felt any ) would focus instead on any damage he night have done to the woman's reputation and prosp[ects of marriage (like the child-rapist in that study) . and if the victim was an adult, and no physical damage was done, it might be genuinely hard for hiim to see the harm in i.
Let's resurrect Cal's obnoxious phrase "stealing pussy" . Yeah, some men real;y do see rape in such simplistic terms,; they've simply taken something without consent, and that's no worse than any other acrt of petty theft. Indeed it's less of a crime because the victim still gets to keep the thing that was stolen, don't they? Then, consider the case of a prostitute who has her pussy up for barter anyway (or some girl who dresses like a prositute) and...yeah I can surely see the harm in it, but I can also quite easily imagine how some men might fail to see the harm in it , especially given that sexual desire tends to interfere with people's judgement . doesn't it? (to put it mildly) .
Those would the men who might benefit from education. But I don't just mean "Telling him it's wrong" (Al) . I mean making him understand the harm in it; giving him the wherewithal to be able to see it from the victim's point-of-view. To do that, you might even have to go so far as to challenge societal norms. Not an easy task at all.
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Except, of course, that only women see sex as a meaningless at. Not all women but just in general. Women generally just throw sex around like party favours, with no thought to consequence. Throwing booty around left and right.
Sounds pretty bad doesn't it? But honestly no more right nor honest than what you just said about guys, right?
I guess the thrust of the argument is that men do not see sex in non-violent terms and/or they are too blinded by their own primal lust to see much less care for how women they are having sex with have done so willingly and consensually. Much in the way that when they torture animals or rip arms off babies they are blinded by any pain or distress they inflict. Stupid men need education so they can say "Oh....I guet it now, torturing puppies is bad, ripping arms off babies is bad and raping women is bad. Silly me, how did these things evade my conscience for so long. Thank God for education"
I just do not agree with your assessment.
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Sounds pretty bad doesn't it? But honestly no more right nor honest than what you just said about guys, right?
That's actually been said to me by several guys. Nearly all my friends have been guys, so I get to hear the male perspective more often than the female perspective
Now, it seemed to me, first time I heard it. to me that if a guy believes that , then it must be true of that particular guy at the very least. Eventually, after hearing several guys say the same (as well as several other guys making it clear that they were an exception to that rule) I concluded that it must be true of rather a lot of guys. Hence my declaration that there's a lot of truth in that stereotype-- to my own annoyance , because I don't like sterotypes, and I surely don't want to tar all men with the same brush (if it is tarring). But having finally accepted that, I've thought about it further, and read further, bearing that in mind all the time, and it does help to make sense of several things.
I should think there's some reserach to back that up. Why don't you check that, Al?. (It might back you up instead),
But I don't see that you've put anything like the lkind of effort I've put into trying to understand these thingss. You just have a knee-jerk judgmental reaction , call it an "opinion" and project ugly motivations people with different opinions -again without putting any effort into understanding where they're really coming from. Just skim-read and judge.
Who is supposed to be being dishonest here, btw? Me, or the guys who said that? And what the heck would they gain by misrepresenting themelves like that? None of them were rapists. They weren't making excuses for anything, just discussing their attitudes. And it doesn't exactly cast them in a positive light.
Oh! you must mean that it's me being dishonest. But that still doesn't make any sense to me.
FYI, my opinions are not static , because I'm always adjusting them in the light of further information, but thise that continue to make sense, no matter how much i turn them around and look at the question from different angles, in different lights, those ones tend to stick.
Also, FYI, I'm intersted enough in the male perspective and sympathetic enough towards men, in genearal, to have read psychology books with tites like like "Healing the Male Psyche" . That particular one made a big impression on me, because , until I read that specific book m thought about what the author was saying, and also thought about how rthat might apply to my friends, I didn't really believe there were any significant differences between male psyche and the and female psyche. Nnor did I believethat my own psyche was especially female in any case. I didn't want to believe it, because I so much wish we all drop this male-female shit and just be people, FFS. (Oh !and also I had a Negative Mother Complex, as a result of a shit relationship with my Mum. As might easily be guessed from my preceding statements) )
That book deepened my understanding of human beings, because it confronted me with some significant factors I was missing, when I was looking at other people. Things I was missing because it didn't suit me to grasp them
That's not where you think I'm coming from at all is it? And I feel pretty damned offended when somebody like you comes along and puts down my POV with some emotionally -driven, off-the-cuff opinion which isn't open to change in the least (so far as I can see) whilst judging me as "dishonest" or whatever, just because it doesn't suit you to believe that an intelligent and kindly motivately person could honestly hold a different opinion from yours.
Well, I also find it hard to understand how an intelligent guy can hold some of the opinions you do. But I do actually stuggle to understand that. I don't just dismiss you as a "liar" . My favourite theories on that front are that you can't be arsed with applying your intelligence to these matters; and/or it's all about ego-defence, really. In this instance, if you put a rapist down as a Monster , and won;'t admit to any kind of point of commonality , that proves to the world and -more importantly- to yourself that you're not a monster, doesn't it?
That proves nothing to me, though, because I personally believe that the monsters within us are more relevant than the monsters on the outside, and we've no hope of taming them, and preventing them from going on the rampage if we pretend to ourselves that they don't exist. So, personally, I'm all for looking closely at what I have in common with people who do monstrous things, amd asking myself what kind of thing could tip me into behaving monstrously? I call that "being responsible" .
Look into Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment sometime. That guy demonstrated that ordinary people are capable of behaving monstrously, under certain (quite common) conditions. We might hope and believe that we're the exception. But even if we are, we don't have the power, nor the resources to be able to to jail all the others when push comes to shove. So we'd better , for everybody's sake, find some better approach to monstrous behaviour , hadn't we? Trying to inderstand it is a start.
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Walkie, much as I appreciate you, I have to call you on the 'pussy-stealer' type, being less of a crime because the victim gets to keep what is stolen. Is it fucking shit less. If anything it is worse. Because as well as being a rapist piece of shite, they go beyond that and try to blow it off, not even trying to excuse themelves, as if what they took, was of about the same moral level of encountering a woman (or man, if the rapist is a faggot of course. Ew.), and, without engaging in rape, in their view 'muff-burgling' being no different, from if they instead didn't rape, but dipped their hand into the lass's purse, bag, coat or whatever else of the kind and helped themselves to a pack of fucking smokes?
Anyone that damn callous as to actually see the two as equal, IMO almost certainly has strong sociopathic tendencies, and, afaik (I am right on this, as being the consensus, Elle, am I not, with regards to the psychology and psychopathological traits, as a headshrinker, you're probably more well up on the most current of the literature than I am) that those with a personality disorder are essentially untreatable, its inborn, with things such as sociopathy, and true psychopathy (ed bundy types I mean, by the latter), just waiting to surface, when its practical, or perhaps when it suits the nutball best to let it off any leash they may have it on. And if it is manifest in a given subject, they are hard-wired that way, and that even if one were to lock such up permanently, the only way that they could be made to stop THINKING of the evils they desire to do, and desiring them still, would be to remove the bit of them that does the thinking from the rest of their body, no?
'Raxy, of COURSE, I never meant to imply that there was a practical association qualitatively with regards to guilt or innocence, in referencing the uncanny valley and witchcraft. Not in the least. Of course somebody can't be guilty in truth, of witchcraft, regardless of the law of the land, because it is impossible to in actuality, employ witchcraft, white, black or any shade inbetween, in any manner beyond ceremony, and/or use of plant or/and animal derivatives to cause effects, ranging from frank and outright subtly poisoning somebody, sticking some wolfbane in their cup of coffee, etc. to culturally-recognized practices like those of the african sangomas with their Ubulawu herbs *not that I deny that these may indeed have therapeutic or psychotropic properties. Or/and toxic effects in some cases. That this is the case is indisputable, but also indisputable, is that it is science, not magic, although the practitioner may have a nonscientific view, and lack the knowledge that after say, partaking of something like DMT in ayahuasca, that it is dimethyltryptamine, allowed to become orally active via the action of coadmixed and coadministered monoamine oxidase inhibitor alkaloids acting on type 5HT2a, 5HT1a, 5HT2c serotonin receptor and TAARs (trace amine associated receptors) which produce psychedelic manifestations through altering biochemistry. (although, truth told, there IS something pretty well ineffable about some such qualities of some of these things, DMT in particular that is most persuasive)
Although there do also exist intriguing cultural parallels between a mixture of sorcery and science. In north african Ubulawu practices, a heavy dose of sorcery is in with a lot of bioactive plants, but at the same time, once it became available, because they knew some of these precious living resources were in massive danger, due to overexploitation, slow growth, combined, pushing the populations of the living plants into danger of dying out, or becoming almost unavailable, many of these african medicine-men using Ubulawu herbs, decided to adopt a western psychedelic drug, knowing what it was, because they realized that with the synthetic, they could use it in what quantities they required, so as to allow their rich bioactive botanical heritage to procreate, and regenerate, the drug in question being the fairly well-known 2C-B (2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine) being nonnaturally occurring at least in any organism thus far analyzed chemically, but recognizing the common properties of this product of man's artifice and hallucinogen and some of their Ubulawu, 2C-B became highly valued, apparently, among many of these african shamen.
With regards to the hostile, hysterical witchcraft panics in european medieval culture, it was highly misogynistic, and influenced by christianity. But it is thought quite probable that, albeit not deliberately, a hallucinogenic toxic group of fungi, plant pathogens which are in nature, obligate parasites upon grasses and cereal grains being favourite or obligate hosts of some species. These fungi, are the Ergots, genus Claviceps, particularly the commonest probably, in england, and widespread wherever we europeans took our cereals. Most Claviceps species are highly host-specific, restricted either to a single grass (usually, although Clavicipitalean species growing on sedges and reeds have been confirmed to exist) species within a genus, or are restricted in their host range with specificity at genus level with regards to the grass hosts. Claviceps purpurea, the most well-known, and doubtless the most infamous, or rye ergot is unique in the genus Claviceps, in that it is extremely adaptable, even so far as to parasitize arundinoid, pooid, panicoids, even some chloridoid grasses, not just rye, wheat, but not only different, and extremely wide ranging genera of host grasses but entirely different lineages and orders of grass supertypes.
They infect by both distribution of nonsexually produced conidiospores, and ascospores during a sexual cycle, mimicking the pollen grain's germ tube formation and travelling down the internals of the florets of host grasses, with conidia being divided into primarily insect-vectored primary, asexual macroconidia and airborne microconidia, along with short-distance maintainance of infection via the sexual reproductive cycle-produced ascospores, and once these infectious propagules come into contact with a suitable host species and locus of infection, they replace the ovary of the plant, with their own tissue, subsisting as a parasite, and in order to survive, producing resting structures called sclerotiae, which look like purplish-black, elongated (usually, although since rye ergot is uniquely adaptable the physical morphology of the sclerotium varies according to the morphology and size of the ovary of the plants)
These fall to the ground, and after suitable climactic conditions for their germination and ascospore formation, start sprouting little mushroom-shaped bodies which sporulate away to perpetuate infections.
However, they have a connection, twofold, perhaps, with witchcraft. In one sense, midwives of the ages were also often targeted by the orthodoxy, for their use of herbal remedies and potions, as 'witches', and ergot was, although if misused, extremely poisonous, and in an extremely unpleasant way, it (and today, chemical isolates of purified compounds) are used in obstetric medicine to staunch post-partum haemorrhage, and to quicken difficult labors, as it contains compounds, ergot alkaloids with a peptidic, cyclic sidechain of a small number of amino-acids, the specific aminoacids being variable.
Chemically, they share one thing in common. They are based upon lysergic acid, and have a certain structural commonality with LSD, the peptidic bond, is an amide linkage between two or more aminoacids..LSD, is a lysergic acid amide, and there are numerous analogs, although not so close to the natural ergot alkaloids as to be toxic. The natural ones however, are. They are both oxytocic in effect, to varying degrees of efficacy, some more than others. But they are also extremely fucking potent vasoconstrictors, and unfortunately being parasites of grain ears, replacing the seed used in making bread with their toxin-laden sclerotiae, which cause a distinct pair of toxic syndromes depending on the alkaloidal chemotype of the infecting strain afflicting a given harvest. One chiefly due to vasoconstriction, due to their powerful agonistic effect on adrenergic receptors located within vascular tissue epithelial walls (quite powerful enough, for example, for my merely harvesting such infected host-plants for their sclerotiae without gloves, picking them and putting them into a bag for transport was sufficient to induce a coldness of my fingers and hands, and tingling in the fingertips, which were the bodypart having most contact physically with the ergot sclerotiae due to the diminished blood-flow to the extremities)
One of the two toxic syndromes from ergot-infested bread, in sublethal quantities was the development of a dry gangrene, with affected people suffering what they thought to be the wrath of god, or else the work of witches and demons, causing the affliction they termed 'St. Anthony's fire', and due to the cutting off of blood supply, the extremities, such as fingers, toes, ears, nose, lips, hands, feet, arms, legs suffered most in this kind of ergot poisoning. The second, which occurs in distinctly different strains, expressing a different profile of ergot alkaloids, less on the vasoconstrictor side, took a convulsive profile, with people being seized by powerful muscle contractions possssed of almost bone-breaking force potential, such that a sufferer would often beg for the assistance of others in forcing their painfully clenched hands open, and preventing them reclenching, and epileptiform seizures. At the time this was not understood, and such as epilepsy was potentially viewed as demoniacal possession, perhaps via the agency of witches, doing the bidding of Satan, and to complicate things, due to the lysergic acid amide structure, some of these alkaloids could also induce hallucinatory states. They are related also to the hallucinogenic principle within the seeds of many morning glory species, ergine, a simple lysergic acid amide, and whilst it has some vasoconstrictor effects when the seed is consumed as an LSD substitute, it is not nearly so powerful as to cause gangrene, tissue dessication and death, etc. and can be, and is, often used, along with relatives in the Convolvulaceous tribe of plants, although these do not produce the hallucinogenic compounds within the seeds directly, rather, an obligate endosymbiont fungus, not of the genus Claviceps itself, but related, of a Clavicipitalean lineage, does so.
Such effects combined, especially in a superstitious, hyperreligiose, mysogynistic cultural setting sets a very strongly provocative scenario for excuses for discrimination against (chiefly) women, as 'witches', often people would be denounced as witches on such 'evidence' as a physical deformity, unattractiveness, on the say so of children on the content of their dreams, or ergotized bread (and it was often heavily, even to the point of acutely lethally so, ergotized, the toxic and psychotropic sclerotiae having been processed along with the uninfected ears and seeds. And the rich, acting the way the rich and powerful so often do, bought up the best flour for themselves, leaving only the dross for the peasants, who were sometimes left, even when toxicity became known of ergot fungi, with a choice between consuming bread which was 30% ergot, to half, or even almost all of it being ergot, rather than grain flour) and facing death by sheer starvation. In addition, the ergot caused frequently, cumulative neurological lesions of enduring duration.
With much effort, these little buggers can be cultured artificially in fermenters, and the ergopeptide alkaloids hydrolyzed to give free lysergic acid, which even in gram quantities, is an extremely valuable commodity, and one that the hobbyist chemist community would otherwise have intense, the very greatest of difficulty in obtaining such a normally 'watched' chemical. Such strains as are stable producers, or both productive of alkaloids AND conidia-forming (rare), and most difficult in terms of the microbiology work required, would be of immense value to the non-uni affiliated scientist community. And of course, not without reward for a job well done either, assuming I could manage it. To whip some cultures into shape appropriate for servitude, although given the toxicity, culture medium handling, and any processing and purification must be conducted with the utmost care.
So, 'Raxy, with such background knowledge thus proffered for your digestion, perhaps the connection is not unobvious? Especially to a shining intellect such as your own :)
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There are a lot of differences between rape and other forms of assault.
Generally with assault the severity of assault is determined by the extent of physical injury. A woman who has been raped may not be physically injured.
Sexual intercourse is an act that takes place between consenting adults on a fairly regular basis (unless you're me). What makes it rape is lack of consent. This is very different from assault, where if someone is beaten and physically injured the issue of consent is effectively irrelevant except in edge cases.
How would treating rape like any other form of assault reduce the incidence of rape? I can see how it might reduce the incidence of provable rape. Can you expand? I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm actually very interested in your point of view.
You're missing my point. Rape would be treated like another form of assault only as a result of treating sex without all
of the excess baggage that it carries around in society. It is that, more general change, which could lead to less rapes,
as it becomes less damaging to the victim and less of a sign of dominance.
The question is whether the increased importance of sexually associated behavior, and especially the dominance aspect
is hard wired, or if it is completely malleable. It is certainly subject to some degree of change, as shown by societal differences
over time.
The motivations and effects of rape are very different from other forms of assault.
Yes. But mainly because of that baggage.
If you meet a woman and put your hand around her arm without consent, it's usually not a big deal. If you put your hand on her shoulder without consent, similar. If you put your hand on her butt or her breast or her upper thigh without consent, she would have every right to feel violated, and you're at serious risk of being charged with sexual assault, even though no injury has occurred. There is an element of very personal violation involved with sexual assault.
It's interesting because usually the law doesn't take into account the emotional and subjective damage in this manner.
For example, a person is not more likely to be prosecuted seriously for stealing all that a poorer person has (indeed,
I suspect the opposite, but for different reasons) as opposed to from a wealthier one. But again, this is broader than
what the victim experiences: it's a general increased valuation of things associated with sex.
Examining that increased valuation itself is interesting. The roots of such seem to be founded in the patriarcal
control of women's sexuality. It's an attack not just on the women, but more importantly (for the societies which developed
this view) on the men who 'owned' those women. Part of why wartime rape is used is to undermine the function of the
opposing male warriors (there are also morale effects such as bonding for the perpetrators).
What I find ironic is that we see a collision of these early patriarcal control taboos with our society throwing off
an equally patriarcal assertion of dominance through over-familiar actions (harassment), but relying upon that
heightened valuation of perceived sexual matters which spawns from the same mores.
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OKay Walkie. This is 2015 statistics, hope they will do.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/table-1
Next I want you to calculate the number of offences/number of males in US to find ratio of males/rape.
Next I want you to adjust what you think is a reasonable amount for rapists who rape many times in that year and t whose crimes are tallied as more than one incident.
Next I want you to double this to give account of women not reporting it (200% of figure)...If you do not like that figure then increase it by what percentage you feel would "reasonably be right".
Next I want you to consider if sex has any value and what men are prepared to do or forgo for the promise of sex.
Have men....I dunno......paid money, killed themselves, others, lost friends, fought.....ever? Has it happened more than once? Have women ever been able to manipulate men's interest in sex to manipulate or control men? Ever?
But it is like a sneeze and no more consequence right?
So there you have both the actuality of rape and whether it is something closely tied to the male psyche and not that far removed from men generally OR something that goes against general men and is really the monsters that deviate from normal male psyche in the same way theives and murderers and teh psychopaths and sociopaths do.
AND
You have the sex of no more value than a sneeze vs what do men NOT do for sex and what value do they not price on it?
I did not call you a liar I said I thought you were wrong. I still do. I think your books were wrong too and the fact they are from Psychologists does not impress me in the least.
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Walkie, much as I appreciate you, I have to call you on the 'pussy-stealer' type, being less of a crime because the victim gets to keep what is stolen. Is it fucking shit less.
@Lestat, I wasn't agreeing with that concusion on the least, just saying that if you look at thing in "pussy-stealing "terms, then it 's a totally logical conclusion that no real harm is done if you rape a prostitute. And it's therefore probable that some rapists really do think that.
I thought it was pretty damned obvious that I neither share in nor approve of that mindset. Hey! Didn't I call the phrase "pussy-stealing" obnoxious? And that's precisely why it's obnoxious. It can too easily result in a totally callous attitude towards the victims.
I grew up in a culture where the victims of rape were routinely cross-examined in Court about their sexual morals and behaviour. Basically, the more men the victim had willingly fucked in her lifetime, the less the chance that the Court would sympathise with the victim, or believe that she hadn't "brought it on hereslf". So all that shit was supposed to be relevant, and the victim was on trial as much as the rapist was. And almost nobody seemed to realise that she's gonna feel just as if she's being raped all over again. That's a very modern insight that very few people were able to grasp all by themselves. They actually needed to be told.
Heck, a man had to go so far as murdering a "woman of ill-repute" before people started thinking he'd really commited a crime. And what exactly was this primitive culture I grew up in? Britain in the latter half of the 20th Century. And we all thought we were really enlightened back then, too.
So excuse me for wondering what kinds of seemginly-reasonable attitude could possibl result in that degree of callousness? My background leads me to believe that this is a bloody huge issue that is all-to llikely to come back into fashion sometime. And the daily News leads me to believe that it never went out of fashion in great big swathes of the globe. Our current state of "enlightenment" might just be a tiny little blip in history. We have surely not evolved in that little bit of time. We can go backwards again, just as easily as forwards.
So, IMO, you gotta take that phrase seriously. Not to agree with it, nor excuse it, but to find out ways of subverting it.
The heck I meant you toagree with me, or to think I was giving my own opinion. That was more like an exercise in ruductio ad adsurdam . That is, I proved that it's a crap premise by going on to logically deduce something that we all know damned well is bullshit. Wouldn't be so easy to prove that to people who really do think in "pussy-stealing " terms though :(
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Y'all shouldn't get upset about a jailhouse colloquialism like 'stealing some pussy' (NOT pussy stealing - that lacks the grace).
It's like 'throwing fists' - it doesn't mean anyone is taking it literally in that sense. Too lightly? Sure. But amusing.
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OKay Walkie. This is 2015 statistics, hope they will do.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/table-1
Have men....I dunno......paid money, killed themselves, others, lost friends, fought.....ever? Has it happened more than once? Have women ever been able to manipulate men's interest in sex to manipulate or control men? Ever?
But it is like a sneeze and no more consequence right?
Umm. That's not the kind of research I was looking for. I was thinking of research into men's subjective evaluation of what sex means to them. That's the real issue here. IMO (as I hope to explain)
The phrase "sex is meaningless" was direct out of the horse's mouth. Perhaps I should have inserted the word "emotionally" before the term "meaningless" because that was clearly what was meant. And that's surely not to say that it isn't a powerful urge. Heck , even sneezing is a poweful urge, come to think.
To make it even more clear: one of those men who told me that sex was meaningless to him had a powerful sex drive nonetheless ...and a deep resentmemnt towards women , in general, for exploiting their sexual power over him. That's something quite common, it seems. It was also discussed in that book that you have no respect for.
That man was not a rapist, but it's not hard to see how such resentment could boil over into rape. So it's worth noting.
Perhaps , like me, you think that men who believe that sex has no emotional dimension for them are fooling themselves? They forget, perhaps, that negative felings like rage are also emotions? And/or they are too out-of-touch with their emotions to know what they're really feeling? In any case, men are still expected by society (even Western society) to be less emotional than women and that has an effect. Whether men would be naturally less emotional than women. all else being equal, is bloody hard to tell, But that would also be a reason why men can be so callous towards women. If a man can't empathise with his own feelings (he's been trained to push them aside, and to call himself all kinds of nasty names when they show through ) he's not going to be able to empathise with somebody else's feelings is he?
From that point-of-view , genuine gender equality, without pressure to conform to sexual sterotypes ought to reduce the incidence of rape. And not just on account of greater respect for women, but also because men would be not be emotionally staightjacketed by such a society.. .if only it existed! The fact is, even in our enlightened Western world, parents still pressure their childten to conform to sexual stereotypes, and the schoolchildren still pressure each other.
According to that book (and after thinking about it, I do concur) we haven't come far enough to take the conformity pressure offfyour modern man, just far enough to rob him of a sense of identity and a sense of self-worth; and far enough to confuse him, as to what's the right thing to do? Though I don't suppose that's especially relevant to the present discussion.
I just hope you can se there;'s no real contradiction between those different statements after all. Men often value gold enough to kill for it, don't they? but I don't suppose they're emotionally involved with the stuff, at least not in any deep and meaningful way *chuckle*
I did not call you a liar I said I thought you were wrong. I still do. I think your books were wrong too and the fact they are from Psychologists does not impress me in the least.
You actually said I was "dishonest" (for the umpteenth fucking time) . So perhaps you might explain the difference between "dishonest" and "lying" becuase I honestly don't grasp it,
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Separately, walkie, I must address part of your logic, which is in error.
The statement 'In this instance, if you put a rapist down as a Monster , and won;'t admit to any kind of point of commonulity , that proves to the world and -more importantly- to yourself that you're not a monster, doesn't it?'
Is not logically correct. It Presume the truth of the logical fallacy known as the false dilemma.
Let be considered Socrates. Socrates and Gods exist. Socrates is capable of independent thought. Gods are capable of independent thought. Let the proposition then be made Socrates is either mortal, or immortal. Gods are immortal, and are not mortal, whilst men, are mortal. And not gods. Ergo (truth( Neither man nor god may be both immortal and subject to death, thefore as consequence, Socrates must be either a man, or he must be a god..thefore (false) he must be mortal)
The False Dilemma exists in the statement 'Socrates must be either a man, or he must be a god', since at no time, for example, was it defined in the postulate that Socrates, the Socrates discussed within the logical subject-object relation clause that the Socrates instance referred to is the famed philosopher of Athens, Greece. A man could name his pet cat Socrates in modern times (initial possibility, left undefined within subject-object tense clauses being set to an indefinite frame of reference), and the cat is neither man, nor god. But the cat, either immortal or mortal. It does force a choice, but if an option is left as a hidden variable. (and neither does it reference the possibility that member of the category 'cat' be capable of both mortal and immortality (if for the sake of questioning, this, being quite obviously false in OUR reality, that in the reference frame of the logical proposition, that members of the category '+=cat, =cat!=god =cat!=man Ergo, since cat is in this instance, allotted the trait 'immortality' it does not thus present the dilemma that this specific instance of +=cat+=immortal-therefore-all instances of class +=cat whilst an individual cat, may be mortal and immortal, therefore (falsehood) an individual +=cat+=god+=man simultaneously. And the question as to whether THIS cat, named Socrates, being both immortal (paradox of course) and mortal simultaneously as a superposition of the two states, is not demanded to be made by the statements =cat!= man,!=member of group+=gods, is or is not, a man or a god.)
There exist shades of black, and white intermediate between the two, producing a greyscale and a color spectrum perceptible to the healthy human eye. There also usually, in actual practical logical systems exit undefined variables. And if one man +=monster, assigned so for having acted in the monstrous manner, and a second, separate man up until the point and preceeding sufficiently in duration within the dimension of time, within the reference frame of the question for the question to be asked and that when answered
(considered axiomatically true question in reference frame to be proceeded by answer, regardless of the nature of the question, if posed, it will be anwered)
the answer given persists in such a state as to remain true from the beginning of the question being posed through the time taken to do so, and remain true once answered, for sufficient progress forwards along the time dimension axis to not take place such that excessive time elapses between answering of a question elapses for a change to invalidate the answer.
If the second man has not committed acts which would define him as a monstrous man but which is not deprived of the capability to commit, or to mentally consider, and weigh up the cost-vs-benefit analysis of committing such act or acts, then he is a possible monstrous man at a future point, but not at such a point in time wherein he has weighed up the cost vs benefit (to him) of acting in various ways, and decided that as a result of that analysis, he will refrain, for the time being, until cost v benefit requires further cognitive analysis, then this man has the POTENTIAL to become, a monstrous man, but is not, necessarily a LATENT monstrous man, not having committed a monstrous act at the point of time of a given reference temporal reference frame but which WILL at an indeterminate specific temporal reference frame, such an act, definitively and certainly.
But he could be. The answer is within the mental space of the second man, and no other being has unfettered access to such spaces, without the absolute and total consent of the man to provide it to that other being, then it logically follows, we cannot know, unless we are told before the fact (honestly) or we witness either the act, or proof of its consequences sufficient to infer with certainty, that the act has taken place which renders the man monstrous, or that it has not, but will.
>>end logical definition attempts>>
Fact:
I am not a rapist, this is the absolute truth, ignoring perhaps statutory definitions, where relationship was held, and mutually cherished by both parties, and initiated by the other party than myself, and at all times until she made the choice to act in a certain way which resulted in my choosing to end the relationship, that relationship was maintained by the combination of mutual, freely given assent (once she'd finished some...admittedly rather shockingly predatory..introduction..which could, had I spoken of it in a manner hostile to its reception to others, she could have gotten in a lot of legal trouble for. In that she did not give me the choice to say no, to being thrown into a tree and having a tongue stuck down my trachea. However those sparks of passion did fly between us in a bidirectional manner, irrespective of the degree of forcefulness she chose to employ, and they resulted, once she'd let me go long enough to breathe and actually ask who she was, in what I consider to have been the best relationship I have ever had, and have spent over ten years wishing I had not acted in the degree of haste with which I broke off the relationship. And doing my best, to force into submission, the anguish that I have eversince, felt as a result of my making the wrong choice (to break off the relationship based on something she did. Or rather, that she said she did. Whether she did or did not, what I now realize is that I made the wrong choice, and in doing so turned from the girl I wish I had grown old besides, had a family with, and been buried beside.
However, I do not act towards women, in the way that girl did to me, and were I to do so, I would hate myself for it, and expect to be hated in return, with a high degree of certainty, which logic and the precedent set by many interpersonal relationships between two third parties utterly distinct from any sphere of interaction with me, where a man did use such force as that girl did. But I was certainly willing to say 'bugger the statute books, to follow them is not what either of us desired, as made abundantly clear by both her actions and her given word' Temporal length of existence of either of us, was irrelevant to each other. So long as we got to spend as much as possible of it with each other.
As you see, walkie, there are many grey areas there. Many people would call me a monster for saying 'bollocks to it' in response to a hypothetical question of age, which neither of us ever posed to the other. There are also those which would call HER a monster, for incapacitating a guy with her steel-toed boots who got between her coming over to me during our first meeting, (I think what she did there was wrong, of course, the guy did nothing that I know of to deserve what she meted out to him, other than to speak, and in doing so, delay her. I was not, however party to the content of what was spoken between them, so it is not impossible he did something to deserve it. And there are certainly those would say she did wrong, in coming over to a man much older than she, and using quite violent exertion to procure, quite frankly, my being stunned somewhat, and then sticking her tongue down my throat. *I* would say, as a rule, the pattern of such action was wrongful as a very general rule, but I retroactively granted consent, although AFTER she took from me.
(lets just say, when she slammed me into a tree, she REALLY wasn't fucking about. Hit me hard enough to momentarily leave me seeing little birds and stars making tweeting noises flying in a circle round my head and no mistake about that. And she pretty much relied on my retroactive assent to everything she did during the first contact of our original meeting. She got it, yes. Because from the moment I set eyes on her, sparks flew and set my blood to boiling. She didn't know it at the time, however, until I could at least speak with her. Is that girl a bit of a monster, because of the way she came on....rather strongly....to some people, had it been to them, undoubtedly they would consider her actions so. In my case...I realized as I type this, that there are tears in my eyes, and I cannot hold them back from falling. Not because of what she did or how she did it, but because the girl, young as she was, that I love, hasn't been in my sight or hearing for over a decade.
If you'll excuse me here...I will perforce break off my participation in this discussion for a time, because the emotion is strong, extremely strong, and I cannot suppress it enough to be sure my responses to others will be rationally worded and grounded in logic.
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Other than=I did not see your last post until just now, walkie. Acknowledged. Lestat over, and out. I need some time to quell my roused emotion.
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There are a lot of differences between rape and other forms of assault.
Generally with assault the severity of assault is determined by the extent of physical injury. A woman who has been raped may not be physically injured.
Sexual intercourse is an act that takes place between consenting adults on a fairly regular basis (unless you're me). What makes it rape is lack of consent. This is very different from assault, where if someone is beaten and physically injured the issue of consent is effectively irrelevant except in edge cases.
How would treating rape like any other form of assault reduce the incidence of rape? I can see how it might reduce the incidence of provable rape. Can you expand? I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm actually very interested in your point of view.
You're missing my point. Rape would be treated like another form of assault only as a result of treating sex without all
of the excess baggage that it carries around in society. It is that, more general change, which could lead to less rapes,
as it becomes less damaging to the victim and less of a sign of dominance.
The question is whether the increased importance of sexually associated behavior, and especially the dominance aspect
is hard wired, or if it is completely malleable. It is certainly subject to some degree of change, as shown by societal differences
over time.
The motivations and effects of rape are very different from other forms of assault.
Yes. But mainly because of that baggage.
If you meet a woman and put your hand around her arm without consent, it's usually not a big deal. If you put your hand on her shoulder without consent, similar. If you put your hand on her butt or her breast or her upper thigh without consent, she would have every right to feel violated, and you're at serious risk of being charged with sexual assault, even though no injury has occurred. There is an element of very personal violation involved with sexual assault.
It's interesting because usually the law doesn't take into account the emotional and subjective damage in this manner.
For example, a person is not more likely to be prosecuted seriously for stealing all that a poorer person has (indeed,
I suspect the opposite, but for different reasons) as opposed to from a wealthier one. But again, this is broader than
what the victim experiences: it's a general increased valuation of things associated with sex.
Examining that increased valuation itself is interesting. The roots of such seem to be founded in the patriarcal
control of women's sexuality. It's an attack not just on the women, but more importantly (for the societies which developed
this view) on the men who 'owned' those women. Part of why wartime rape is used is to undermine the function of the
opposing male warriors (there are also morale effects such as bonding for the perpetrators).
What I find ironic is that we see a collision of these early patriarcal control taboos with our society throwing off
an equally patriarcal assertion of dominance through over-familiar actions (harassment), but relying upon that
heightened valuation of perceived sexual matters which spawns from the same mores.
I think that's interesting as a thought experiment, but it's not a practical solution to get from where we're at societal to get to the ideal I think you're talking about. I also think that wouldn't just involve a societal shift; I think it would run against at least some degree of how we're biologically wired to feel.
Also, it reminded me of this:
(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/drama.png)
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Ooh! Gotta plus Elle, for coming up with a simple reply that managed to encapsulate my own response to Cal's post in a nutshell.
Also for making me laugh with that cartoon :LOL: :2thumbsup: :plus:
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I think that's interesting as a thought experiment, but it's not a practical solution to get from where we're at societal to get to the ideal I think you're talking about. I also think that wouldn't just involve a societal shift; I think it would run against at least some degree of how we're biologically wired to feel.
Never suggested it was a solution - just a direction things may be moving in.
But yes, the big question is whether sex is hard wired as having special connotations beyond the social - or
even if the social mores are hard-wired. It would seem not though - there are societal examples where sex
doesn't seem to have the same enhanced importance; they are, as far as I know, all ones in which the move
to agriculture and the resulting patriarchal control was not made fully.
The next is whether society can maintain the complex structures which have allowed for advances in technology
without this special treatment of the reproductive act. Certainly, it ties in to inheritance concepts - but many
societies (including our own) have not followed the idea of direct descent being vital: with concepts of adoption,
as an example.
I'm not here advocating for something that is a personal stance. I'm terribly bounded by
the heightened valuation of sex to other forms of interpersonal relations. Maybe exploring
such is a result of seeing what I perceive as personal shortcomings though: being irrational
in my treatment in my own life.
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Ooh! Gotta plus Elle, for coming up with a simple reply that managed to encapsulate my own response to Cal's post in a nutshell.
Also for making me laugh with that cartoon :LOL: :2thumbsup: :plus:
Yep. Concision is always the goal.
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Ooh! Gotta plus Elle, for coming up with a simple reply that managed to encapsulate my own response to Cal's post in a nutshell.
Also for making me laugh with that cartoon :LOL: :2thumbsup: :plus:
Yep. Concision is always the goal.
Epic fail in your previous post then? :LOL:
Actually, this has turned into a pretty good discussion.
Almost civilised, dare I say? :hide:
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I know. I try though.
Sometimes, I manage. Sometimes, I feel a need to use words.
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OKay Walkie. This is 2015 statistics, hope they will do.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/table-1
Have men....I dunno......paid money, killed themselves, others, lost friends, fought.....ever? Has it happened more than once? Have women ever been able to manipulate men's interest in sex to manipulate or control men? Ever?
But it is like a sneeze and no more consequence right?
Umm. That's not the kind of research I was looking for. I was thinking of research into men's subjective evaluation of what sex means to them. That's the real issue here. IMO (as I hope to explain)
The phrase "sex is meaningless" was direct out of the horse's mouth. Perhaps I should have inserted the word "emotionally" before the term "meaningless" because that was clearly what was meant. And that's surely not to say that it isn't a powerful urge. Heck , even sneezing is a poweful urge, come to think.
To make it even more clear: one of those men who told me that sex was meaningless to him had a powerful sex drive nonetheless ...and a deep resentmemnt towards women , in general, for exploiting their sexual power over him. That's something quite common, it seems. It was also discussed in that book that you have no respect for.
That man was not a rapist, but it's not hard to see how such resentment could boil over into rape. So it's worth noting.
Perhaps , like me, you think that men who believe that sex has no emotional dimension for them are fooling themselves? They forget, perhaps, that negative felings like rage are also emotions? And/or they are too out-of-touch with their emotions to know what they're really feeling? In any case, men are still expected by society (even Western society) to be less emotional than women and that has an effect. Whether men would be naturally less emotional than women. all else being equal, is bloody hard to tell, But that would also be a reason why men can be so callous towards women. If a man can't empathise with his own feelings (he's been trained to push them aside, and to call himself all kinds of nasty names when they show through ) he's not going to be able to empathise with somebody else's feelings is he?
From that point-of-view , genuine gender equality, without pressure to conform to sexual sterotypes ought to reduce the incidence of rape. And not just on account of greater respect for women, but also because men would be not be emotionally staightjacketed by such a society.. .if only it existed! The fact is, even in our enlightened Western world, parents still pressure their childten to conform to sexual stereotypes, and the schoolchildren still pressure each other.
According to that book (and after thinking about it, I do concur) we haven't come far enough to take the conformity pressure offfyour modern man, just far enough to rob him of a sense of identity and a sense of self-worth; and far enough to confuse him, as to what's the right thing to do? Though I don't suppose that's especially relevant to the present discussion.
I just hope you can se there;'s no real contradiction between those different statements after all. Men often value gold enough to kill for it, don't they? but I don't suppose they're emotionally involved with the stuff, at least not in any deep and meaningful way *chuckle*
I did not call you a liar I said I thought you were wrong. I still do. I think your books were wrong too and the fact they are from Psychologists does not impress me in the least.
You actually said I was "dishonest" (for the umpteenth fucking time) . So perhaps you might explain the difference between "dishonest" and "lying" because I honestly don't grasp it,
I remember my ex one time telling me that many women did not orgasm during sex, which I found surprising at the time. She quickly pointed to her friend, Amanda. Amanda up until the year before had not and considered sex "just a bit of fun". Now let's remove all context from that and focus exclusively on what she said. She considered sex "just a bit of fun". Does that sound like much emotional attachment? I thought YOU said that there had to be an emotional attachment and if there was not then that sexually active person was on the road to rape? No, you did not actually say that but in referencing men you inferred that this is the case.
So why would someone have sex for reasons that have no real vested emotional attachment? Why would Amanda? How would this make Amanda a rapist or at risk of raping (and yes her sex life was and had been very healthy)?
The connnection you have not made. Not even close to made, is the connection between sating one's own sexual urges and dehumanising someone. It is to me like saying I get REALLY angry with people sometimes BUT I am not at risk of kidnapping their family, tying them up, dousing them with kerosene and setting them alight to get back at them.
Were I to do that, then the correct response surely would NOT be to examine that I was angry and I had focused on this anger, and somehow missed the memo that this act contravenes any act of humanity and decency, that this was a direct consequence of my anger.
You are doing exactly the same thing making these kind of connections to: men, lack of emotionality, rape and such. It is dishonest, a bit disgusting and unfair in the extreme.
I would say taking a run up and trying again may work better.
As to how you could be dishonest and not lying? I don't know perhaps you can examine that within yourself. Are you that far down the rabbit hole that you cannot see sunlight? Are you so confused about men or perhaps what rape is? Did you bother running statistics on rape? Can you not imagine that in today's permissive society that sex given freely does not mean that this equates to a lot of people just sating urges and not a lot of emotional attachment by either party and not a pathway to rape?
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So, I really was confused initially by Al's reaction in this thread, and I kinda pieced a better guess about what's going on in his head together a day or two ago and didn't bother commenting on it, but it's so bloody blatant now that I'm going to:
Al. Dude. Nobody in this discussion is accusing you of being a rapist, or a potential rapist. And we (at least as far as I'm understanding this discussion) aren't saying all men are rapists/potential rapists. And we aren't saying women are never perpetrators.
We aren't saying any of these things, explicitly or implicitly, but your reactions make me think that somehow they're what you think we're trying to get at. Which you're allowed to think we're saying, and you're allowed to talk about, and you're allowed to argue against. But fwiw, it does seem like you're primarily trying to argue against those central points (or argue against things you think are springing from those assumptions), which, because those aren't central points that are actually being made, kinda makes it look like you're just getting super-upset and yelling at people at random.
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So, I really was confused initially by Al's reaction in this thread, and I kinda pieced a better guess about what's going on in his head together a day or two ago and didn't bother commenting on it, but it's so bloody blatant now that I'm going to:
Al. Dude. Nobody in this discussion is accusing you of being a rapist, or a potential rapist. And we (at least as far as I'm understanding this discussion) aren't saying all men are rapists/potential rapists. And we aren't saying women are never perpetrators.
We aren't saying any of these things, explicitly or implicitly, but your reactions make me think that somehow they're what you think we're trying to get at. Which you're allowed to think we're saying, and you're allowed to talk about, and you're allowed to argue against. But fwiw, it does seem like you're primarily trying to argue against those central points (or argue against things you think are springing from those assumptions), which, because those aren't central points that are actually being made, kinda makes it look like you're just getting super-upset and yelling at people at random.
I am not saying anyone is saying that of me and I do not care whether women are perpetrators or not or whether you think so. I would hardly think I would need to defend any such charge if it was made (as I didn't when Bint accused me of buggering my son).
Come on, El, you are the psychologist and THIS is what you think is going on in my head? How come you are getting it so wrong? After two or three days this was your genuine attempt at psychoanalysis? Wow.
I am not yelling at random people I am responding to people on a forum I have been replying on for 10 years with others that have been here about the same time. How did you get this so wrong?
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So, I really was confused initially by Al's reaction in this thread, and I kinda pieced a better guess about what's going on in his head together a day or two ago and didn't bother commenting on it, but it's so bloody blatant now that I'm going to:
Al. Dude. Nobody in this discussion is accusing you of being a rapist, or a potential rapist. And we (at least as far as I'm understanding this discussion) aren't saying all men are rapists/potential rapists. And we aren't saying women are never perpetrators.
We aren't saying any of these things, explicitly or implicitly, but your reactions make me think that somehow they're what you think we're trying to get at. Which you're allowed to think we're saying, and you're allowed to talk about, and you're allowed to argue against. But fwiw, it does seem like you're primarily trying to argue against those central points (or argue against things you think are springing from those assumptions), which, because those aren't central points that are actually being made, kinda makes it look like you're just getting super-upset and yelling at people at random.
I am not saying anyone is saying that of me and I do not care whether women are perpetrators or not or whether you think so. I would hardly think I would need to defend any such charge if it was made (as I didn't when Bint accused me of buggering my son).
Come on, El, you are the psychologist and THIS is what you think is going on in my head? How come you are getting it so wrong? After two or three days this was your genuine attempt at psychoanalysis? Wow.
I am not yelling at random people I am responding to people on a forum I have been replying on for 10 years with others that have been here about the same time. How did you get this so wrong?
Umm. Al , look closeley at El's wording please:
I really was confused initially by Al's reaction in this thread, and I kinda pieced a better guess about what's going on in his head
but your reactions make me think that somehow they're what you think we're trying to get at
... kinda makes it look like you're just getting super-upset and yelling at people at random.
El's made it perfectly clear that she's not a mind reader, and that she's finding it really hard to see where you're comimng from. She's casting around for a rationale to explain your recent posts, because they do come across as increasingly irrational . (That's my own observatioon)
If the boot were on the other hoof, you wouldn't be anywhere near as tentative as El is being here. You'd be telling her exactly what she thinks., getting it totally wrong, then castigating her for it. I've seen you doing that loads of times ,just lately, and I've been on the receiving end often enough
I don't think you intend to construct a load of straw men, then bark at the straw men, but that's what you're doing in effect, all the freaking time. it's wearing me down. Looks like it's wearing El down too.
Psychotherapists are not magicians, Al, and you're not in her consulting room, you're in the place wgere she goes to hang out with her mates. Stop demanding miracles. You're really hard to fathom these days, but at least some of us are still trying to fathom you, despite that you bite our heads off for trying. I say: kudos to El for that.
Well, anyway, it's Christmas Eve over here . Maybe we can all raise a glass to each other's health, and chill out for a while?
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So, I really was confused initially by Al's reaction in this thread, and I kinda pieced a better guess about what's going on in his head together a day or two ago and didn't bother commenting on it, but it's so bloody blatant now that I'm going to:
Al. Dude. Nobody in this discussion is accusing you of being a rapist, or a potential rapist. And we (at least as far as I'm understanding this discussion) aren't saying all men are rapists/potential rapists. And we aren't saying women are never perpetrators.
We aren't saying any of these things, explicitly or implicitly, but your reactions make me think that somehow they're what you think we're trying to get at. Which you're allowed to think we're saying, and you're allowed to talk about, and you're allowed to argue against. But fwiw, it does seem like you're primarily trying to argue against those central points (or argue against things you think are springing from those assumptions), which, because those aren't central points that are actually being made, kinda makes it look like you're just getting super-upset and yelling at people at random.
I am not saying anyone is saying that of me and I do not care whether women are perpetrators or not or whether you think so. I would hardly think I would need to defend any such charge if it was made (as I didn't when Bint accused me of buggering my son).
Come on, El, you are the psychologist and THIS is what you think is going on in my head? How come you are getting it so wrong? After two or three days this was your genuine attempt at psychoanalysis? Wow.
I am not yelling at random people I am responding to people on a forum I have been replying on for 10 years with others that have been here about the same time. How did you get this so wrong?
Umm. Al , look closeley at El's wording please:
I really was confused initially by Al's reaction in this thread, and I kinda pieced a better guess about what's going on in his head
but your reactions make me think that somehow they're what you think we're trying to get at
... kinda makes it look like you're just getting super-upset and yelling at people at random.
El's made it perfectly clear that she's not a mind reader, and that she's finding it really hard to see where you're comimng from. She's casting around for a rationale to explain your recent posts, because they do come across as increasingly irrational . (That's my own observatioon)
If the boot were on the other hoof, you wouldn't be anywhere near as tentative as El is being here. You'd be telling her exactly what she thinks., getting it totally wrong, then castigating her for it. I've seen you doing that loads of times ,just lately, and I've been on the receiving end often enough
I don't think you intend to construct a load of straw men, then bark at the straw men, but that's what you're doing in effect, all the freaking time. it's wearing me down. Looks like it's wearing El down too.
Psychotherapists are not magicians, Al, and you're not in her consulting room, you're in the place wgere she goes to hang out with her mates. Stop demanding miracles. You're really hard to fathom these days, but at least some of us are still trying to fathom you, despite that you bite our heads off for trying. I say: kudos to El for that.
Well, anyway, it's Christmas Eve over here . Maybe we can all raise a glass to each other's health, and chill out for a while?
Yes I agree psychoanalysts are not magicians and it looked to me when she said:
I really was confused initially by Al's reaction in this thread, and I kinda pieced a better guess about what's going on in his head
That she was INITIALLY confused BY she has pieced together what was in my head (read she has psychoanalysed me) and THAT was her psychoanalise of that "reading" after three days or whatever? Am I wrong?
Happy to take it all back if this is an unfair reading of her own words.
Christmas is the time of miracles. But I think it is rather less miraculous to make a fair assessment of what I did say to what I did not. I never once mentioned that I don't rape (I don't but that is rather beyond the point). Most men don't and when I say most, I really mean that.
Let’s look at figures. Hard non-abstract figures.
In 2015 there were approximately 140 000 000 males in America. (and the incidences of rapes are falling)
There were about 40 000 reported rapes (it was less but let’s run with that)
This accounts for all rapes and rapists tend to be serial rapists rather than rape as a one off. So let’s account for that and knock it down to 30 000
However this is only was is reported so let’s increase this by 700%
280 000 rapes / 140 000 000 males (if you watch the news and see the proliferation of females being accused of rapes — especially teachers you know it is NOT gendered BUT let’s pretend it is)
0.002% of the male population engaging in rape.
So who are these rapists? Well, many are abused themselves and/or have really fucked up psychological issues.
It is not to say that 280 000 rapists are something of no consequence nor a societal problem but it is not an ingrained spectre lurking in the hearts of most men and something inherent in the male psyche and pretending it is anything close or merely a male educational thing men need to own and take responsibility for is a bit perverse.
That is my reading.
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There were about 40 000 reported rapes (it was less but let’s run with that)
...
O_o
problematic assumption is problematic.
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The phrase "sex is meaningless" was direct out of the horse's mouth. Perhaps I should have inserted the word "emotionally" before the term "meaningless" because that was clearly what was meant. And that's surely not to say that it isn't a powerful urge. Heck , even sneezing is a poweful urge, come to think.
To make it even more clear: one of those men who told me that sex was meaningless to him had a powerful sex drive nonetheless ...and a deep resentmemnt towards women , in general, for exploiting their sexual power over him. That's something quite common, it seems. It was also discussed in that book that you have no respect for.
This perspective may give some weight to Calandale's point about removing the sociological baggage from sex. Will agree it seems widely acccepted, males generally lack emotional sentiment associate to sex, and the opposite is true for females. However your description of the sexually driven male friend lacking sexual sentiment could just as easily describe me. Lack of sentiment has definitely been off putting to partners, so have before wondered if the general conceptions about men are really true. Maybe is just isn't as socially acceptable for males to express such feelings of sentiment, or maybe females equate sex and love because they're taught to and therefore expected to. The concept of men wanting a fuck buddy without the emotional baggage doesn't seem so true when that partner is someone they respect or care about, or at least want to. Maybe prostitutes are a good outlet for people who genuinely prefer the emotional detachment. It would be interesting to know a prostitute, to ask them how many men have fallen for them. :laugh:
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...males generally lack emotional sentiment associate to sex
Bullshit. It's just a different sentiment than you're thinking. One of ownership.
, and the opposite is true for females.
Not sure about this at all. For example, past studies have shown females more willing to
forgive a sexual indiscretion more than an emotional tie.
Maybe is just isn't as socially acceptable for males to express such feelings of sentiment, or maybe females equate sex and love because they're taught to and therefore expected to.
This is what I believe. That societal constructs are largely what drive all of this.
It would be interesting to know a prostitute, to ask them how many men have fallen for them. :laugh:
The limited number I have known well never expressed that this happened. I suspect it happens more often with waitresses. :P
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...males generally lack emotional sentiment associate to sex
Bullshit. It's just a different sentiment than you're thinking. One of ownership.
A sense of ownership is common in relationships for both males and females, but it's socially unacceptable to discuss people in terms of personal property. Husband was offended by it once, but after explaining what it means he was okay with the objectification that comes along with it. Not sure if it's bullshit in general for males to not find sex emotionally meaningful; just saying that's the accepted generalization and stereotypes are commonly based in a truth. Still think it's possible males are much more sappy feely about sex than what's believed, and possibly more so than males are comfortable acknowledging.
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The leaps between such things as feelings of belonging to each other or feeling lust or resentment towards a gender or having emotional attachment/detachment or what have you tend not to lead in ANY way to rape and the nullification of consent.
Trying to establish these things as rapists not "getting the memo" is just as bad.
It seeks to make rather bizarre connections that have no business of being connected.
When I was younger.....really younger....about a million of years ago....I would go to nightclubs and occasionally pick up. I have a head like a robber's dog so not as often as I may have liked. The culture of nightclubs as being meat markets is quite apt. Essentially everyone says they are going there for a few drinks or to dance or hang out BUT the drive to find someone of the opposite gender and take them home after a few or few too many drinks is rife.
Many DO end up picking up someone who they later, after the alcohol and a hormonal fuelled jaunt in the sheets, feel they want to have a relationship with but more often than not, they bail or lose the number and avoid if they see them out again.
None of that is rape. It is almost a rite of passage, or is where I grew up.
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...males generally lack emotional sentiment associate to sex
Bullshit. It's just a different sentiment than you're thinking. One of ownership.
It's probably easier to forgive a sexual betrayal, if one actually believes their partner doesn't have an emotional tie to sex.
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The leaps between such things as feelings of belonging to each other or feeling lust or resentment towards a gender or having emotional attachment/detachment or what have you tend not to lead in ANY way to rape and the nullification of consent.
Agreed. Have no clue what makes a rapist tick, and wouldn't begin to pretend to. Not really discussing that at all, but rather finding Calendale's perspective interesting on aspects of sexual baggage that may be completely sociological. Not seeing these things considered in terms of how they affect a rapist, but rather affecting how rape is perceived.
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I think rape USED to be considered the forcible sexual penetration of a female and for this to occur, non-consent had to be expressed and the woman had to try to resist. Then things were made less arbitrary and then moreso again until today no one really knows BUT we all know accusations of any inference that there was rape is dangerous ground.
I DO think that the former basis for what constituted rape WAS too stringent. Fear and domination can mean that the ability to struggle and voice resistance is muted. THIS ought not absolve the rapist nor make it all the victim's fault.
As a young guy I fought a bit. A bit more than I should and for a bit longer than I should. I was low self-confidence and had a lot I thought I should prove and was very angry and a bit of an arsehole. Hard to believe, right?
One thing that I learned was that you did not have to really hurt a guy to win. If you absolutely dominate a guy in a fight, you will win. Outclassing them is one way. If you go toe to toe and evade, block and strike better, that will likely work and at some point the guy will essentially give up and cover up and stop trying. That is a hard way to go.
Me? I was only fully grown at about 21-25 and only 5'9". However, I was very strong for my height and compact and had a high pain threshold. For me the sparring was not as meaningful as getting under the reach of a guy who was likely to be a lot taller and bigger and take it to the ground and press and pound and ground. Be quick and mean and brutal.
People who were not used to being manhandled as easily and being winded and thrown around would very quickly give up and be almost paralysed in fear. Some did not even have the sense to cover up. If you at THAT point seeing this and them knowing you saw it, got up, they would generally not want to try it on again. You had won, whatever point needed to be made had been made.
The reason I bought this up is that I think in many cases rape could be the same perhaps. someone pressed into a position they do not want that they are unable to break free of and ecape from and paralysed in fear. Unfortunately the Progressives pick up this ball and run with it, but I think there has to be common sense. Bad sex, drunken sex, regretable sex and sex with someone you later realise is an arsehole does not equate to rape. Unconscious sex, forcible sex, sex where someone expresses no desire at all for sex probably is.
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People who were not used to being manhandled as easily and being winded and thrown around would very quickly give up and be almost paralysed in fear. Some did not even have the sense to cover up. If you at THAT point seeing this and them knowing you saw it, got up, they would generally not want to try it on again. You had won, whatever point needed to be made had been made.
The reason I bought this up is that I think in many cases rape could be the same perhaps.
It makes some sense to me that it could be similar. Haven't been raped but I know what that physical paralyzation feels like. However I would ask whether it would be different for a guy, getting physically manhandled and beaten, and then released (assuming in a private place rather than a public fight) and getting physically manhandled, anally raped and then released. Would it have a different psychological impact? It seems intuitively obvious that it would, though I'm open to being corrected. With that said, I think the paralyzation and feeling of being beaten is only one aspect of the impact.
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People who were not used to being manhandled as easily and being winded and thrown around would very quickly give up and be almost paralysed in fear. Some did not even have the sense to cover up. If you at THAT point seeing this and them knowing you saw it, got up, they would generally not want to try it on again. You had won, whatever point needed to be made had been made.
The reason I bought this up is that I think in many cases rape could be the same perhaps.
It makes some sense to me that it could be similar. Haven't been raped but I know what that physical paralyzation feels like. However I would ask whether it would be different for a guy, getting physically manhandled and beaten, and then released (assuming in a private place rather than a public fight) and getting physically manhandled, anally raped and then released. Would it have a different psychological impact? It seems intuitively obvious that it would, though I'm open to being corrected. With that said, I think the paralyzation and feeling of being beaten is only one aspect of the impact.
Yes. I imagine (thank God I am only making this abstract assessment) would only be a part of things. But it struck me when Jack mentioned about the definition of rape I automatically thought of the Progressive "anything could possibly be" kind of definition and the hard and fast old definition that was a decent guide at best. The definition to me is likely somewhere in between and has to take into account such things as fear and domination and that willingness to fight back may naturally be suppressed by fear and inability and so on.
It somehow came around to reminding me of fact, that in fights I have had. I did not rape anyone, and the fights were a man on man, but it occurred to me that men CAN be completely overwhelmed in a similar paralysed way. Again, in a similar way to women, I would imagine (or men if they were raped too I guess) could be beyond the mental state to make rational and aggressive attempts to free themselves from their predicament.
The other thing is that actual damage to the person need not mean that there was a fight or an assault, nor that the person was not in fear. One of the last people I fought 10 or 15 years ago. I scared Hell out of. Did very little actual damage to them. They were very big and could absorb a bit of damage and no doubt was sore for a while but no breaks, muscle or ligament tears, noticeable facial swelling or the like BUT they knew they had been in a fight and that I had easily got the best of them and that they were unable to answer or counter anything I tried. They were terrified and froze up. They left town soon after and no doubt did not try their crap with others afterwards.
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...males generally lack emotional sentiment associate to sex
Bullshit. It's just a different sentiment than you're thinking. One of ownership.
A sense of ownership is common in relationships for both males and females
There's a longer history of males' regularly exerting that ownership however. And that's important even if what we're looking
at is purely societal in nature. Innovations of the past few decades are more easily swept away than long standing traditions -
especially when those traditions are reinforced by immigration from societies which do still hold them, often in even stronger forms.
... but it's socially unacceptable to discuss people in terms of personal property.
Is it? People still use the possessive - even if they aren't willing to be explicit about what it is they
possess. They talk about 'my partner' (significant other, or whatever), but don't seem to understand
that it is actually the tie of the possessive which makes any sense in the language.
Not sure if it's bullshit in general for males to not find sex emotionally meaningful; just saying that's the accepted generalization and stereotypes are commonly based in a truth.
Once again, I think this is a matter of imprecision. That there is a strong emotional attachment, but there are
differences in the expression. And there are likely physical reasons for this, having to do with the fast reduction
in sexual hormones after a male orgasm.
Still think it's possible males are much more sappy feely about sex than what's believed, and possibly more so than males are comfortable acknowledging.
Sappy is the iffy part. I think the bro bragging about his conquests has an emotionally meaningful relationship with the sex.
Does the word 'sappy' apply there though? :D
I'm having trouble distinguishing exactly what you're saying. A man gets tied to a sexual partner in many of the same
emotional ways a woman does, I think. The feelings of enjoyment linked with that person all become tied together, and
both (ideally) try to do things to make the other feel happy. When those bonds are broken, even when a friendship remains,
either gender can be devastated by the loss. I've both been through and kept both genders company through breakups enough to
be pretty sure that there's little fundamental difference - at least among the types of people whom I am likely to be friends
with (admittedly, probably not a great sample of the average). I've also seen similar reactions at a distance though (anger,
betrayal, hurt) which seem very similar. Am I completely missing the point here?
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The leaps between such things as feelings of belonging to each other or feeling lust or resentment towards a gender or having emotional attachment/detachment or what have you tend not to lead in ANY way to rape and the nullification of consent.
I disagree. If you feel ownership, you may seek to express that, when otherwise facts disprove it.
Too, if you feel a strong threat/fear/hatred of a gender, it does not seem unreasonable to perpetrate assault
as a means of expressing your own dominance.
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Just a very quick point here:
... but it's socially unacceptable to discuss people in terms of personal property.
Is it? People still use the possessive - even if they aren't willing to be explicit about what it is they
possess. They talk about 'my partner' (significant other, or whatever), but don't seem to understand
that it is actually the tie of the possessive which makes any sense in the language.
God , am I sick of hearing that argument all over the place.
Oh yeah? And people still say "My God" "My Boss" My mother" "My master" "My country"
Use of the so-called "possessive " needn't denote anything at all beyond some kind of relationship. In many such cases, one does not possess at all, but is rather possessed.
When I say "my neck of the woods" do you suppose that I own (or think that i own) all I survey?
When i talk about "my stupid mistake" do you think I'm not willing to let you comm it the selfsdame stupid mistake, if you like? That I've made sure to register the copyright to myself?
Must I hencefiorth write OFG tather than OMFG, to make it clear that I'lm totally happy to share my fucking god with you?
Must I carefully say "the person with whom I have a mutually committed relationship" rather than "my partner" , so as to avoid claiming ownership of the same?
Apparently so.
Your point (errrr.... I mean, the point that issued from your own keyboard, or possibly your wife's 's or flatmates keyboard ...Ah! the keyboard that you are presently utilising, I should say ) might be valid , but that is not the way to validate it *groooooan*
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...but it's socially unacceptable to discuss people in terms of personal property.
Is it? People still use the possessive - even if they aren't willing to be explicit about what it is they
possess. They talk about 'my partner' (significant other, or whatever), but don't seem to understand
that it is actually the tie of the possessive which makes any sense in the language.
Yes it is, and you seem to be agreeing with that, by acknowledging people still use a possessive my, but aren't willing to be explicit about what that means. Anything explicit makes people cringe.
I'm having trouble distinguishing exactly what you're saying.
Am disagreeing with Walkie's assessment that sex isn't a deeply intimate act for males. Though at the same time wont commit to that being untrue, because stereotypes exist for a reason. Maybe it's a common conception because it's true, or maybe it's just the macho crap men feel the need to say. Think it may be a misconception that sex doesn't make males feel more emotionally intimate and connected to their partners, or that they really prefer sexual relationships without the sentimental baggage. Though not really sure because it could be that males may not deal well with females who don't associate sex and love, only because females are expected to. So, just really saying I don't know what to think. Saying some stuff so you will say what you think, because the honest perspective of a male on this topic is more interesting than my uncertainty.
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Just a very quick point here:
... but it's socially unacceptable to discuss people in terms of personal property.
Is it? People still use the possessive - even if they aren't willing to be explicit about what it is they
possess. They talk about 'my partner' (significant other, or whatever), but don't seem to understand
that it is actually the tie of the possessive which makes any sense in the language.
God , am I sick of hearing that argument all over the place.
Oh yeah? And people still say "My God" "My Boss" My mother" "My master" "My country"
Use of the so-called "possessive " needn't denote anything at all beyond some kind of relationship. In many such cases, one does not possess at all, but is rather possessed.
When I say "my neck of the woods" do you suppose that I own (or think that i own) all I survey?
When i talk about "my stupid mistake" do you think I'm not willing to let you comm it the selfsdame stupid mistake, if you like? That I've made sure to register the copyright to myself?
Must I hencefiorth write OFG tather than OMFG, to make it clear that I'lm totally happy to share my fucking god with you?
Must I carefully say "the person with whom I have a mutually committed relationship" rather than "my partner" , so as to avoid claiming ownership of the same?
Apparently so.
Your point (errrr.... I mean, the point that issued from your own keyboard, or possibly your wife's 's or flatmates keyboard ...Ah! the keyboard that you are presently utilising, I should say ) might be valid , but that is not the way to validate it *groooooan*
Absolutely agree with this. General use of possessive pronoun is very different than explicitly claiming ownership. Once discussed this here before in a thread about being territorial in relationships. Husband was once offended early in marriage because I claimed he's mine and he belongs to me. He told me I didn't own him. I told him yes I do in fact own him and I have the legal documentation to prove it; I own him so completely down to the decisions of his last dying breath. I told him he's my most prized possession and I would fight to protect defend and keep him, more so than any other thing. I said these are the choices we've made, I don't mind the idea of being owned by him, I didn't understand why it would bother him to think of himself as mine, and if it wasn't reciprocal then there's a problem with the relationship. Fortunately he found it endearing. :laugh: Though do realize it's not socially acceptable to objectify him like that and talk about him in those terms. He gets it and that's good enough.
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Well now, I can't agree. When someone says "keep your hands off my wife (daughter ect)," they are
expressing something closer to possession than merely the existence of some sort of referential
relationship. Sometimes, the bonds of possession are different in nature from that referring to
an object - for example 'my country' which expresses a set of mutual obligations - but this is
the nature of language; the lines blur. As to the explicicity, that blurring allows people to directly
state what they mean, without any social consequence, because it is not always that. :P
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I'm having trouble distinguishing exactly what you're saying.
Am disagreeing with Walkie's assessment that sex isn't a deeply intimate act for males. Though at the same time wont commit to that being untrue, because stereotypes exist for a reason. Maybe it's a common conception because it's true, or maybe it's just the macho crap men feel the need to say. Think it may be a misconception that sex doesn't make males feel more emotionally intimate and connected to their partners, or that they really prefer sexual relationships without the sentimental baggage. Though not really sure because it could be that males may not deal well with females who don't associate sex and love, only because females are expected to. So, just really saying I don't know what to think. Saying some stuff so you will say what you think, because the honest perspective of a male on this topic is more interesting than my uncertainty.
I'm not terribly typical, I think. So, my personal view is likely of little value. And the women I've been both
sexually and emotionally involved with are not either.
Given that though, my limited experience (both direct and perceived) lend to both males and females being able to
engage in sex without much meaning - sometimes even just as a means to get out of anotherwise uncomfortable
situation. Both are able to form emotional bonds quickly, with or without sex. The major differences that I've seen
appear to be gender role-based expressions: which I tend to mark down almost entirely to societal expectations.
The most distant perceived experiences are probably the most generally applicable - though, of course, I am
likely applying filters and have less information as to what is really being felt. The gamit seems to align well
with what I've experienced more closely (through self, or close contacts).
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*tentatively raises hand from the back of the room*
...so umm... maybe we'll have more luck if we just compare the relative likelihood of the genders to each other to have certain experiences and attitudes rather than trying to make an argument requiring half the planet to have homogeneous sets of emotions and sexual appetites?
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*tentatively raises hand from the back of the room*
...so umm... maybe we'll have more luck if we just compare the relative likelihood of the genders to each other to have certain experiences and attitudes rather than trying to make an argument requiring half the planet to have homogeneous sets of emotions and sexual appetites?
Though what is the relative likelihood of what people feel? Really don't see anything wrong with generalizations in this conversation, because such generalizations already exist. Females are generally more emotionally expressive than males. This is accepted as true, but understand it's accepted as true because people also understand it's true that it's more socially acceptable for females to be emotionally expressive, and they're taught to be. It has nothing to do with how much males actually do or don't feel. The point that this also translates to sex seems valid.
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I'm not terribly typical, I think. So, my personal view is likely of little value.
Fair enough. Would have to say the same about myself. Used to think my perspective about sex was more like a male, until realizing that might not actually be what guys think either. :laugh:
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*tentatively raises hand from the back of the room*
...so umm... maybe we'll have more luck if we just compare the relative likelihood of the genders to each other to have certain experiences and attitudes rather than trying to make an argument requiring half the planet to have homogeneous sets of emotions and sexual appetites?
Or perhaps we can agree that bad people do bad things for bad reasons and the relationship to their gender or their education plays less part than their psychology? Could we agree to that? (I am feeling charitable)
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*tentatively raises hand from the back of the room*
...so umm... maybe we'll have more luck if we just compare the relative likelihood of the genders to each other to have certain experiences and attitudes rather than trying to make an argument requiring half the planet to have homogeneous sets of emotions and sexual appetites?
Or perhaps we can agree that bad people do bad things for bad reasons and the relationship to their gender or their education plays less part than their psychology? Could we agree to that? (I am feeling charitable)
It seems unreasonable to expect anyone to deny gender relationships to any form of violent crime. While social status variants of education and income are more debatable, the remarkable difference in victimization rates is also difficult to deny or argue against. Though to be fair, will agree with your earlier assertion, there are some things people don't need to be taught are wrong, and it's not productive in certain topics to take any stance which suggests some people harm others because they don't know any better.
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*tentatively raises hand from the back of the room*
...so umm... maybe we'll have more luck if we just compare the relative likelihood of the genders to each other to have certain experiences and attitudes rather than trying to make an argument requiring half the planet to have homogeneous sets of emotions and sexual appetites?
It's worse than that, because each society seems to treat these things differently.
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In terms of whether sexual intercourse is a deeply intimate act for men or just a physical release of some sort, I would imagine the range of emotions involved for men is a bell curve with "deeply intimate" to the right and "not intimate" to the left. If you drew the same bell curve for women then you'd probably see a similar shaped bell curve to the right.
I've attached a rough hand-drawn example of what it might look like. Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left. There is probably a lot more overlap than I've allowed for. But it kind of covers Walkie's example of men saying that they find sex about as intimate as blowing their nose, and the experiences of some of us men who find sex a deeply intimate experience.
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Maybe prostitutes are a good outlet for people who genuinely prefer the emotional detachment. It would be interesting to know a prostitute, to ask them how many men have fallen for them. :laugh:
It depends where you go. I know several guys who married women who they met as prostitutes. You wouldn't encounter very many men falling in love with prostitutes very often in countries where the girls tend to be "on the clock" and charge by the hour or half hour, and none of the guys I know who married prostitutes met them in my home country where I've lived the majority of my life.
This raises a good point. These relationships tend to be unstable, usually because of the behaviour of the males involved. They marry the girl because she looks good and makes them feel like a million dollars and the sex is great. But some of the sort of guys who marry prostitutes tend not to "get" things like intimacy and commitment. That's just my experience anyway.
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In terms of whether sexual intercourse is a deeply intimate act for men or just a physical release of some sort, I would imagine the range of emotions involved for men is a bell curve with "deeply intimate" to the right and "not intimate" to the left. If you drew the same bell curve for women then you'd probably see a similar shaped bell curve to the right.
I've attached a rough hand-drawn example of what it might look like. Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left. There is probably a lot more overlap than I've allowed for. But it kind of covers Walkie's example of men saying that they find sex about as intimate as blowing their nose, and the experiences of some of us men who find sex a deeply intimate experience.
I just saw boobs and cleavage
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About 27 years ago I was sharing a house and a few of us were watching this movie on TV:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_(1988_film)
It was a movie about a gang rape and rape culture in a remote Australian town.
One of the guys had just recently moved to the city from a country town. I said something about how I knew people from towns like that and he started telling me how that sort of thing went on a lot where he was from..... but it wasn't a big deal like how they made it out to be in the movie. In fact it was just a bit of fun, the girls got that and they didn't make a big deal out of it. And he said that, even if the girl did make a big deal out of it and you ended up in court, you just got every one of your mates to stand up in court and lie under oath that they had had consensual sex with her in the past week and that was enough to cast doubt on the girl's character and get you off. I think he thought I'd be impressed with his knowledge of how to rape girls and get away with it. I expressed my disgust with what he was saying but he just kind of looked at me like I was some kind of subjugated weirdo.
I've encountered several guys who claimed that women enjoy being raped and that if she went to the police it meant that you were a dud shag. Most guys don't think like that, but a small proportion do, and these were all Australian guys.
I've known one foreigner who had no concept of things like consent. He admitted that he had no idea of how to act around women because he grew up never seeing a girl's face and never once talking to a girl. But one thing he knew for sure was that if a woman went to a man's room, everyone would know that she only went there for one thing and that nobody would believe her if she said that the man forced himself on her. He literally just laughed at me when I tried to explain that he still needed her consent. He did try to rape at least one girl that I knew, who believed him when he asked her to come to his room to talk (I only found out about this a year later). He was only a small man and she was quite strong. He was constantly inviting girls to his room or trying to invite himself to theirs. He also used to walk around with his jacket draped over his arm so that he could sneakily grope girls with his hidden hand. I tried to explain the concept of consent to this guy, and how much trouble he was likely to get into, but he just had no idea. He reckoned that because he saw men touching women in the street that it was therefore okay for him to do it. That because other men fucked women they weren't married to, it was okay for him to fuck women he wasn't married to.
I'm not saying that any of these attitudes are common or universal. But I have personally encountered them. I know that there are guys out there who really do think like this, and probably a lot worse.
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About 27 years ago I was sharing a house and a few of us were watching this movie on TV:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_(1988_film)
It was a movie about a gang rape and rape culture in a remote Australian town.
One of the guys had just recently moved to the city from a country town. I said something about how I knew people from towns like that and he started telling me how that sort of thing went on a lot where he was from..... but it wasn't a big deal like how they made it out to be in the movie. In fact it was just a bit of fun, the girls got that and they didn't make a big deal out of it. And he said that, even if the girl did make a big deal out of it and you ended up in court, you just got every one of your mates to stand up in court and lie under oath that they had had consensual sex with her in the past week and that was enough to cast doubt on the girl's character and get you off. I think he thought I'd be impressed with his knowledge of how to rape girls and get away with it. I expressed my disgust with what he was saying but he just kind of looked at me like I was some kind of subjugated weirdo.
I've encountered several guys who claimed that women enjoy being raped and that if she went to the police it meant that you were a dud shag. Most guys don't think like that, but a small proportion do, and these were all Australian guys.
I've known one foreigner who had no concept of things like consent. He admitted that he had no idea of how to act around women because he grew up never seeing a girl's face and never once talking to a girl. But one thing he knew for sure was that if a woman went to a man's room, everyone would know that she only went there for one thing and that nobody would believe her if she said that the man forced himself on her. He literally just laughed at me when I tried to explain that he still needed her consent. He did try to rape at least one girl that I knew, who believed him when he asked her to come to his room to talk (I only found out about this a year later). He was only a small man and she was quite strong. He was constantly inviting girls to his room or trying to invite himself to theirs. He also used to walk around with his jacket draped over his arm so that he could sneakily grope girls with his hidden hand. I tried to explain the concept of consent to this guy, and how much trouble he was likely to get into, but he just had no idea. He reckoned that because he saw men touching women in the street that it was therefore okay for him to do it. That because other men fucked women they weren't married to, it was okay for him to fuck women he wasn't married to.
I'm not saying that any of these attitudes are common or universal. But I have personally encountered them. I know that there are guys out there who really do think like this, and probably a lot worse.
My family and most of my mates from old were all from the country in Australia and this does not purport their views. How do I know this? Because I have had years (sometimes decades) long relationships with them and being young males these subjects around sex and women and such do come up.
So again, it does not seem to be particularly a male thing, nor a country thing, nor an Australian thing, nor an education thing.
It seems to me a bad values kind of thing. It is certainly not saying that such people do NOT exist nor that rapists are non-existent creatures nor that injustice does not happen, but then the world and people generally are imperfect. We say how can things like the terrorist attacks around the world exist? Conmen stealing money from elderly people exist? Child grooming gangs exist? The Rosemary and Fred Wests of the world exist? People like that Josef Fritzl exist? The Boko haram girls being kidnapped? Horror DOES exist in the world and man's inhumanity to man certainly DOES exist.
But that hardly sells any large point I don't believe.
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Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left.
The length of the bottom suggests your assessment is that neither males nor females align anywhere near the far right side of deeply intimate. Even if the bottom line were to begin with the first point of blue, and end with the last point of pink, it still concludes no males at all align to the far right of deeply intimate, and no females at all align to the far left of no intimacy. Is that the intended visual?
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Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left.
The length of the bottom suggests your assessment is that neither males nor females align anywhere near the far right side of deeply intimate. Even if the bottom line were to begin with the first point of blue, and end with the last point of pink, it still concludes no males at all align to the far right of deeply intimate, and no females at all align to the far left of no intimacy. Is that the intended visual?
No. I just don't have very sophisticated paintbox skills. Just trying to suggest that it's a bell curve in both cases.
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Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left.
The length of the bottom suggests your assessment is that neither males nor females align anywhere near the far right side of deeply intimate. Even if the bottom line were to begin with the first point of blue, and end with the last point of pink, it still concludes no males at all align to the far right of deeply intimate, and no females at all align to the far left of no intimacy. Is that the intended visual?
No. I just don't have very sophisticated paintbox skills. Just trying to suggest that it's a bell curve in both cases.
I just saw boobs
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Okay, fixed it for Jack.
And a little extra for Al as well, because I'm an inclusive kind of guy.
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In terms of whether sexual intercourse is a deeply intimate act for men or just a physical release of some sort, I would imagine the range of emotions involved for men is a bell curve with "deeply intimate" to the right and "not intimate" to the left. If you drew the same bell curve for women then you'd probably see a similar shaped bell curve to the right.
I've attached a rough hand-drawn example of what it might look like. Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left. There is probably a lot more overlap than I've allowed for. But it kind of covers Walkie's example of men saying that they find sex about as intimate as blowing their nose, and the experiences of some of us men who find sex a deeply intimate experience.
Here. I made a venn diagram that should clear this up. :zoinks:
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I found Silly Walk's reminiscences interesting and informative Thanks :plus:.
I know it's onl;y anecdotal evidence, but when it comes to cultural influences , anecdotes can winklle out what's really going on a damned sight better than statistics can. There are too many different ways to interpret statistics .
Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ? But, then, Al's offering of a single, equally anecdotal counter-example does not in any way disprove the "rape culture " theory. You'd surely expect to find any number of individuals and families who buck any given trend.
In Laurie Lee's autobiographical work "Cider with Rosie" he describes how, as an adolescent, he and his mates made a half-assed plan (whicjh they never actually went through with) to waylay a mentallly challenged local girl and gang rape her. From a modern perspective, it's shocking. Some people also find Lee's understated treatment of the subject shocking. There's a sort of "Boys will be boys" tone to it that suggests that this kind of thing really was pretty normal in rural England, back in his day.
I'm thinking that kids who grow up in a rural enviromnent (like Lee and his friends) are more likely to have a sort of matter-of-fact c attitude to sex, because they'll all-too-likely have got their sex education from watching farm animals mating. So they won't see it as any big deal. That matches with my own (limited) experience of country people. I found a really startling alteration in attitudes to sex when I went to stay in a hamlet in rural Herefordshire for a little while. I mean, for example, it was clear that people I met there (whilst not approving of paedopholia) did not see paeophilia as a serious crime that ought to be reported . (One guy told me about a man who drove along thev main road near the village, picking young children up and paying tjhem to masturbate him. He's been one of those kids. The kids appreciated the chance to earn easy money. When I questioned to guy about the ethics of that , he shrugged and said the guy was harmless, in view. "He didn't force us. I felt sorry for him," he said. "I think he did it becuse he was lonely". The difference is that whilst the same sort of thing surely happened in the city too, it would never be talked about so openly and so casually.)
Similarly, when I when a child, sex education in English schools was presented as a purely biological thing (straight after the life cycle of the frog, usually :LOL:) . None of the sociological nor emotional aspects were discussed at all. If you had any feelings on the issue (and who woudn't ? upon discovering that their parents had - immensely hypocritically- done very rude things, involving unmentionalble body parts? and that onself was the outcome of that act ?) then you just had to work through those feelings for yourself. One had the impression that feelings just didn't come into it at all. Then the "permissive society " came along and had the effect of heightening one's guilt about having any feelings about sex (which guilt was already fighting with the more-traditional guilt about sexual desire) especially girly-type feelings such as love and affection.
For myself, as an adolescent girl in the seventies, I was much more embarassed about the significance my mind attached to the sex act and by own viginity (for as long as it lasted) than I was about he act itself. And that was entirely due to cultural influences: what I saw on TV, and read in books and newspapers. And being autistic didn't help, there. It meant that I was much more exposed to - and influenced by- exaggerated media reports than I was to the complex, human perspectives of the people immediately around me (who'd mostly already earned my contempt for their narrow-mindedness). And inasmuch as I grasped that most of the people around me hadn't "moved with the times " near as much as the media suggested, I just put that down to them being dinosaurs.
I can easily imagine all kinds of individual attitudes to sex arising out of that particular cauldron of social forces, depending on gender, upbringing, enviroment, personality, etc. But you couldn't claim that anbody's attitudes were unnifluenced by societal norms- or that societal norms no longer existed, just that those norms were in a state of flux, and we were all receiving a a bunch of confusing mixed mes
sages. There was a rendency towards casting off ( or rather repressing ) the "sexual hang-ups" of previous generations, together with a (less obvious) move towards " maculinising" sex .
It was a bloody hard time to be a girl. On the one hand , you got social disapprobation for being "frigid" , or old-fashioioned, iif you didn't put out; and on the other hand, the double-standards that would put a girl down as a "whore" for behaving in ways that were totally acceptable for boys (and always had been ) were still alive and kicking. You couldn't do right.
What I see happening nowadays , is a bit of re-balancing of sexual mores going on. I mean, it's now totally OK to have emotional feelings about sex , especially if somebody groped you without your consent....and all the lecherous gropers of the past 3-4 decades are winding up in court, FFS (or all the ones who wound up famous, at least). Now , I loathe that kind of behavious as much as anybody, but it was so damned common in my youth (and I think it was probably always common) that I fel it's unfair to make examples of a few individuals like that.
For my own part, when I've taken exception to a guy groping me, I've told him very fi rmly to stop. And if that didn't work, I slapped him in the face. And yeah, I can see that some girls (and boys) wouldn't be so assertive . Some girls (and boys) might freeze and wind up being effectively raped. And I can also see that it's ugly behaviout that ought to be stopped a root...if possible. But it doesn't follow that all those guys are evil . Or let's say, if they are, then we might as well top ourselves, because there's no escaping such widespread evil any other way.
So i'm very much with Al, in wanting to firm up the definitions of "rape" and "sexual assualt" to stop this thing becoming a witch-hunt. But i find this idea that societal forces don't come into this at all to be laughable. If different cultures don't have different rate -rapes I'll be bloody amazed. But the evidence suggests that they do. And what the heck is your problem with that, Al?
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
Not entirely right nor entirely wrong.
There is a very worrying trend to call things "other than rape", rape. US colleges are very much bastions of Progressive and Feminist thought and enthusiastically embrace the belief females at all costs.
No one wants rapists to get away with rape but taking away due process and/or believing one party over another on basis of gender is not that great either.
So NO, you do NOT out of hand become a supporter of rape culture or a victim blamer IF the victim has not been proven. Up until then you are simply a reasonable and moral human being waiting for all the facts and passing judgment accordingly.
Shock horror, some males do rape and shock horror some girls do lie about being raped.
I think it is crazy that the high incidences of rape have been compared by some as akin to the rape statistics in the Congo during time of war where rape is used as an instrument of war to dehumanise the enemy. It is insulting. It would be similarly as insulting to pretend that just because an accused rapist is in a US college, that he could not have raped someone. Rape does and has and will continue to happen in US colleges. The truth is like most things somewhere inbetween. There will be some guys who DO rape and there will be some women who will lie about it. There will also be a lot of women who do not report it. None of us for those very reasons know what the TRUE statistics ion rape there or anywhere else is BUT it is absolutely reasonable to say that rape is abhorrent and ought not occur and rapists are monsters.
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
Oh I agree with all that, except that I'm very surprised by that 3% figure. that suggests to me that modern-day US is hugely better that Britain in the seventies and eighties! My experience was that every girl/woman I ever talked with about it with had been groped without her consent on several occasions by several different men. The number of boys/men who were well-known to be to much too free free with their hands was closer to 50% than 3%. and that probably went up to 50% or more when they were drunk.
That said, I moved in a number of radically different social circles , as it happens, and I found that college kids (who were largely middle-class, back then. That might have changed somewhat?) were , on average, a lot more civilised in their sexual behaviour than working-class men were.
Again, I suppose that goes to reinforces the part that prevailing cultural attitudes play. You can't just dismiss culltural influences and put it all onto the individual, like Al does.
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I found Silly Walk's reminiscences interesting and informative Thanks :plus:.
I know it's onl;y anecdotal evidence, but when it comes to cultural influences , anecdotes can winklle out what's really going on a damned sight better than statistics can. There are too many different ways to interpret statistics .
Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ? But, then, Al's offering of a single, equally anecdotal counter-example does not in any way disprove the "rape culture " theory. You'd surely expect to find any number of individuals and families who buck any given trend.
In Laurie Lee's autobiographical work "Cider with Rosie" he describes how, as an adolescent, he and his mates made a half-assed plan (whicjh they never actually went through with) to waylay a mentallly challenged local girl and gang rape her. From a modern perspective, it's shocking. Some people also find Lee's understated treatment of the subject shocking. There's a sort of "Boys will be boys" tone to it that suggests that this kind of thing really was pretty normal in rural England, back in his day.
I'm thinking that kids who grow up in a rural enviromnent (like Lee and his friends) are more likely to have a sort of matter-of-fact c attitude to sex, because they'll all-too-likely have got their sex education from watching farm animals mating. So they won't see it as any big deal. That matches with my own (limited) experience of country people. I found a really startling alteration in attitudes to sex when I went to stay in a hamlet in rural Herefordshire for a little while. I mean, for example, it was clear that people I met there (whilst not approving of paedopholia) did not see paeophilia as a serious crimes that ought to be reported . (One guy told me about a man who drove along thev main road near the village, picking young children up and paying tjhem to masturbate him. He's been one of those kids. The kids appreciated the chance to earn easy money. When I questioned to guy about the ethics of that , he shrugged and said the guy was harmless, in view. "He didn't force us. I felt sorry for him," he said. "I think he did it becuse he was lonely". The difference is that whilst the same sort of thing surely happened in the city too, it would never be talked about so openly and so casually.)
Similarly, when I when a child, sex education in English schools was presented as a purely biological thing (straight after the life cycle of the frog, usually :LOL:) . None of the sociological nor emotional aspects were discussed at all. If you has any feelings on the issue (and who woudn't ? upon discovering that their parents had - immensely hypocritically- done very rude things, involving unmentionalble body parts? and that onself was the outcome of that act ?) then you just had to work through those feelings for yourself. One had the impression that feelings just didn't come into it at all. Then the "permissive society " came along and had the effect of heightening one's guilt about having any feelings about sex (which guilt was already fighting with the more-traditional guilt about sexual desire) especially girly-type feelings such as love and affection.
For myself, as an adolescent girl in the seventies, I was much more embarassed about the significance my mind attached to the sex act and by own viginity (for as long as it lasted) than I was about he act itself. And that was entirely due to cultural influences: what I saw on TV, and read in books and newspapers. And being autistic didn't help., there. It meant that I was much more exposed to - and influenced by- exaggerated media reports than I was to the complex, human perspectives of the people immediately around me. (who'd mostly already earned my contempt, for their narrow-mindedness) And inasmuch as I grasped that most of the p[eople around me hadn't "moved with the times " near as much as the media suggested, I just put that down to them being dinosaurs.
I can easily imagine all kinds of individual attitudes to sex arising out of that particular caudron of social forces, depending on gender, upbringing, enviroment, personality, etc. But you couldn't claim that anbody's attitudes were unifluenced by societal norms- or that societal norms no longer existed, just that those norms were ion a state of flux, and we all receiving a a bunch of mixed messages. There was a rendency towards casting off ( or rather repressing ) the "sexual hang-ups" of previous generations, together with a (less obvious) move towards " maculinising" sex .
It was a bloody hard time to be a girl. On the one hand , you got socoal disapprobation for being "frigid" , or old-fashioionediif you didn't put out; and on the other hand, the double-standards that would put a girl down as a "whore" for behaving in ways that were totally acceptable for boys (and always had been ) were still alive and kicking. You couldn't do right.
What I see happening nowadays , is a bit of re-balancing of sexual mores going on. I mean, it's now totally OK to have emotional feelings about sex , especially if somebody groped you without your consent..and all the lecherous gropers of the past 3-4 decades are winding up in court, FFS (or all the ones who wound up famous, at least) Now , I loathe that kind of behavious as much as anybody, but it was so damned common in my youth (and I think it was probably always common) that i fel it;'s unfair to make examples of a few individuals like that.
For my own part, when I've taken exceprion to a guy grropinfg me, I;'be told him very formly to stop. And if that didn't work, I slapped him in the face. And yeah, i can see that some girls (and boys) wouldn't be so assertive . Some girls (and boys) mmight freeze and wind up being effectively raped. And I can also see that it's ugly behaviout that ought to be stopped a root...if possible. But it doesn't follow that all those guys are evil . Or let's say, if they are, then we might as well top ourselves, because there's no escaping such widespread evil any other way.
So i'm very much with Al, in wanting to firm up the definitions of "rape" and "sexual assualt" to stop this thing becoming a witch-hunt. But i find this idea that societal forces don't come into this at all to be laughable. If different cultutes don't have different rate -rapes I'll be bloody amazed. But the evidence suggests that they do. And what the heck is your problem with that, Al?
It s interesting that you latch onto the rape culture narrative on the basis of an anecdote but when offered a counter say that my experience of people who I grew up and around is simply a case of exception to the rule. Could it not be said the other way around? That the people in the counter anecdote to mine were the exceptions? Not if you are mentally invested in the narrative being true.
As to your assertions being rural as having a more matter of fact attitude towards sex (which may or may not be true....it really is a guess isn't it?) somehow translates into more likely to be at risk of being rapists??? Again, I do not see your connection.
I have a feeling and I may be completely off-base, but I think you have chosen a narrative and now have conclusions and are looking for premises to fit these conclusions. Poor way to go about things.
Now can rapists find each other to commit horrible crimes? Absolutely. I do not know how they do but then I do not travel in such circles nor know their psychology but Fred and Rosemary West found each other and so did Myra Hinckley and Ian Brady. I do not think that this indicates that there is a murder and child abduction culture that evil people may find each other and perpetuate evil acts together and I believe the same about so-called rape culture.
Society is NOT a rape culture. It has laws against. It has social cost against rapists. It is not celebrated or encouraged. It is just about the opposite to what rape culture is supposed to be. But horrible people will do horrible things to others and always will. You will always have people in society who murder, torture, abuse children, rape, steal, and every other crime. It is sad and regretable. But that does not mean there is a rape culture and I am sorry but the idea that there is, is laughable to me.
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Well here's a thing about anecdotal evidence, Al: you can't just overturn a growing weight of anecdotal evidence by presenting a counter-anecdote. Not reasonably. Presumably, that film was inspired by various anecdotal evidence (that kind of thing usually is) ;it drew more anecdotal evidence out of Silly Walks ; which in , turn, inspired me to present some anecdotal evidence of my own.
I also pointed out that I know for a fact (purely by introspection) that my own sexual attitudes were very much influenced by the prevailing social mores (confused and contractory though they were) so why should n't the same be equally true of other people, especially men?
In answer to all that you cite your family , as not participating in the supposed rape culture. And you expect us to just drop the theory that a rape culture exists on that basis? That's just not gonna satisfy anyone but you Al, because nobody's actually trying to suggest that everybody is the same.
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Well here's a thing about anecdotal evidence, Al: you can't just overturn a growing weight of anecdotal evidence by presenting a counter-anecdote.
[...]
nobody's actually trying to suggest that everybody is the same.
thaaaaaank you. Both points are what I was trying to get at a page ago but I apparently didn't put it very well.
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Well here's a thing about anecdotal evidence, Al: you can't just overturn a growing weight of anecdotal evidence by presenting a counter-anecdote.
[...]
nobody's actually trying to suggest that everybody is the same.
thaaaaaank you. Both points are what I was trying to get at a page ago but I apparently didn't put it very well.
Oh, you put it clearly enough . But Al is ome bloody hard nut to crack. I surely wouldn't presuppose that my own attempt will be sucessful. Water off the proverbial duck's back, most likely.
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I've actually known of a woman who says she wants to be raped. She has (or had, she's had several, moving from various host to various others after a host basically won't tolerate her posted content) several blogs. She HAS been raped, and says she wants to be. In fact she actually goes so far as to say as far as sex goes, she wants to be used as a piece of meat, for the guy to STFU, fuck her and fuck off.
Lived in an underground self-made bunker, after she got fired from her job at a nuclear plant for disclosing the fact, dug the place out, in the woods, tapping power from the grid (illegally but who gives a shit). I have to confess, having seen her pics of the place, it was AMAZING. Totally teched-out. If you were to include an armory, a geiger-counter and an NBC suit or three, then you'd have one hell of a survivalist apocalypse-bunker. I seriously envy this lass her bunker, it OWNED. Made money from dumpster-diving for and rehabilitating technology and ebaying it (yeah, she had internet and everything)
She is autistic (autistic savant type) and seems pretty damn smart. Although about as comprehending of people as people are of the languages spoken if any, by, if any, silicon based life located in other fucking galaxies. They are/we are, to her, as well understood as a potato understands how to fly a fighter jet.
In many, many ways I feel a lot of compassion for the girl. In her kane-cave, she even kept beer in her mini fridge. AFAIK she doesn't drink. Why, you might wonder, would a non-drinker keep a case of beer cold at all times? to offer to people who'd rape her.
Messed up, certainly. Search for 'faye kane'
Not sure what (if she has managed to host one) her current blog address is, but it makes some interesting reading, both from a psychology viewpoint, and shes a serious astrophysics geekstress. As well as one helluva kinky fucker. Whilst yeah, I'd love to get in bed with her, I COULDN'T rape her, (or anyone else), and she gets off on some serious masochism/BDSM....pins poked through clit and nipples....sheesh..bloody christ on a barbeque..some fucking messed up shit. That I'd have a big problem with, in that I don't think I could, even to get off a willing partner, strike a woman other than in either self defense against having violence done to me, to protect another person from violence, or to prevent an animal being abused.
But faye kane makes for some interesting reading....and I don't know anybody else who could explain the uncertainty principle in terms of a girl standing on a chair, bound at some point to tip over in a given direction, surrounded by men, any one of which would fuck the girl in the ass. She's got a novel way of putting things, thats for sure.
And with regards to the term 'rape culture' or 'rape subculture', quite frankly the very concept is nauseating, in that is suggests such a base, abhorrent act is or could be in any way cultured. A group/sub-group phenomenon perhaps, but not a 'culture'. A culture, outside of the context of a microorganism being bred, is something which has class, and is refined. Is something to be striven towards the attainment of. And rape, is not it.
Ignoring statutory 'rape' where there is a relationship between two people who exert no power over one another that the person such a power is exerted over is not the totally aware, and not just consenting to, but desirous of that power being exerted (E.g the context of bondage etc. in their sexual practices), and where the one, and ONLY way it is 'rape' is in the lex legis of the country the people in that relationship are located, but otherwise, all partakers in the relationship are even in status, and truly desiring any and all interactions between them of a sexual nature.
I won't say what, for legal reasons, but the younger of the former fiancees I have had, as an example. One of the two of us could have been jailed for some of our activities on the grounds of the number of solar cycles the person in question had existed for, yet had ANYBODY posed a threat to the other, attempted to exploit them in any way whatsoever, or done them harm, the other partner would not have thought twice about reduced the one posing the threat to. The love was mutual, and it was both total and equal. Neither would lift their little finger against the other, save in (quite lewd and most certainly illegal) manners of using it to pleasure the other...if you catch my drift. (lets just say, that, to my considerable regret, I even had to decline certain requests, given that the acts in question would have been performed in places such as a train station, and if seen, would certainly have been reported, and if so, one of the two partners would be arrested and charged both for statutory rape and for gross indecency [well, indecency, neither of us would consider it gross, a classically autie girl in a horny as hell mood with looks to die for and a personality to match...who could say no? :autism:, this girl...she could turn homophobic females into rampaging bulldykes :P]
Search her out online. Although NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK! I cannot possibly express that strongly enough. Her astronomy and astrophysics, physics stuff is real interesting reading.
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
Rape is no exception among violent crime to have a higher instance of victimization among the poor and uneducated. Once read somewhere that females without college degrees have stats about a third greater than their higher educated counterparts. That's not to say universities aren't experiencing a problem; it's just not a unique problem and society is focusing on the victimization of the privileged.
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
Rape is no exception among violent crime to have a higher instance of victimization among the poor and uneducated. Once read somewhere that females without college degrees have stats about a third greater than their higher educated counterparts. That's not to say universities aren't experiencing a problem; it's just not a unique problem and society is focusing on the victimization of the privileged.
It also is not to say that universities are experiencing the problem they are purporting.
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Well here's a thing about anecdotal evidence, Al: you can't just overturn a growing weight of anecdotal evidence by presenting a counter-anecdote. Not reasonably. Presumably, that film was inspired by various anecdotal evidence (that kind of thing usually is) ;it drew more anecdotal evidence out of Silly Walks ; which in , turn, inspired me to present some anecdotal evidence of my own.
I also pointed out that I know for a fact (purely by introspection) that my own sexual attitudes were very much influenced by the prevailing social mores (confused and contractory though they were) so why should n't the same be equally true of other people, especially men?
In answer to all that you cite your family , as not participating in the supposed rape culture. And you expect us to just drop the theory that a rape culture exists on that basis? That's just not gonna satisfy anyone but you Al, because nobody's actually trying to suggest that everybody is the same.
Sure we all can present anecdotal evidence and what does that show? Did I dismiss it out of hand? No. Did I say these were all a lie? No. What did I do?
Show me something substantial that a rape culture exists. Show me a law supporting it? Perhaps the educational book that supports it? Maybe the Recognised spokespeople for it? No? No...why not?
Might it be because rape is actually so hated and despised by society, that it is illegal and advocating for it is likely to have the person doing so come to harm? Does it have anything to do with rapist men often facing mob justice from the hands of victim's families? Is it true being branded a rapist is like a scarlet letter? Is ANY of that true OR is there rape culture?
Isn't it more true that due to the fact that it is NOT a rapist want to very often isolate the victim for fear of getting caught, incapacitate the victim or intimidate and scare them, then isn't it true threats and being told they will not be believed and that it was their fault and all of this play a part in trying to control a situation from being bought to ANY attention BECAUSE there is no rape culture and rapist must try to keep to the shadows of society?
Have you come to the party with anything substantial to show me that the above is not, in fact, true and that the opposite is true and a culture and society is pro-raping? No? That is because the premise is a load of unmitigated bullshit. Something that a few anecdotes and a want to base wild conclusions around these things will not extinguish.
Now if we step over and around the bullshit we come to other questions like, do rapists exist in small country towns and in Universities? I would presume the answer in any decent population is yes. Is rape a problem? Yes. Can fellow rapist somehow find other rapists? Yes. Are rapists just uneducated on what rape is and what consent is? No.
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
Rape is no exception among violent crime to have a higher instance of victimization among the poor and uneducated. Once read somewhere that females without college degrees have stats about a third greater than their higher educated counterparts. That's not to say universities aren't experiencing a problem; it's just not a unique problem and society is focusing on the victimization of the privileged.
That's actually a really good point.
I wonder how much of the frequent citation of college rape stats is simply the availability of the statistics? (Psychology's favorite subjects are pigeons, lab rats, and college students- animals they have easy access to study.)
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
Rape is no exception among violent crime to have a higher instance of victimization among the poor and uneducated. Once read somewhere that females without college degrees have stats about a third greater than their higher educated counterparts. That's not to say universities aren't experiencing a problem; it's just not a unique problem and society is focusing on the victimization of the privileged.
That's actually a really good point.
I wonder how much of the frequent citation of college rape stats is simply the availability of the statistics? (Psychology's favorite subjects are pigeons, lab rats, and college students- animals they have easy access to study.)
I wonder how much of the stats are driven by such things as Title 9 and the affirmative consent bullshit.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/03/living/affirmative-consent-school-policy/index.html
California might become the first state to make affirmative consent law. Senate Bill 967 would amend the education code to require schools whose students receive financial aid to uphold an affirmative consent standard in disciplinary hearings and to educate students about the standard. The legislature sent the bill to Gov. Jerry Brown last week.
The legislation has the support of victims' rights groups, violence prevention groups and the University of California System. But critics worry it could define a great deal of sexual activity as "sexual assault" and undermine due process rights of the accused.
Even if Brown vetoes the legislation, consent will still be defined on the University of California's 10 campuses as an "affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity."
When young girls are fed a diet that they have no accountability for their sexual choices, that they have no agency, and that bad sex is rape, a lot of bad things can happen. Furthermore, if on an accusation they can ruin a man and get no legal or social cost for doing so and likely as not to be able to do this in virtual anonymity, then but ends will happen and unreliable stats will be the result.
Just to underline this for those wishing to take my words out of context, I will reiterate, rapists absolutely exist on University campuses and not every rape is a false claim by a girl nor an ambiguous sexual encounter. Sometimes rape is just rape.
But self-reported sexual assaults = rape? Is this what the stats are reporting and how is this considered empirically true. If it is not considered empirically true how does this sell the rape culture myth and things like the Title 9 laws?
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Show me something substantial that a rape culture exists. Show me a law supporting it? Perhaps the educational book that supports it? Maybe the Recognised spokespeople for it? No? No...why not?Might it be because rape is actually so hated and despised by society, that it is illegal and advocating for it is likely to have the person doing so come to harm? Does it have anything to do with rapist men often facing mob justice from the hands of victim's families? Is it true being branded a rapist is like a scarlet letter? Is ANY of that true OR is there rape culture?Isn't it more true that due to the fact that it is NOT a rapist want to very often isolate the victim for fear of getting caught, incapacitate the victim or intimidate and scare them, then isn't it true threats and being told they will not be believed and that it was their fault and all of this play a part in trying to control a situation from being bought to ANY attention BECAUSE there is no rape culture and rapist must try to keep to the shadows of society?
I think you're taking the word 'culture' to mean 'community'. There may be some sub-cultures where rape itself
is viewed that way, but that's not what is generally meant. Rape culture is used to point more to the normalization
of certain behavior and attitudes (romance novels are a great example of this) which treads close enough (or even
crosses the line) to rape and sexual assault that there is a more general attitude that these things aren't rape, per se.
(edited to put correct quote in)
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Well here's a thing about anecdotal evidence, Al: you can't just overturn a growing weight of anecdotal evidence by presenting a counter-anecdote.
[...]
nobody's actually trying to suggest that everybody is the same.
thaaaaaank you. Both points are what I was trying to get at a page ago but I apparently didn't put it very well.
Oh, you put it clearly enough . But Al is ome bloody hard nut to crack. I surely wouldn't presuppose that my own attempt will be sucessful. Water off the proverbial duck's back, most likely.
That darn Al just refuses to accept that because you have AN opinion that:
A) It be right
B) The only opinion worth having
C) That he must accept this opinion and make it his own right?
Is that what you were trying to convey?
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A bit of a tangent, but interesting, and relevant in that Al seems quite convinced (I am not sure why) that rape is *over* reported/the statistics are significantly inflated by false rape accusations, rather than it being underreported:
False rape accusations loom large in the cultural imagination. We don’t forget the big ones: The widely-read 2014 Rolling Stone article, later retracted, about a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia; the 2006 accusations against innocent members of the Duke University lacrosse team. These cases are readily cited by defense attorneys and Republican lawmakers and anyone else who wants a reason to discuss the dangers of false allegations. What if a woman has consensual sex, and then regrets it the next day? What if a woman gets dumped by her boyfriend and decides to accuse him of rape as revenge? What if she’s just doing it for attention? Are false accusations reaching epidemic levels in today’s hard-drinking hookup culture, where the lines of consent have been blurred? Critics argue that reports of rape should be treated with more caution, since men’s lives are so often ruined by women’s malicious lies.
But my research—including academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations—suggests that every part of this narrative is wrong. What’s more, it’s wrong in ways that help real rapists escape justice, while perversely making it more likely that we will miss the signs of false reports.
Innocent men rarely face rape charges
Let’s start with the idea that false rape accusations ruin lives, and are therefore a universal risk to men. Generally, feminists dismiss this idea by arguing that false accusations are rare—only between 2% and 10% of all reports are estimated to be false. What’s equally important to know, however, is that false rape accusations almost never have serious consequences.
It’s exceedingly rare for a false rape allegation to end in prison time.
This may be hard to believe, especially considering that rape is a felony, punishable with years of prison. However—to start with this worst-case scenario—it’s exceedingly rare for a false rape allegation to end in prison time. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, since records began in 1989, in the US there are only 52 cases where men convicted of sexual assault were exonerated because it turned out they were falsely accused. By way of comparison, in the same period, there are 790 cases in which people were exonerated for murder.
Furthermore, in the most detailed study ever conducted of sexual assault reports to police, undertaken for the British Home Office in the early 2000s, out of 216 complaints that were classified as false, only 126 had even gotten to the stage where the accuser lodged a formal complaint. Only 39 complainants named a suspect. Only six cases led to an arrest, and only two led to charges being brought before they were ultimately deemed false. (Here, as elsewhere, it has to be assumed that some unknown percentage of the cases classified as false actually involved real rapes; what they don’t involve is countless innocent men’s lives being ruined.)
So the evidence suggests that even in the rare case where a man is the subject of a false rape complaint, chances are that the charges will be dropped without him ever learning about the allegations. This raises an obvious question: Why would false accusers go through the trouble of making a report to police, only to instantly withdraw it?
The reasons for false reports
In every academic study, one of the most common kinds of false accuser is a teenage girl who tells her parents she was raped to avoid getting in trouble. Unwanted pregnancy is sometimes cited by such girls, but the reason can also be trivial; the phrase “missed curfew” shows up with disturbing frequency in these cases. As a rule, it’s the parents who insist on getting police involved. Two different studies have found that almost half of all false rape complaints are lodged by someone other than the alleged victim, usually a parent.
Another kind of case which evaporates rapidly is that of a person who falsely reports a rape in the hope of getting needed medical care or psychiatric medication; in one study, six of the 55 reports classified as false by a police department in one year fit this description. Like the teens who missed their curfew, these false accusers have no interest in pursuing charges after the lie has served its purpose.
Portrait of a false accuser
Some false accusers do press charges, however, and this brings us to an unpalatable point. Because real rape victims are often mistaken for false accusers, it can be uncomfortable to insinuate anything negative about either group. But these two groups are not at all alike. In fact, rape victims aren’t even a group; they have no unifying traits. They can be young or old, black or white, men or women, gay or straight, rich or poor—anyone at all. Even a 65-year-old man can be a victim of rape.
Almost invariably, adult false accusers who persist in pursuing charges have a previous history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud.
When one looks at a series of fabricated sexual assaults, on the other hand, patterns immediately begin to emerge. The most striking of these is that, almost invariably, adult false accusers who persist in pursuing charges have a previous history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud. Indeed, they’re often criminals whose family and friends are also criminals; broken people trapped in chaotic lives.
Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the Duke lacrosse case, was the archetypal false accuser. She had previously reported another brutal rape/kidnapping in which no one was ever charged. She had a previous felony conviction, and she ultimately went to prison for an unrelated crime (in her case, murdering her boyfriend). She had trouble keeping her stripping job because the combination of drugs she was on—including both anti-depressants and methadone—made her keep falling asleep at work. Tragically, she seems to have genuinely suffered sexual abuse as a child—another feature that often appears in adult false accusers.
Four motivations
But while false accusers often have similar histories, they have various motives. These can be divided into roughly four categories: personal gain, mental illness, revenge, and the need for an alibi.
Accusers motivated by personal gain are generally the same people who slip on the courthouse steps and sue the city. Sometimes their modus operandi is to claim to be raped on government property; sometimes it’s to claim to have been raped by a government employee. In either case, the resulting suit against the government will typically only be one in a series of fraudulent claims. One such false accuser turned out to have previously filed seven bodily injury insurance claims, including three identical claims against restaurants in which she claimed to have broken a tooth on a rock in her food. Occasionally, however, the gain is not financial, as in the case of a woman who lied about rape because she thought it might help her stay out of prison on a drug charge; or the man, already in prison, who was hoping to be moved into a cell with his boyfriend.
Mentally ill false accusers can be people with severe psychosis who genuinely believe they’ve been raped; one woman claimed to have been sexually assaulted every day for three years by “every gang member in the city.” More commonly, however, they have what is called a factitious disorder: a personality disorder related to (and often accompanied by) Munchausen’s syndrome, which compels them to claim they’ve been assaulted. One such accuser was Sara Ylen, who ultimately accused at least seven different men of rape; in the incident for which she was finally arrested, she appeared at a police station with her face painted in fake bruises that wiped off easily with gauze. Like many such accusers, Ylen also falsely claimed to have a terminal illness, and spent two years in hospice care for cancer, although no doctor had ever diagnosed her with the disease.
These accusers often compulsively change their stories, adding dramatic details without regard either for the account they originally gave or the physical evidence. (Note that more common mental health problems like anxiety, depression, or non-psychotic bipolar disorder are not associated with false rape accusations.)
Revenge is another common catalyst—either as a single motive, or as the reason a particular victim was chosen. Contrary to popular belief, however, relatively few such accusers are seeking revenge for getting dumped or rejected by former lovers. For instance, none of the 52 cases of documented wrongful conviction in the US feature women scorned—although there is one “man scorned”, a remarkably persuasive character who managed to convince his girlfriend to accuse a male roommate who’d rejected his sexual advances.
Other revenge cases include a woman trading sex for drugs who was disappointed in the quantity of drugs; a man who beat his wheelchair-bound girlfriend until she agreed to accuse a man of whom he was jealous; an 18-year-old boy living with an older man who threw the boy out after an argument about the man’s reneging on a promise to buy the boy a car in return for sex; and a woman who accused a man she thought had stolen her husband’s truck while the husband was in prison. There’s also the remarkable case of a woman who accused her gastroenterologist of performing oral sex on her after a colonoscopy, because she was angry at his refusal to act as an expert witness for her in a lawsuit. She then, of course, sued the gastroenterologist too.
Accusers who fabricate rapes as an alibi are mostly the already mentioned teens in trouble with parents, although some are adults, who are typically trying to cover up an infidelity. These are the only accusers who can sometimes seem ordinary, even sympathetic—like the 14-year-old girl with cognitive deficits whose mother found her in a compromising position with a boy, and who took four months to work up the courage to admit the sex was consensual. When charges are brought in these cases, the driving force is often a third party who believes the lie and naturally wants to see the perpetrator punished—and sometimes also to cash in with a lawsuit.
What we know
A final note about who makes false accusations: While popular conceptions of this issue center on female mendacity, clearly many of these stories involve male accusers. Given the fact that men, too, can crave revenge and have personality disorders, this should be obvious. If it’s counter-intuitive, it’s because the issue has consistently been framed as one of gender warfare. But the truth is that false rape accusations aren’t salvos in any political struggle. They’re crimes, mostly perpetrated by the same men and women who commit other categories of crime, and for similar reasons.
False accusers almost never tell stories that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as an innocent misunderstanding.
Neither are false accusations the result of miscommunications taking place in a murky world of casual hook-ups and heavy drinking. False accusers almost never tell stories that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as an innocent misunderstanding. In a study of false rape claims made to the Los Angeles Police Department, 78% involved claims of aggravated rape—assaults involving a gun or knife, gang rapes, and/or attacks resulting in injuries.
Most of all, it should be remembered that a false accuser is a person making up a story to serve some goal. Whether the impetus is personal gain, factitious disorder, the need for an alibi, or revenge, it’s crucial to the accuser that their story be taken seriously. For this reason, it’s radically unlikely—and in practice does not happen—that a false accuser would invent a story where the issue of consent could seem ambiguous.
It’s necessary to add an important caveat: The same kinds of people who are most likely to become false accusers are also frequently targeted by predators. Teenagers, people with severe mental illness, people with criminal records—all are vulnerable to rapists, who often have a very keen sense of which victims are most likely to be mistrusted by authorities. Although the accounts of these complainants need careful scrutiny, police should take them more seriously, not less seriously, than they currently do. The lesson to be drawn here is not that any individual’s story of sexual assault should be discounted; it’s that the vast majority of rape reports can be believed.
When a woman says she’s been brutally raped by seven men at a public party on a bed of broken glass, as the UVA accuser did, and when that woman has a history of strange lies, as the UVA accuser also did, there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical. But if a woman without any history of dramatic falsehoods says she went home with a man and, after they’d kissed a while consensually, he held her down and forced her into sex—in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, you can just assume it’s true. This is not because of any political dictum like “Believe women.” It’s because this story looks exactly like tens of thousands of date rapes that happen every year, and nothing at all like a false rape accusation.
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A bit of a tangent, but interesting, and relevant in that Al seems quite convinced (I am not sure why) that rape is *over* reported/the statistics are significantly inflated by false rape accusations, rather than it being underreported:
False rape accusations loom large in the cultural imagination. We don’t forget the big ones: The widely-read 2014 Rolling Stone article, later retracted, about a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia; the 2006 accusations against innocent members of the Duke University lacrosse team. These cases are readily cited by defense attorneys and Republican lawmakers and anyone else who wants a reason to discuss the dangers of false allegations. What if a woman has consensual sex, and then regrets it the next day? What if a woman gets dumped by her boyfriend and decides to accuse him of rape as revenge? What if she’s just doing it for attention? Are false accusations reaching epidemic levels in today’s hard-drinking hookup culture, where the lines of consent have been blurred? Critics argue that reports of rape should be treated with more caution, since men’s lives are so often ruined by women’s malicious lies.
But my research—including academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations—suggests that every part of this narrative is wrong. What’s more, it’s wrong in ways that help real rapists escape justice, while perversely making it more likely that we will miss the signs of false reports.
Innocent men rarely face rape charges
Let’s start with the idea that false rape accusations ruin lives, and are therefore a universal risk to men. Generally, feminists dismiss this idea by arguing that false accusations are rare—only between 2% and 10% of all reports are estimated to be false. What’s equally important to know, however, is that false rape accusations almost never have serious consequences.
It’s exceedingly rare for a false rape allegation to end in prison time.
This may be hard to believe, especially considering that rape is a felony, punishable with years of prison. However—to start with this worst-case scenario—it’s exceedingly rare for a false rape allegation to end in prison time. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, since records began in 1989, in the US there are only 52 cases where men convicted of sexual assault were exonerated because it turned out they were falsely accused. By way of comparison, in the same period, there are 790 cases in which people were exonerated for murder.
Furthermore, in the most detailed study ever conducted of sexual assault reports to police, undertaken for the British Home Office in the early 2000s, out of 216 complaints that were classified as false, only 126 had even gotten to the stage where the accuser lodged a formal complaint. Only 39 complainants named a suspect. Only six cases led to an arrest, and only two led to charges being brought before they were ultimately deemed false. (Here, as elsewhere, it has to be assumed that some unknown percentage of the cases classified as false actually involved real rapes; what they don’t involve is countless innocent men’s lives being ruined.)
So the evidence suggests that even in the rare case where a man is the subject of a false rape complaint, chances are that the charges will be dropped without him ever learning about the allegations. This raises an obvious question: Why would false accusers go through the trouble of making a report to police, only to instantly withdraw it?
The reasons for false reports
In every academic study, one of the most common kinds of false accuser is a teenage girl who tells her parents she was raped to avoid getting in trouble. Unwanted pregnancy is sometimes cited by such girls, but the reason can also be trivial; the phrase “missed curfew” shows up with disturbing frequency in these cases. As a rule, it’s the parents who insist on getting police involved. Two different studies have found that almost half of all false rape complaints are lodged by someone other than the alleged victim, usually a parent.
Another kind of case which evaporates rapidly is that of a person who falsely reports a rape in the hope of getting needed medical care or psychiatric medication; in one study, six of the 55 reports classified as false by a police department in one year fit this description. Like the teens who missed their curfew, these false accusers have no interest in pursuing charges after the lie has served its purpose.
Portrait of a false accuser
Some false accusers do press charges, however, and this brings us to an unpalatable point. Because real rape victims are often mistaken for false accusers, it can be uncomfortable to insinuate anything negative about either group. But these two groups are not at all alike. In fact, rape victims aren’t even a group; they have no unifying traits. They can be young or old, black or white, men or women, gay or straight, rich or poor—anyone at all. Even a 65-year-old man can be a victim of rape.
Almost invariably, adult false accusers who persist in pursuing charges have a previous history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud.
When one looks at a series of fabricated sexual assaults, on the other hand, patterns immediately begin to emerge. The most striking of these is that, almost invariably, adult false accusers who persist in pursuing charges have a previous history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud. Indeed, they’re often criminals whose family and friends are also criminals; broken people trapped in chaotic lives.
Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the Duke lacrosse case, was the archetypal false accuser. She had previously reported another brutal rape/kidnapping in which no one was ever charged. She had a previous felony conviction, and she ultimately went to prison for an unrelated crime (in her case, murdering her boyfriend). She had trouble keeping her stripping job because the combination of drugs she was on—including both anti-depressants and methadone—made her keep falling asleep at work. Tragically, she seems to have genuinely suffered sexual abuse as a child—another feature that often appears in adult false accusers.
Four motivations
But while false accusers often have similar histories, they have various motives. These can be divided into roughly four categories: personal gain, mental illness, revenge, and the need for an alibi.
Accusers motivated by personal gain are generally the same people who slip on the courthouse steps and sue the city. Sometimes their modus operandi is to claim to be raped on government property; sometimes it’s to claim to have been raped by a government employee. In either case, the resulting suit against the government will typically only be one in a series of fraudulent claims. One such false accuser turned out to have previously filed seven bodily injury insurance claims, including three identical claims against restaurants in which she claimed to have broken a tooth on a rock in her food. Occasionally, however, the gain is not financial, as in the case of a woman who lied about rape because she thought it might help her stay out of prison on a drug charge; or the man, already in prison, who was hoping to be moved into a cell with his boyfriend.
Mentally ill false accusers can be people with severe psychosis who genuinely believe they’ve been raped; one woman claimed to have been sexually assaulted every day for three years by “every gang member in the city.” More commonly, however, they have what is called a factitious disorder: a personality disorder related to (and often accompanied by) Munchausen’s syndrome, which compels them to claim they’ve been assaulted. One such accuser was Sara Ylen, who ultimately accused at least seven different men of rape; in the incident for which she was finally arrested, she appeared at a police station with her face painted in fake bruises that wiped off easily with gauze. Like many such accusers, Ylen also falsely claimed to have a terminal illness, and spent two years in hospice care for cancer, although no doctor had ever diagnosed her with the disease.
These accusers often compulsively change their stories, adding dramatic details without regard either for the account they originally gave or the physical evidence. (Note that more common mental health problems like anxiety, depression, or non-psychotic bipolar disorder are not associated with false rape accusations.)
Revenge is another common catalyst—either as a single motive, or as the reason a particular victim was chosen. Contrary to popular belief, however, relatively few such accusers are seeking revenge for getting dumped or rejected by former lovers. For instance, none of the 52 cases of documented wrongful conviction in the US feature women scorned—although there is one “man scorned”, a remarkably persuasive character who managed to convince his girlfriend to accuse a male roommate who’d rejected his sexual advances.
Other revenge cases include a woman trading sex for drugs who was disappointed in the quantity of drugs; a man who beat his wheelchair-bound girlfriend until she agreed to accuse a man of whom he was jealous; an 18-year-old boy living with an older man who threw the boy out after an argument about the man’s reneging on a promise to buy the boy a car in return for sex; and a woman who accused a man she thought had stolen her husband’s truck while the husband was in prison. There’s also the remarkable case of a woman who accused her gastroenterologist of performing oral sex on her after a colonoscopy, because she was angry at his refusal to act as an expert witness for her in a lawsuit. She then, of course, sued the gastroenterologist too.
Accusers who fabricate rapes as an alibi are mostly the already mentioned teens in trouble with parents, although some are adults, who are typically trying to cover up an infidelity. These are the only accusers who can sometimes seem ordinary, even sympathetic—like the 14-year-old girl with cognitive deficits whose mother found her in a compromising position with a boy, and who took four months to work up the courage to admit the sex was consensual. When charges are brought in these cases, the driving force is often a third party who believes the lie and naturally wants to see the perpetrator punished—and sometimes also to cash in with a lawsuit.
What we know
A final note about who makes false accusations: While popular conceptions of this issue center on female mendacity, clearly many of these stories involve male accusers. Given the fact that men, too, can crave revenge and have personality disorders, this should be obvious. If it’s counter-intuitive, it’s because the issue has consistently been framed as one of gender warfare. But the truth is that false rape accusations aren’t salvos in any political struggle. They’re crimes, mostly perpetrated by the same men and women who commit other categories of crime, and for similar reasons.
False accusers almost never tell stories that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as an innocent misunderstanding.
Neither are false accusations the result of miscommunications taking place in a murky world of casual hook-ups and heavy drinking. False accusers almost never tell stories that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as an innocent misunderstanding. In a study of false rape claims made to the Los Angeles Police Department, 78% involved claims of aggravated rape—assaults involving a gun or knife, gang rapes, and/or attacks resulting in injuries.
Most of all, it should be remembered that a false accuser is a person making up a story to serve some goal. Whether the impetus is personal gain, factitious disorder, the need for an alibi, or revenge, it’s crucial to the accuser that their story be taken seriously. For this reason, it’s radically unlikely—and in practice does not happen—that a false accuser would invent a story where the issue of consent could seem ambiguous.
It’s necessary to add an important caveat: The same kinds of people who are most likely to become false accusers are also frequently targeted by predators. Teenagers, people with severe mental illness, people with criminal records—all are vulnerable to rapists, who often have a very keen sense of which victims are most likely to be mistrusted by authorities. Although the accounts of these complainants need careful scrutiny, police should take them more seriously, not less seriously, than they currently do. The lesson to be drawn here is not that any individual’s story of sexual assault should be discounted; it’s that the vast majority of rape reports can be believed.
When a woman says she’s been brutally raped by seven men at a public party on a bed of broken glass, as the UVA accuser did, and when that woman has a history of strange lies, as the UVA accuser also did, there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical. But if a woman without any history of dramatic falsehoods says she went home with a man and, after they’d kissed a while consensually, he held her down and forced her into sex—in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, you can just assume it’s true. This is not because of any political dictum like “Believe women.” It’s because this story looks exactly like tens of thousands of date rapes that happen every year, and nothing at all like a false rape accusation.
Al does not think that at all. Are you trying to tell me what I think or others? If you are actually wondering what I think you know what I would do? I would ask. Have you asked or have you presumed?
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There is one (well more than one, but in particular, one comes to mind). At least here, names of POTENTIAL criminals, those who have been arrested, but neither convicted, nor even had charges formally brought against them. Merely held in detention in a police station for questioning, are often released.
And the filth really don't give a fuck. To whit, when two porkers came to the door today, asking about my taken property that I want back (I.e chemicals perfectly legal to own, and which had NOT been used for any criminal purpose, nor did evidence exist that I had done so, or was going to do so, the only law, related to one of two types of chemical reagent seized, which is on the chemical weapons precursor list, something rather hard to obtain for people not 'affiliated', it ISN'T itself a chemical weapon, but can be used to make mustard type blister chemical warfare agents, although truth told, hydrochloric acid, generable either as dry HCl gas with 98% bog-unblocker grade sulfuric acid and common table salt, or for that matter, obtained simply by walking into a hardware store, handing over money and walking out with a bottle of HCl, can be used for exactly the same, a Meyer-Clarke type synthesis of sulfur mustard(s). I hadn't and had no intention in the slightest to do that, but there is one law relating to the chemical, SOCl2, which is a reagent with MANY many uses that are completely unrelated to any chemical warfare purpose, its on the 'precursor list', and the law is that those who either manufacture themselves, or trade in over, I forget if its 30 tons or 300 tons annually must declare that they do so. They don't need afaik, a license, only to say 'we are trading in this quantity/manufacturing this quantity'. My supply was 100ml at the time, minus that which had been put to use, and yet I was arrested for its mere possession, along with another chemical which is sufficiently unusual that I won't name it specifically, no laws relate to its possession, but it theoretically COULD be used to make a pretty non-volatile, area-denial contact-exposure type mustard 'gas' (IF its a liquid, for all I know the theoretical compound in question might even be of sufficient molecular weight to be a waxy solid you would have either to swallow, or to physically touch to be affected), and yet, illegally they were seized. I'm currently bringing legal action against the filth not only to recover my stuff but to seek compensation for all the things they did (including quite literally pocketing valuables, precious stones, of no relation to chemistry whatsoever. Not seizing, they just disappeared, they were in containers they could not fall out of, you have to open them to remove the stones, deliberately, and I can only assume they were spotted by some greedy swine who pocketed them, since the containers were closed before they came to trash the place, and contained the stones, neither of them cheap, but one of them quite valuable indeed. Taken for personal gain)
And the coppers that came, when they tried to write down the names of the chemicals in their notebook, I said here, let me do it, I'm the one fluent in chemistry, and you are the ones fluent in police arrest procedure. And literally, I quote, they said 'not really, we usually just make it up as we go along' (which, IMO is NOT good enough with regards to standards. Those who's profession it is to enforce the law as written by others and authority given to the pork to enforce those laws, they must, must they not, do so according to that which is formally codified in established law, not just 'make it up as we go along and do what suits us when we feel like it')
Anyhow, here, thats about the standards the filth operate at. And name of suspects, not convicts, not even those charged, but merely detained under suspicion, their names are released. And should such a person be held on suspicion of rape, paedophilia, sexual assault not including actual penetrative rape, etc. anything sexual, that is allowed to get out, including into newspapers. Even if that man is either released without charge, or are charged, tried and found unanimously not guilty of having committed the act or acts then people will STILL view them as dirt who should be killed at the first opportunity. The mere accusation in and of itself is sufficient to utterly destroy somebody's life, to cause them to lose their job, to lose all their friends, bar perhaps a few truly faithful friends, or those present at the time the act was falsely claimed to have taken place and who KNOW it cannot have happened, since they were there to see that it did not happen...that is enough, especially if accusations involving children are involved, people won't think twice about beating them, even killing them, never mind the fact they did not do it (the filth are more than happy to release such information before conviction, which IMO is super-fucked-up. If their names are to be released, and if convicted in a valid court of law then a rapist or nonce damn well ought to be outed, but before that, IMO the names of suspects, even those charged, but as yet, who have not had their day in court to present their defense, the truly innocent, they almost certainly will find their lives crashing down in ruins around them, IMO all people arrested MUST, whatever the charge, be protected absolutely until the moment of successful conviction. And when they find people innocent or they are released without charge, also their names must, imperatively, be withheld from public knowledge, because those not charged, or found not guilty, the pigs don't go and publicly correct the record and make sure everybody KNOWS the person arrested on suspicion is not guilty, they just leave them to rot.
And I've known of a...I won't call It either a girl nor a woman, because either implies humanity, this bearer of at least two X chromosomes and no Y, is not even human..I met her on AFF, she claimed her parents and siblings regularly battered her, that her father raped her and so did grandfather and brother. I HAD heard violence, screaming, vicious-sounding violence over a hidden bluetooth we were talking over the phone at. I'd invited her to come here, and live at my place, under my protection whilst we attempted to get her citizenship in the UK, away from these fucks. At the time, all evidence pointed towards that being the truth. She was in fact a compulsive liar, bipolar, borderline PD fucking bitch from hell and klepto slag from the abyss. She then got a BF over in the states, proposed, drained him of all resources he had then made a rape claim, after he'd bought her a ring and a plane ticket. True or false I don't know. I have word from good sources (Kassiane S/RettDevil, genius chick and autie beauty extraordinaire that not only is HE a creep, but I've heard from several sources that his best friend is a paedophile, and did some particularly sick fucking shit, so HE might have done, I'll never know for sure, and I'm sure not going to ask, as I want nothing to do whatsoever with any of them, not including kassi, who I deeply respect, admire, and if I am honest, I've got quite the 'thing' for, and always have. Stunning intellect, stunning looks/body and SUCH a snuggly personality... seeing kassiane snark off against a deserving victim is a sight to behold...she is AWESOME at snark:autism: and a damn fine lady to boot, someone I'd quite willingly marry and have kids with if the choice were given me)
But my former housemate, after making these rape claims, she did it again over here. Got a BF, someone I'm not particularly a fan of, but I don't dislike him enough to wish him harm until or unless he does something to deserve harm being done unto him...but he is, quite honestly, incapable of raping his way out of a paper bag with an napalm strike if his life depended on it. So wet behind the ears he practically pisses out of his nose, and whilst I'm nothing of the sort, he is no more capable of rape than I am. Less so, if that is possible to actually be the case. She bled him dry, for a laptop, a trenchcoat, for a set of sai, a set of crescent-moon bladed daggers (a pair of daggers each with a blade about 10-11 inches to 1 foot long, shaped like a crescent moon or less-curved sickle blade, each dagger having a slit beside the blade, at the guard, that goes deep into the handle, so one can sheath each one in the handle of the other, forming a crescent moon-shaped one-piece handle. Then she got high with him (deliberately, SHE baked the hash cakes, and he knew what he was eating too), then claimed to the filth he drugged and raped her.
Little bitch was one sick little fuckup. Tried to kill me, after I told her to stay the fuck out of my bedroom while I was getting dressed, and she had to wait a few minutes while I woke up and put clothes on before she could feed her pet tropical fish (I let her have a fish tank, keep some as pets; although she stole a kitten from place or places unknown, twice). Total fucking psychotic mental case, and TOTALLY unworthy of being autistic. Had the gall, when I took her magic mushroom picking with a friend of mine, to have a go at me for eating some straight from the field as I picked, despite the fact we each had our own bags to fill, which, naturally, I assumed we each would fill and what we put in them would be ours, since nothing was ever agreed otherwise first before starting the hunt. And my friend, not the bitch, a guy I've known since I was a kid, he did, he filled a bag, picking for himself, so did I, but her...she did too but had the nerve to start screaming and kicking off at me for eating some I found for myself, rather than putting them in my bag. total control freak, and a disgrace to every single last person on the spectrum)
Even borrowed a cat-crate from neighbors who are friends of mine, and hid it in the loft, made me believe I had returned it and forgot.
Some people, if people they can be called at all, those like this bitch (The Bitch, or 'The Bitch From Hell' is what she has forever after been known as.), are damn dangerous, and will use the filth as a weapon. She did against me, got me raided, after the incident with the fish tank, when she tried to kick my door down, then barged in with a katana (curved, very sharp samurai sword, a bit over a meter long in the blade) and actually tried to use it on me. In the end, I drew a ninja-to blade of my own (a ninja-sword, similar to a katana, but rather than a curved blade edge, it has a steep, straight angle at the tip), parried her strikes before landing a real cruncher of a blow to her ugly fat head, knocked her senseless and disarmed her. She was pretty lucky, in that I was closer to the sword than to any of my guns, or she could easily have ended up with a bullet in the head or being hit with a toxic dart, little bitch is lucky to be alive at all, and that I showed the restraint in just parrying and disarming then going in hand to hand rather than running her through)
That day, immediately after I'd taken her weapon, I told her then and there first to turn out her pockets, so I could check for stolen property, then to get the fuck off my property and if she ever came back, save the agreed time in which I would leave her property in bin bags outside the house, that nobody would ever find the pieces of her.)
Bitch called the filth, made up (COMPLETELY false allegations against me, that I was growing weed amongst other things, when I didn't have so much as a speck of weed-twig in an empty bag in the house). And shockingly, the filth acted on the 'tipoff' despite already knowing she'd made false rape claims and was an illegal immigrant in the country.
(and when I went through her stuff, after kicking her out, helping myself to all her valium, temazepam and pain meds, anything else useful too, with the sincere hope she'd suffer a grand mal seizure and die screaming of pure, unmitigated chemical-withdrawal-induced terror) I found she'd been leaching off my meds, just so she could hide them under her bed, and get a hold on me, try to force me into withdrawal to be able to manipulate me. Along with having stolen (saw her do it once) money right out of my father's wallet, waiting until he went to the bog after waking up and then running on tiptoe into his room and lifting notes out of his wallet, the little fucking whore)
There ARE people like that out there elle, I've known one of the worst, most dangerous of them around. Because whilst a pretty inefficient physical threat, as shown by her speedily being disarmed during the sword incident, and beaten (even more, if that is possible) stupid, she was probably the most dangerous person I've ever known. A fucking sneak, a backstabber and willing to do anything and everything it took to get her what she wanted, when she wanted it, from who she wanted it from. Including tarring innocents with the 'rape brush'.
Thing is, as we say in these parts 'mud sticks', meaning that once the allegation is made, people will assume guilt, and since nobody either likes a rapist, or would lift a finger to help one, all that is necessary is the reputation damage, never mind jail time not happening, never mind no conviction. Once the lie is spoken, the mud thrown, it sticks. And it doesn't go away. You smear someone falsely with that kind of lie, and their life is very probably going to end up in ruins and crash down around their feet. The person smeared doesn't have to have done it, all it takes is a malicious little shit to SAY they did.
As for those who are mentally challenged, thats worrying. Of course there are those who are too much so to be capable of a relationship, especially if physically crippled also. But there are a great many such people who do want love, although of course anyone in a relationship with someone spesh in that way must be both extra careful to go out of their way to make damn sure that the relationship cannot be even slightly inequitable. But there are those who are mentally challenged, and both can and do want love. And one thing I hate, whether the lover is me, or anyone else, is to see someone with MR told and treated as basically a person with less rights than those who are NT or autistic, who haven't the right to take a lover if that is what they truly desire, and the person to be the lover is of the kind who will ensure equitability, equality and absolute, unswerving devotion. I've BEEN in such relationships before, and yeah, you have to be careful. One girl dumped me merely because she did not like the way I kissed (she wished me to do so, she just didn't like my technique, so none of her rights were violated, she just didn't like how I did what she wanted me to do) so MR people can be....pretty volatile
Not all of them, but the risk of something like mutually consensual sex being witnessed by a third party, and the MR person coerced into reporting a rape, even when they have themselves asked their BF if they want to fuck, but the third party inadvertently witnessing the lovemaking exerting pressure on the MR person, being overprotective, that is sickening really.)
Saw a TV program once where something like that happened. MR guy, and his loved one, quite obviously they both adored each other. Girl (who by all accounts was absolutely gorgeous, but obviously naive, inexperienced, doing things like putting a condom on a banana, obviously from sex-ed classes and replicating it literally rather than using it on a guy's dick, putting it on an actual banana when about to fuck her bf), girl got pregnant, and her mother pushed for accusing of rape, afaik she wouldn't do it (the girl), but her mother literally forced her to have a late-term abortion, when the partners both wanted to keep the child, IIRC others were willing to help, and the documentary ended with the girl unconsolable, in tears, after her mother forced her to kill her own baby; weeping in agony for her and her BF's loss.
The program was on years ago, and I still remember it, I remember how she looked, her voice, the way her tears rolled down her face, how distraught she was. It is still very painful indeed to bring to memory, the way she wept as she was forced to murder a cherished part of her soul...jesus, it makes me ache inside for her sorrow, even now. I don't think I will ever be able to forget that program. Or how much I wanted to grab her mother and shake her until she shit her own kidneys out in slurry form. Christ..it was one of the most heartrending things I've ever, ever seen in my life, and the way the girl wept, and wept, and wept, desperately, begging to keep her new flesh and blood, only for her to be dragged away and forced to undergo the procedure....no..not the medical procedure. That girl was brutally raped alright. But not by her boyfriend and lover, but by her own mother and the bastard 'doctors' who murdered her poor baby.
Even now, so many years since I watched that true documentary, the thought of her distress brings tears to my eyes, and tears at my heart-strings. Quite honestly, I just wish I had known her, as a person, to be there and provide support and backup, with force if necessary. Because nobody, MR or not, should have to endure something so fucking barbaric.
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As for those who are mentally challenged, thats worrying. Of course there are those who are too much so to be capable of a relationship, especially if physically crippled also. But there are a great many such people who do want love, although of course anyone in a relationship with someone spesh in that way must be both extra careful to go out of their way to make damn sure that the relationship cannot be even slightly inequitable. But there are those who are mentally challenged, and both can and do want love. And one thing I hate, whether the lover is me, or anyone else, is to see someone with MR told and treated as basically a person with less rights than those who are NT or autistic, who haven't the right to take a lover if that is what they truly desire, and the person to be the lover is of the kind who will ensure equitability, equality and absolute, unswerving devotion. I've BEEN in such relationships before, and yeah, you have to be careful. One girl dumped me merely because she did not like the way I kissed (she wished me to do so, she just didn't like my technique, so none of her rights were violated, she just didn't like how I did what she wanted me to do) so MR people can be....pretty volatile
Not all of them, but the risk of something like mutually consensual sex being witnessed by a third party, and the MR person coerced into reporting a rape, even when they have themselves asked their BF if they want to fuck, but the third party inadvertently witnessing the lovemaking exerting pressure on the MR person, being overprotective, that is sickening really.)
Saw a TV program once where something like that happened. MR guy, and his loved one, quite obviously they both adored each other. Girl (who by all accounts was absolutely gorgeous, but obviously naive, inexperienced, doing things like putting a condom on a banana, obviously from sex-ed classes and replicating it literally rather than using it on a guy's dick, putting it on an actual banana when about to fuck her bf), girl got pregnant, and her mother pushed for accusing of rape, afaik she wouldn't do it (the girl), but her mother literally forced her to have a late-term abortion, when the partners both wanted to keep the child, IIRC others were willing to help, and the documentary ended with the girl unconsolable, in tears, after her mother forced her to kill her own baby; weeping in agony for her and her BF's loss.
The program was on years ago, and I still remember it, I remember how she looked, her voice, the way her tears rolled down her face, how distraught she was. It is still very painful indeed to bring to memory, the way she wept as she was forced to murder a cherished part of her soul...jesus, it makes me ache inside for her sorrow, even now. I don't think I will ever be able to forget that program. Or how much I wanted to grab her mother and shake her until she shit her own kidneys out in slurry form. Christ..it was one of the most heartrending things I've ever, ever seen in my life, and the way the girl wept, and wept, and wept, desperately, begging to keep her new flesh and blood, only for her to be dragged away and forced to undergo the procedure....no..not the medical procedure. That girl was brutally raped alright. But not by her boyfriend and lover, but by her own mother and the bastard 'doctors' who murdered her poor baby.
Even now, so many years since I watched that true documentary, the thought of her distress brings tears to my eyes, and tears at my heart-strings. Quite honestly, I just wish I had known her, as a person, to be there and provide support and backup, with force if necessary. Because nobody, MR or not, should have to endure something so fucking barbaric.
Yeah... this is a rough one. I remember seeing an episode of Law and Order SVU, years and years ago, that presented a similar dilemma, and it stuck with me. MR girl had a loving MR boyfriend but didn't understand how babies were physically made. This allowed her to be raped by her boss at work, under the pretext that he was doing her "exercises" with her, without her realizing what had happened. She and her boyfriend had been affectionate but never had PIV sex. When it all came out, she and boyfriend wanted to bring the child to term and raise it. She was allowed to give birth but the child was taken away by the court because they were determined not to be fit parents. They were devastated.
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Worst thing was, this was not fiction. If it had, I would have remained my usual, detached self, knowing it to be nothing more than acting. What I saw, wasn't.
As far as getting taken away by the courts...if I ever had an MR kid and they had an MR partner, or otherwise got pregnant, and wanted to raise the baby, the courts? fuck THEM. I would literally have to be killed before I would cease standing at their side. Yeah, I'd go that far. Same if ever I end up in another relationship with a girl who is MR. I'd DIE before I let the filth take the kids, and I would kill until my blade broke and weapons ran dry of ammunition or power cells, and too many bones were broken to stamp on a face and swing a punch. Put it this way, there would be a body count-pile high enough you need fucking ropes, crampons and pitons to get to the top of the heap of pig-helmet-wearing skulls.
I don't know about other people, but I've been in relationships with MR girls, and known them, and those who want love are as entitled to have it bestowed by one who would give it as I am, you are, or anyone else.
I wouldn't and don't see it as 'allowed to' keep a baby. They say they are keeping it, and they are either keeping it, or I will be killed before I cease to stand for their rights to do so. But not before I had got the message through. And both killed plenty pigs, and inflicted things that are worse than being allowed to simply die on many others. There is no way in HELL I would allow, legally demanded or otherwise, such a thing to happen and remain to draw breath whilst I could still lift a blade.
The way MR people are treated in this way especially, it makes me SO fucking angry, not to mention utterly sickened. MR people always seem to be handed the shittiest end of the stick and worse still, expected to like it and be happy they were handed so much as a turd. I'm as open to a mutually-consenting, loving relationship with MR people as everybody else ought to be. In fact one of the girls I've been with over the years was both somewhat severely MR and classically autistic, and she was one of the loves of my life, the few people I have cared the most for. I still remember the way when we meet up, we'd go around with one arm around the small of each other's backs, one hand keeping the side of the other person facing towards the cold warm,squeezed tight together. She was..well naive, perhaps, but still at the same time, quite a dirty lil bugger, and if some ofthe things we've done together while we were together were ever made known to anybody I'd likely do jail time for public indecency (consensual, asked for, but lets just say there are things that most people do at restaurants and things that we did too, and then there are things we did that had anybody actually known what was going on under those dining tables, at the very least, neither of us would ever be allowed in not just the restaurant but within a 20-mile radius of the entire shopping center. And then there were a few of the things we did whilst dining out together. Would I have taken advantage of her? fuck no!, did I love her? put it this way, if she needed a double kidney/lung as well as a heart and liver transplant, and no surgeon would perform it, I'd have told them to use a local plus strong but sub-knockout doses of painkillers to make sure I could keep a gun trained on them at all times, until everything bar one lung and the heart was out, then blow my own brains out so they'd have no ethical excuse to not continue performing the transplant surgery. There is only one, maybe two other people I would do that for I have ever, ever known. So yes, I did. I still think of her often too, I miss her sweet smile, her TOTALLY spazz voice, the way she'd wrap her arm round me and squeeze super-tightly (autie pressure-thing, in that, she really knew how to please me, in a non-sexual manner, but just walking around together, she'd squeeze super-tight so I could barely breathe, really squish me hard)
Fuck..I miss her. mentally retarded and autistic or not (the latter of course I actively search for when looking for a partner, ideally Kanner's/classic autism, but aspie, either way, if I'm on the lookout for a potential relationship then autistic is right at the top of the list of desirable characteristics :autism:), but MR people, I think they have the right to be treated as equals, not handed the bags of shit the trash men in life won't take and throw away, and if any girl I end up being with is MR, the ONLY two things that matter to me are 1-consent and mutual desire for each other to be with each other and mutual wishing to partake of any sexual activities partaken in, with the details being explained beforehand, making sure they know EXACTLY what they would be doing until I am certain the given consent is knowing in full. And 2-to give everything I have to give of me to them, and make sure they are treated as equals, not just by me, but by every other to walk to earth. Those are non-negotiable. People either show the girl the proper respect, or they are going to piss me off big-time, in the kind of way of pissing someone off that you want to remove yourself at least 15 miles distant to the blast radius if you happen to be an innocent bystander.
None of my MR other-halves have ever been raped by anybody, but even for someone who left me, if anyone of them were, again, that would push my nuclear-button. Its the kind of thing I would commit murder for. Well, not murder. It'd be committing pesticide. But it would be short, messy and extremely violent. One other thing is for sure, I would never give up, stand down or give in. They would have my....exterminator services as much as they needed, with nothing required in return. Even those I'm no longer with in a relationship, they'd have only to get hold of me and tell me what happened and who the target is. And I would be their instrument to direct.
When I have been in relationships with MR girls, I've loved them no less than I do those who are just autistic. And when I give my love to somebody who wants to receive it, I give myself wholly, totally and without reserve. Yeah, I admit, I am intense in that respect. But in matters of the heart I give to the loved one every last single scrap of my being; without the tiniest bit of me held back. Only bad parts of me, the parts that everybody has deep down in the reptillian bits of their brain do I not show them, since of course I would never want a loved one hurt. But all I am, everything of me, as far as I am concerned, it is given to them, and both it, and I, belong to them as much as say, my lab glassware is mine. They OWN me, all of me, in perpetuity until they should decide otherwise.
And since I both grew up in my first secondary school with a lot of people MR, as well as all autistic (usually kanner's, a few aspies) I know the kind of person, and to see such a person suffer for who they are, and what is no fault of anybody, nor something they can change, but for them to be tormented or forced to do or not do something just because of their mental status, it makes me so heartily sick, the pain of it is difficult to bear on my shoulders and still stand.
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
Rape is no exception among violent crime to have a higher instance of victimization among the poor and uneducated. Once read somewhere that females without college degrees have stats about a third greater than their higher educated counterparts. That's not to say universities aren't experiencing a problem; it's just not a unique problem and society is focusing on the victimization of the privileged.
That's actually a really good point.
I wonder how much of the frequent citation of college rape stats is simply the availability of the statistics? (Psychology's favorite subjects are pigeons, lab rats, and college students- animals they have easy access to study.)
It's been a hot topic ever since the white house got involved. Maybe it's all a university conspiracy to save money by frightening people into online classes. :laugh:
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Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?
There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.
A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.
But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.
Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.
Rape is no exception among violent crime to have a higher instance of victimization among the poor and uneducated. Once read somewhere that females without college degrees have stats about a third greater than their higher educated counterparts. That's not to say universities aren't experiencing a problem; it's just not a unique problem and society is focusing on the victimization of the privileged.
That's actually a really good point.
I wonder how much of the frequent citation of college rape stats is simply the availability of the statistics? (Psychology's favorite subjects are pigeons, lab rats, and college students- animals they have easy access to study.)
It's been a hot topic ever since the white house got involved. Maybe it's all a university conspiracy to save money by frightening people into online classes. :laugh:
What are the rape statistics for the COngo comparable to the rape statistics for US college. If they are close then likely there is something really bad in creation of these statistics and some party of the process, or many parts has fallen down. 1 in 4 ( or sometimes 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 is used) statistic is comparable to the numbers of rapes and sexual assault s in the Congo where rape is used as a weapon of war. Are US universities THAT infested with rapists? Or is there a narrative and political element being pushed here?
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What are the rape statistics for the COngo comparable to the rape statistics for US college. If they are close then likely there is something really bad in creation of these statistics and some party of the process, or many parts has fallen down. 1 in 4 ( or sometimes 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 is used) statistic is comparable to the numbers of rapes and sexual assault s in the Congo where rape is used as a weapon of war. Are US universities THAT infested with rapists? Or is there a narrative and political element being pushed here?
Really have no interest in comparing the US to some other place, in order to minimalize anything happening in the US. Think it's important for any private establishment to be allowed to have rules which protect their patrons and personnel, but also important they actually do it. It may speak volumes about the atmosphere of universities, that the government got involved in the first place to force them to adopt disciplinary policies with lower standards of proof than general law. What the government demands from universities isn't much different than what's commonly found in any workplace policy for violence and harassment. The average person has to adhere to different standards in the workplace to avoid disciplinary action than what is required to seek legal action in a criminal conviction. Don't see it as any different. Private universities must meet certain standards to receive government funding, and they also have the right to not meet those standards.
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What are the rape statistics for the COngo comparable to the rape statistics for US college. If they are close then likely there is something really bad in creation of these statistics and some party of the process, or many parts has fallen down. 1 in 4 ( or sometimes 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 is used) statistic is comparable to the numbers of rapes and sexual assault s in the Congo where rape is used as a weapon of war. Are US universities THAT infested with rapists? Or is there a narrative and political element being pushed here?
Really have no interest in comparing the US to some other place, in order to minimalize anything happening in the US. Think it's important for any private establishment to be allowed to have rules which protect their patrons and personnel, but also important they actually do it. It may speak volumes about the atmosphere of universities, that the government got involved in the first place to force them to adopt disciplinary policies with lower standards of proof than general law. What the government demands from universities isn't much different than what's commonly found in any workplace policy for violence and harassment. The average person has to adhere to different standards in the workplace to avoid disciplinary action than what is required to seek legal action in a criminal conviction. Don't see it as any different. Private universities must meet certain standards to receive government funding, and they also have the right to not meet those standards.
.....and there I disagree. I believe that this is simply a want by some elements of society to create a narrative. I saw a similar and quite successful attempt by the same kind of outrage merchants to create a similar impression of Gamers being misogynists (aka "Gamergate). It is a political tool for ideological ends.
Is there a "problem" with rapes on University? That depends on what is meant by "problem". Problem, as in epidemic, as what these people have painted? Or problem as in it sometimes happens and it (like wherever else it happens) should not? I believe it to be the later. If that is the case and they simply want to portray it as the former, all they need to do is make up a statistic through very poor statistical approach, disseminate as the gold standard in the field, quote it over and over to the point where it becomes unquestioned and stoke the fires of outrage. The outrage becomes a weaponised political vehicle to enact change and it feeds itself. unquestioned and worst still any scepticism is dismissed as hate.
Why would people do this? Ideological reasons. There was very little truth behind Gamergate and unless you were particularly involved in Gmaergate or such narratives you would have no reason to doubt the veracity of such claims (I mean there is a wikipedia article which is backed by many "reputable articles" from "reputable sources" so who could doubt the claims).
Few people doubt the claims made that there is a rape epidemic on campus and policies do come into being.
Ideologically to those pushing the narrative the ends justify the means. Rape is bad. Rape has to be stopped by all means. Women must be saved from such horrific crimes. The unseen consequences are not nearly as important.
The problem is of course building a narrative that is false DOES have unseen and terrible consequences that ironically do NOT empower women and do not ultimately make anyone safer.
It empowers like minded people to be outraged over things not nearly as important because they see the University Admin is genuinely terrified to challenge such things. (Case in point is the Halloween costume furore and the riots when "unpopular" speakers come to visit and the like). Also young women at University are now living in terror of this rape epidemic thinking that one out of three (or one in 4 or one in 5) of them are going to be raped. Those that know better do not say differently because the narrative must be protected. This too says nothing of how it affects very average men attending and them being seen as potential rapists.
Is it true that rape happens? Yes. Is it true that it happens at heightened levels equivalent to the war rape in the Congo? no. Is university rape greater than those in other places in US? Unlikely. Is the policies and legislative and procedural efforts put in place based on false narratives warranted? No. Is the existence of such efforts causally related to any truth behind the narratives? No.
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Don't really see it so much as a narrative, as much as seeing it as a high limelight policy change. It's in everyone's face because it's political news and thus national news, with government task forces, DOJ and CDC focus. If universities already had violence and harassment disciplinary policies similar to workplaces, or even if they had moved to adopt them without government intervention, it would be a non-issue. The fact they didn't does in fact say something about the lack of professional conduct that might have otherwise been allowed. Does the media sometimes hype campus sexual assault as more pervasive or important than anywhere else? Probably. Even if they didn't, would the fact it's a national political issue alone sometimes blow it out of proportion in the minds of the viewer? Probably.
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IMO jack you are mistaken. A policy change is not going to stop a rapist. A rapist doesn't give a shit that there is a law against comitting rape, so to assume they are going to give a rat's left bollock that somewhere changed a policy. For fucks sake, I'm no rapist and policies are nothing, they are irrelevant. Its bollocks made up by shitspeakers talking arse-leavings.
I generally take no notice of them whatsoever. And I sure as fuck don't need a 'policy' to tell me not to rape women. I was born knowing to fucking well rape women and children. (with the exception of 'statutory' of course, which is not worth the paper such laws are written on, as long as both male and female partner wish to be with each other and wish to get in bed with each other and fuck like rabbits. That is as different from real rape as chalk is from cheese)
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IMO jack you are mistaken. A policy change is not going to stop a rapist.
These policies aren't about rapists, so you are the one who is mistaken. Some of these policies already existed but weren't being enforced. What started all of it was a congressional inquiry which found over a third of universities investigated to have no records of compliance for even reporting claims. The new guidelines laid down during the Obama administration have been rescinded by the Trump administration. Though one thing that isn't going to change, is the previously established policy of a government funded institution's responsibility to report and investigate allegations of violence and harassment.
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My bad, jack. Thanks for clarifying.
And what a surprise, regarding trump. Guy is as big a ginormous faggot cunt as theresa may. If those two ever had kids we'd have the fucking antichrist on our hands.
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A policy change is not going to stop a rapist.
Depends on the policy. If you make it a requirement that vaginae are weaponized....
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And what a surprise, regarding trump.
It's been highly criticized and debated if the Obama era guidelines for burden of proof are unfair to the accused in denying due process. Though the process of a private establishment reviewing and taking action for internal policy infringements for any type of misconduct isn't a legal process, so not sure how debate that pans out.
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Lots of virtual (+1)s for Jack for their last several posts in this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_sexual_assault
^ Interesting info. Lack of a standard definition of rape or sexual assault, lack of a standard methodology for gathering statistics, means that focusing on the veracity of the "one in three" type claims is meaningless and is largely avoiding the issue. If the college campus statistics include things like unwanted groping, and unreasonable pressure to engage in sexual activities, then one-in-three sounds reasonable. If one-in-three women are raped in a war zone, then that is likely to involve violent gang rape under very real threat of death, unlawful killings, serious physical injury, and so on. It is pointless to compare statistics that are gathered in such different situations with such massively divergent definitions of rape or sexual assault.
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Lots of virtual (+1)s for Jack for their last several posts in this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_sexual_assault
^ Interesting info. Lack of a standard definition of rape or sexual assault, lack of a standard methodology for gathering statistics, means that focusing on the veracity of the "one in three" type claims is meaningless and is largely avoiding the issue. If the college campus statistics include things like unwanted groping, and unreasonable pressure to engage in sexual activities, then one-in-three sounds reasonable. If one-in-three women are raped in a war zone, then that is likely to involve violent gang rape under very real threat of death, unlawful killings, serious physical injury, and so on. It is pointless to compare statistics that are gathered in such different situations with such massively divergent definitions of rape or sexual assault.
...and what do you base the belief that 1 in 3 sounds reasonable? A feeling? An educated guess? A Want to believe College Aged men are predators? What exactly?
Maybe....and this IS a guess...there is little real basis to base any of this on?
The way I see it (and I acknowledge I could be terribly wrong) I think that there is a want to conflate too many things and exaggerate and overgeneralise and when pushed back on to misconstrue the position AND not take responsibility for any shortcomings of incorrectly pushed narratives.
If I say, "rape is terrible". There is really nothing to disagree on. "If I say that women should not be sexually assaulted". There is no real argument. If I say "Society ought to do its best to protect women from rape". That too sounds reasonable. If we say "Women at university will sometimes be the victim of sexual assault". That is not really going to be something that could be argued.
However, if armed with this, you decide that because women do sometimes experience sexual assault at university that the system is inherently bad and they let this happen and that all men are potential rapists and are involved in enabling a rape culture on campus...then THIS position is certainly contentious.
So what do they do they use their academic capital to push this narrative, organise activism against this threat and "codify" or "quantify" this threat through a bogus study using very poor methodologies and through your academic network and Progressivism approach, have it widely disseminated and referenced over and over and over in journal after article after thesis and to the point where it becomes "established truth". Keep fanning the flames and use the outrage and fear to affect political and legislative change.
IF questioned the position you take against any naysayers is always back to the reasonable positions of
If I say, "rape is terrible". There is really nothing to disagree on. "If I say that women should not be sexually assaulted". There is no real argument. If I say "Society ought to do its best to protect women from rape". That too sounds reasonable. If we say "Women at university will sometimes be the victim of sexual assault". That is not really going to be something that could be argued.
With no reference to your ACTUAL narrative push:
However, if armed with this, you decide that because women do sometimes experience sexual assault at university that the system is inherently bad and they let this happen and that all men are potential rapists and are involved in enabling a rape culture on campus...then THIS position is certainly contentious.
It allows you to counter with a variety of claims of ignorance, misogyny, lack of empathy towards women and the like and it ALL FEELS true. Why? Because the first position IS reasonable but THAT is NOT what they are promoting nor ideologically their intent and the facts are NOT established truth. It is all narrative and ideologically driven.
The worst thing is I believe that MOST people are taken in by the BS and believe the feigned genuineness and believe what they are doing is from a moral place and questioning this is harmful. However, the ones pushing it know damn well that this is not genuine nor honest BUT also have the moral indignation of a fundamentalist preacher. They believe whatever else comes of any lie or falsity is ultimately a good thing because it "brings awareness", because it "empowers women", because it "strikes out at the Patriarchal power structures and the men within these spaces from prospective male student to male Dean, who by virtue of their existence are suppressing and are a threat to women".
Of course, the kinds of people that peddle this kind of thing does increase the political and cultural capital to their ideology and the smart ones can capitalise on this by getting power via money and fame and such, but there are with all false narratives going to be bad outcomes BECAUSE it is based on an unreality and thus some of the outcomes are going to be in response to a falsity and not the truth. Such as the terrible kangaroo courts without defence on accused men from Title 9 and the resulting law suits due to wrongful dismissal and hi profile rape epidemic outrage cases judged in the court of public opinion like Duke La Cross that turn out to be complete bullshit. THAT will not matter to the ideologues because the narrative and the underpinning ideology is far more important that any harm it causes and they can scream misogyny if questioned.
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The claim that 'all men could be rapists', aside from the purely mechanical possibility of acting thus due to possession of a penis, is misandry and propaganda at its worst. I KNOW I could never rape a woman. Even someone like faye kane, an autistic genius chick who is, in her own words, someone who really wants to be raped, tortured and used as a fuck-hole for a gang of rapists.
If I were to meet her, I physically could not do it. Even if it did mean losing any chance of gaining her respect. The capacity to rape just isn't something that exists in me. I KNOW me, because I AM me, so I'm pretty well qualified to make such a statement when it refers to me specifically. And I just couldn't do it. I'm not talking about any of that 'statutory rape' bollocks, but the act of forcing myself on a woman is as abhorrent to me as a thing can be. If I were to meet another, I'd do exactly the same thing I did to the last one (who was a convicted paedophile as well), and stamp him into a bloody pulp that would have to be transported to the hospital in a jar. Animal cruelty, abuse of those who cannot defend themselves, bullying, and rape, those are the things that push the big red button in my psyche marked 'do not push', generally because it results in an unthinking, unyielding explosion of brutality towards the perpetrator that just doesn't stop until at the very most generous on my part, serious and enduring bodily harm has been inflicted such as the recipient is likely enough to spend the rest of their existence in a wheelchair, being fed by a tube in their stomach. Once that button gets pushed, the result is invariably a real fucking mess. The red mist comes down, and more red mist is made from what used to be the filthy, disgusting little piece of sewage responsible for said big red button being pressed. It happens very rarely indeed, thankfully. But in such an enraged state, the only way that I'll stop is either others forcibly restraining me or the target being crippled or potentially even killed. I REALLY don't like sex abusers. And there are very, very few limits as to what I will not do to one if I get the opportunity to do it.
If 'all men' are rapists, does that make me something other than a man? I don't think so. I treat most people with exactly the treatment they earn according to their conduct towards me. With the bias set to treating someone well, unless they first begin to treat me otherwise/try to do so. Does that sound to anyone like a man who (ignoring statutory age limits) would ever take from a woman by force? (obviously men are a nonentity in that sense, since I'm not a faggot to begin with). Do I sound like a potential rapist? I know I am a man...but a rapist-to-be? fucking christ no.
Also, duke la cross? I do not comprehend the name-drop. Never heard of the bugger. As far as the court of public opinion goes however, fuck that. And fuck the tabloid bell-suckers who'd host such an abomination. I should know. Its been inflicted on me, when the filth raided me (I was charged with nothing, I should add) and the tabloid media (the sun, aka toilet paper for tramps and hobos when they get truly desperate) were there on scene immediately, so MUST have been called by the filth themselves. 'Trial' by public opinion is out and out wrong, regardless of what someone may or may not have done. IMO the names of all arrested MUST be kept silent and secret until or unless they are convicted of a crime in a court of law. Otherwise the lives of the innocent can be ruined, people could and have got death threats due to the 'court' of public opinion, despite having in actuality done nothing wrong. If someone is wrongfully accused of being a rapist, child fucker etc. and it gets out to the public, it doesn't MATTER if they are cleared. There will still be people who want them dead, and some of those willing to make that happen if they can.
There seems an awful lot of focus on misogyny, but misandry appears almost ignored. It is one rule for one gender and quite another rule for the male. Every woman would get sympathy and assistance, but if a man is subject to the male equivalent of the exact same thing, where, then, are the defenders of the innocent who have been made to suffer?
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A policy change is not going to stop a rapist.
Depends on the policy. If you make it a requirement that vaginae are weaponized....
My vagina's so lethal it's banned in eight countries. :zoinks:
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Which ones :lol:
I imagine the UK is one of them, given their really shitty weapon-carry laws.
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A policy change is not going to stop a rapist.
Depends on the policy. If you make it a requirement that vaginae are weaponized....
My vagina's so lethal it's banned in eight countries. :zoinks:
FUCK TRUMP
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My vagina's so lethal protective eyewear is required for use. :zoinks:
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Rather you than me, matey. You first. I'd sooner stick my fucking cock in a blender full of Lyngbya :autism:
Shit, I'd sooner commit bestiality with an NT. And a 70-something year old crack-whore junkie bitch who gives head for bread, only has difficulty in the extreme consuming said bread, as she as one, manky, scraggly, messed up yellow tooth and has a both a face like a slapped arse and a cunt you could lay tracks in and run a train service from, that nobody would fuck without both being blind in both eyes AND putting a bag over her head.
No, I don't hate NTs, but I confess, the idea of having sex with one is about as appealing as chil std molestation on a josef fritzl-esque scale. Happy enough to be friends with NTs who act in such a way as for friendship to be deserved, but fucking one is NOT something I'd consider. The thought turns my stomach. honestly, it rit.eally does make me want to vom
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The claim that 'all men could be rapists', aside from the purely mechanical possibility of acting thus due to possession of a penis, is misandry and propaganda at its worst.
I don't see any evidence of misandry in this thread though. Do you?
I probably come closest to saying "all men could be rapists" when I said that ordinary people are capable of committing atrocities, under the right conditions... but there's no inherent bias against men in that statement. You could accuse me of making excuses for rapists , on that basis, indeed (and i actually was accused of that IIRC).
I wasn't making excuses ofc, I just think that if we refuse to consider that an otherise good (ish) human being could do something that bad to another human being, then we're missing the chance to learn something socially useful. I'd sooner figure out how not to press the wrong buttons .
As someone pointed out, rape has been used as a weapon of war. Repeatedly. Throughout history. On a massive scale. and soldiers are ordinary blokes, by and large. So how does that happen? Because propaganda effectively dehumanises the enemy . The enemy aren't "people", they're "gooks" or what-have-you, aren't they? Dehumanise a human who commits an act of rape, by reducing him to that epithet "rapist" is just fighting fire with fire. If we can't face that people do ugly things to each other, then we'll never figure out how to prevent it.
I've not been raped, but, as I said, I have been groped in intimitate places without my consent- which is something that leads to almost as much disapprobation these days. One case was interesting, in that the man was my boss, and a pretty decent man, on the whole. According to gossip he'sd actually screwed every female member of his staff, except myself...and i did wonder if all those women truly wanted to have sex with him, or if...well, they thought they'd better not say "No" to the boss, or something like that.? Me, I whirled around and slapped him in the face when my turn came and he didn't take "No" for an answer. He was highly surprised by that and said "Nobody's ever done that to me before" . Thereafter , he kept his hands to himself, and treated me with respect, and even with genuine kindness at times. I ogt to know him pretty well, because i sometimes went out with him- and his girfriend- after work. (she really liked me . And I'm should think that the fact that she knew the story was a factor, because she surely didn't like him screwing everything that moved) But the thing is: at no point did I ever get the impression he was a bad person. Just remarkarbly dim. I don't believe it had ever occurred to him for one second that he was exploiting his position of power; he just genuinely believed that he was god's gift to women and that we all found him irresistable.
Unfortunately for me, that guy quit a few months later, and an out-and-out, power-mad, despotic bastard took his place. That the out-and-out bastard kept his hands to himself was the only good thing you could possibly say about him.
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Walkie hun, I did NOT mean you. I mean feminist fuckups who are so far gone down the feminist path that anything with a Y-chromosome is viewed by them as a devil made flesh. Ignoring the fact that without men, there would, after perhaps 60 years there would never be another potential feminist born.
Those, being the cunts who CALL all men potential rapists. Sure, anything with a penis has the physical ability to rape something with a vaginal canal, but in reality, there are people who just could not. I am one of them. I just know, deep, deep down, as definitively as I know that I was born with a pair of legs that have feet attached to them, a pair of arms terminating in hands and fingers on the end, and a neck with a head on top with two eyes, a nose, two ears and a mouth positioned in various parts of said neck-end. I know it as I know I am autistic. I know it like I know I am a chemist. I know it like I know I used to forgo sticks to knock conkers down from trees and used a breech-loading grenade launcher I built in my spare time to blast them out of the tree by the shower.
I know it like I know that I would step in front of cazzie if somebody were to point a gun at her and pull the trigger. (you know who I mean walkie, obviously nobody else does, but you know what I mean) I couldn't do it. I might possess the biology that is requisite to physically commit the act. But to actually perform the act of rape itself. And if I saw it happening, I'd be in there like a cannonball to take the rapist to pieces.
Walkie, I think I know how you feel. I never have been raped, but twice, someone has tried. Once as a child, stopped him with an iron bar through the stomach, and another one threatened to after kicking the fuck out of me, had to stop as I was on remand at the time and he and I both got locked in separate cells after a short 'association' period. By morning he was gone. No idea how or why...honest. I've also got some prime land including a summer palace located in nigeria, I just need you to transfer a million dollars to me in legal fees before I am permitted by the nigerian government to transfer the title deeds to the land. Oh, and I'm a neurotypical in disguise too, I just fake being autistic because I fucking hate those spastics *pokes tongue out through my first two fingers, wiggles it and makes a 'blllleeerrrleeeerrrleerrrlllaahh' sound often used to sarcastically indicate fellatio performed by a male upon a female's frontal nether regions, and makes other motions intended to signify the very height and utmost extremity of sarcasm*
It doesn't have to end in actual bodily rape. But close is bad enough, its still a violation. (and if practical more than a viable reason to commit pesticide)
I have had a stalker too...but she was different. I fell in love with her, almost as hard as I did over cazzie, almost, only because falling THAT far is simply not a physical possibility which could occur. Met her on AFF, took the exchange of a few PMs, and perhaps one conversation, and she had me. Hook, line, sinker, and yanked me into the lake along with the rod and float. She just had an effect on me....I'd let HER rape ME any day of the week. Hell, I'd beg her to if it would result in her doing it. God fucking damn yes. Ironic. Both the loves of my life I have ever had, and the last, have been at the extremes of age. One just about 14, the other by the end of this year either 50 or 51.
Neither age range is a 'type' I have. I don't really HAVE a 'type' specifically, as long as they are female and spesh, they have the potential to be somebody I could like enough to fall for, if they have the correct qualities. Spazz and female, is my 'type' but that is the limit as to my type.
As for the kind of guy that sees women as property, boast about fucking everybody...christ. I have never comprehended why someone would do that. Its enough to make me queasy. Exploitative types like that are even fucking worse. Disgusting. And the ones that actually think, genuinely, even to themselves, that despite their failure at human existence, that they are god's own gift to women....I cannot even begin to put into words the sheer and utter contempt I feel for those creatures. They are a fucking disease. A disease I would dearly like to see meet the same fate as smallpox. Perhaps a couple preserved under cryogenic deep-freeze for scientific study to ensure the continuance of the complete and utter extirpation of the humanity-failure of that breed, but otherwise, if I was handed a gun, and enough hollowpoint, and they were all lined up in a row, I would happily walk on down and pull the trigger until every single one of them had an exploded face, after first shooting them in the groin, and then in the stomach, before reaching the end of the line, walking back to the start, and ending them with a third shot to the face. Making sure they all had time to suffer.
If I were a woman and someone touched me like that...god help the guy responsible because I wouldn't. And nor would I be responsible for my actions immediately following being felt up. Broken knees and hamstring/patellar tendon traumatic avulshion would be the very least of their worries.
And walkie, this IS a response to you personally.
'To dehumanize a human who commits rape by reducing him to the epithet 'rapist' jesus fucking christ hun. You are greatly respected by me, you know how much, because there are probably fewer people I have ever told the thing I told you in that PM I sent recently who exist, than I could count on the fingers of one hand. I mean that. But that statement I do not respect. I cannot. It disgusts me.
Humans never, ever commit rape. Once a bipedal, furless primate of the species 'homo sapiens' commits the act of raping somebody, they ARE a rapist. One who rapes, is a rapist. That is what they are. And nobody human commits rape. The moment they do so they are no longer human. They might look like one on the outside, but what is on the inside is something less than an animal, with mostly the biology of a Homo sapiens primate, one that needs first to be interrogated in various manners, scanned via fMRI, PET, SPECT etc. before being strapped to a gurney with drainage channels to a sewer and vivisected alive. With no anaesthetic (since they alter neurological function, they could alter the results of the dissection. And besides, it'd be a waste of anaesthetic.)
By all means, examine them, study them, vivisect them, torture knowledge from them, once 100% doubtless proven not to be innocent, learn what you can. Do genetic analyses and compare the genes and proteomes with cell sample genetics and proteomics, mRNA expression with human volunteers (its noninvasive, requiring a few cells, and those from the brain could be taken from say, heart attack victims who expire in hospital allowing immediate dissection and analysis, deep freezing of viable samples, treating sample homogenates of brain tissue with RNAlater, etc.), but those who rape are rapists. There can be no ambiguity about that.
And once it is proven they have raped, they lose any human status they had before they raped and became thus, rapists; then they are fair game for whatever people wish to do to them, however and whenever, whyever they wish to do it. And no, grabbing a broken glass bottle, forcing it up their chocolate starfish then stamping on their stomach is absolutely ok. Whoever might do that, thats alright, and they are human. Because they aren't committing rape, they are just sticking a broken bottle up a rapist's arse and rupturing their intestines with broken glass. Physical assault, physical torture, psychological torture, physical AND psychogical torture, killing by slow torture..killing quickly, slowly, just cutting them to bits non-fatally and leaving them to scream and scream until they take infection and die shrieking in delirious agony....all alright. Its a rapist. Whatever is done to them is completely acceptable. They are no more either human nor animal than is a punch-bag in a gym. No more human than a toilet being pissed, shat and/or vomited in. No more than the dirt one might gob out a smoked joint-end or bit of chewed gum on, no more a person than a slick of rotting, putrid raw sewage.
What a rapist gets, how a rapist is made to suffer for what they have done, it is deserved. In fact no matter WHAT is inflicted on them, it is less than they deserve, for no suffering which may exist upon this earthly plain (or is it plane? I always confuse the two, when the homophonic word refers to '''''-of existence' can possibly be meted out upon a rapist which is too abhorrent or too vicious, sadistic and foul for them not to deserve it.
And thats NICE, as far as it goes in my book. Those who do it to children...you don't even want to read the page marked 'nasty'. I doubt I've read it myself for that matter. Of course, ignoring 'statutory' bollocks, where both parties are voluntarily desirous of each other's closeness and would be hurt if parted against their will. Otherwise, if done by force...whatever is on that page is SO unpleasant even I'm not going to look at it unless I ever see the event it refers to happen. I'd be permanently psychologically damaged, unless it did, and the red mist came down to protect me from knowing quite what was done to the chomo.
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Walkie, I like you too much to do so, but if you were almost anyone else here, I would have to ghey you for that 'rapist dehumanization' remark. As it is, consider this a virtual -, so as not to actually take from your good name. That is WRONG, hun. Absolutely wrong. One who rapes, is a rapist. That is axiomatic. And they never had humanity to begin with if they rape someone. Because people, human beings, do not rape one another.
(I'd exclude say, if my stalker did to me, because I'd have begged her to do it) but that is different. For somebody to force themselves on another without their say-so, that is abhorrent, and it can never, ever, EVER be right. It is sick, sick, sick fucking shit. And those who rape deserve exactly what my second (older of the two) fiancees once did to someone who tried to rape her. Grabbed his cock, yanked it, before ramming a long barbed (at least I think it was barbed, it might have been the shorter straight-bladed one that flicks out of the handle and turns into a shortsword, I wasn't physically present, or the guy wouldn't have got off so lightly) dagger, and ripped it outwards, cleaving his cock into two half-dick pieces.
That is just the kind of shit they deserve. Fucking cunts have it coming. Karma is a bitch, and sometimes it happens to come round as fast as it goes round. Nothing worse in disembowelling one and leaving them alive to die slowly and in screaming, howling agony, as you would be doing wrong by changing the hard drive in a computer, or cooking yourself breakfast. There is nothing, nothing at all that a human being can do to a rapist which is wrong, other than to join in the rape act, or treat them well. If you really must, or physically cannot do so, then performing no act of misery-infliction is just about acceptable in the former case, and of course, totally justified and natural in the second case.
Otherwise, sodomize, torture, and butcher away. Rip their eyes out and fill the holes with caustic potash then sew their eyelids shut, before covering a champagne cork in superglue, shoving it up their ass hole and force-feeding them until they first become morbidly obese, then subsequently burst in an explosive projectile shower of blood, gibs, piss, shit, brain matter (pretty much the same thing as the former two) and semidigested stomach contents along with a bunch of bone fragments. Hell, stick 'em in a microwave and use it to skullfuck them. With their own exploded head and spinal column. In their arse.
If a rapist gets it, they deserved it. With the ONLY proviso, that 'it' isn't something good.
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^ You said you’d let that girl you love rape you. Isn’t that a form of consent? I’m genuinely asking, as I don’t know. Cos if you let someone rape you, and you’re allowing them to rape you before they do the act, that appears like consent to me. But it would be non-consent if you challenged her after raping you. I assume the former scenario would count though, because you’ve said beforehand that you would let her rape you. :dunno:
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^ You said you’d let that girl you love rape you. Isn’t that a form of consent? I’m genuinely asking, as I don’t know. Cos if you let someone rape you, and you’re allowing them to rape you before they do the act, that appears like consent to me. But it would be non-consent if you challenged her after raping you. I assume the former scenario would count though, because you’ve said beforehand that you would let her rape you. :dunno:
It's consent. Rape fantasies are common.
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Fantasy or desire doesn't necessarily imply consent.
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Fantasy or desire doesn't necessarily imply consent.
Of course not, but the way I interpret Lestat, it's a fantasy he'd consent to:
(I'd exclude say, if my stalker did to me, because I'd have begged her to do it) but that is different.
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It isn't a fantasy. Just a statement that if she did it, I'd allow her to do so, and I would not inform the authorities. I would just let her do it.
And enjoy it. Although I don't have a specific desire for anybody to do so. That particular person however, if she DID do so, I'd let her. And no, I'd not be above asking her to roofie me, going out and buying or otherwise obtaining some rohypnol, making a drink, putting a lot of it in one of them, making another without any in, telling her which was which, truthfully, then asking if she wanted me to add some to the drink she was to consume also. But in front of her in both cases, so she would know exactly which was which, and have the choice in whether to partake or not to do so.
Because my stalker, she could do pretty much anything and everything she would want to do in such a manner to me and I would in no way attempt to defend myself. As could my (younger of the two) former fiancee. I'd let her do anything and everything to me. Although I have no rape fantasies. Neither of being the recipient, and most fucking certainly not of being the one to do so.
Even my ex fiancee, the one I love beyond life itself, I don't think I could do it if she told me to. I really don't believe that I have the capability to rape. If either my former fiancee (fiancee no.1) or my stalker were to go to rape me, hell I'd even tie myself up and throw my knives out of my reach. But I am about as sure as I can be, that I couldn't do it myself and take pleasure in it. If someone like the love of my life and soulmate, fiancee no.1 told me to do it, then because I would do anything for her, I think...I THINK I might, possibly be able to think of something else, something loving, her happiness, and get it up, or stick an elastic band round my dangly bits to make the act mechanically possible and go through the motions, if she demanded it of me for her pleasure. But whilst doing so, I would be detached and I could not take pleasure in it. All I could take pleasure in in such a situation, is later, when it was over, taking pleasure in her being pleasured, made happy, satisfied etc. But even a deeply loved woman DEMANDING I rape them...that is the only way I could carry out the act. And I would without doubt have to drug myself in several different ways to perform the act, because it is so abhorrent to me. I'd ONLY do that, in such a case, because fiancee no.1, while we were together, I was her property, hers to do with as she wished. My life, my body, my mind, my love, heart and soul, it all belonged to her. And much of me still does.
Goddamn...thats a seriously fucked up piece of cognitive dissonance for me. It is in all respects abhorrent, but in those specific circumstances I would be left without a choice but to do so. I'd probably end up pretty messed up for a long time afterwards, shaking in a corner, and trying to focus only on her pleasure. It would be..a mechanical act caused by the demand of the owner of property causing it to perform a specific function. So there would be nothing I could do.
To rape somebody otherwise, even one who asked it of me literally, I couldn't do it. BDSM etc...I could not do it to one I loved. Unless it were fiancee no.1, or the stalker, and they ordered it of me. But I could not ever take pleasure in inflicting pain upon them. They might find it pleasurable, if in theory that were either of their things, but any blow I struck would be causing ME the pain. If they asked me to slap them, for example, it would to me, like being kicked in the face, and hurt me badly to comply.
As far as all men being potential rapists...does that sound to anyone like a personality type that is a potential rapist?
The only way I'll willingly strike a female, is one who makes themselves, by their own conduct, my enemy, someone who attacks me and makes it such that I must do so in order to defend myself. Rape is..abhorrent. It disgusts me. If even the one I love most in live demanded it of me, I would have no choice but to comply, but at the same time, I would have to dose myself amongst things to disrupt inhibitions, powerful drugs to inhibit nausea and vomiting, to avoid puking on her because I had no choice but to comply.
But her doing it to ME? sure, I'd consent ex post facto.
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They are driven to it.
Probably couldn't stop themselves from doing it if they wanted to.
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As far as all men being potential rapists...does that sound to anyone like a personality type that is a potential rapist?
Maybe. I know that I sure didn't think I was capable.
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"All men are potential rapists".
It's one of the most misunderstood and most often repeated statements out there.
The reality is that most rape victims are not raped by the creepy quiet guy at work, or by a stranger who drags them into a van off the street or who ambushes them in a park. Most women are raped by men they knew and who they never saw as potential rapists.
It is in a woman's best interests to see every guy as a potential rapist. It doesn't mean that every guy would commit rape if given a chance or if he thought he would get away with it. Although, no doubt, a small number of people might believe that.
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"All men are potential rapists".
It's one of the most misunderstood and most often repeated statements out there.
The reality is that most rape victims are not raped by the creepy quiet guy at work, or by a stranger who drags them into a van off the street or who ambushes them in a park. Most women are raped by men they knew and who they never saw as potential rapists.
It is in a woman's best interests to see every guy as a potential rapist. It doesn't mean that every guy would commit rape if given a chance or if he thought he would get away with it. Although, no doubt, a small number of people might believe that.
Especially those who have been repeatedly victimized, and whose experience of the world has done nothing but provide empirical evidence to them that that is the case. (Not saying it's correct, but saying, maybe have a little sympathy for the people who do believe this, because it's often a believe that comes from repeated trauma.)
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Especially those who have been repeatedly victimized, and whose experience of the world has done nothing but provide empirical evidence to them that that is the case. (Not saying it's correct, but saying, maybe have a little sympathy for the people who do believe this, because it's often a believe that comes from repeated trauma.)
It is my contention that many in such a position actually have problems which encourage their own victimization.
Possibly uncontrolled behavior without a full rational understanding of consequences; somewhat similar to the circumstances which a rapist might face.
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Especially those who have been repeatedly victimized, and whose experience of the world has done nothing but provide empirical evidence to them that that is the case. (Not saying it's correct, but saying, maybe have a little sympathy for the people who do believe this, because it's often a believe that comes from repeated trauma.)
It is my contention that many in such a position actually have problems which encourage their own victimization.
Possibly uncontrolled behavior without a full rational understanding of consequences; somewhat similar to the circumstances which a rapist might face.
So, this is one of those things that's correct, but heretical to say out loud around some kinds of feminists and SJWs (I say this as someone who identifies as both) because there end up being screams of "blaming the victim."
The reality of it is, though, that repeated/compound trauma often does fuck up one's sense of what's safe or not safe. And (probably even more important, because this is a foundational-level issue), also one's sense of one's place in the world- how should one interact with the world, and how is it acceptable that the world interact with one? There are certain kinds of hurt that cut to the center of one's self. So, sometimes, there's not just an issue of teaching someone how to be safer. There's the issue of teaching someone what safety is, trying to help them believe that safety feels good (rather than strange or scary or boring), and convincing someone that they deserve to be safe.
There's also often third factors that are maybe compounded by trauma but also exist on their own outside of it, like poverty, or cognitive limitations, that leave people more vulnerable to victimization. (Those are two big ones I see a lot of.)
Personally, I don't see these things as issues of victim-blaming. (Though there's certainly a need to use careful language, at least for people like me whose job it is to put broken people back together as well as possible- what's heard matters, not just what's intended or even "just" what's said. If someone's takeaway is "my therapist said I was asking for it," that could be genuinely damaging, so it's important to make it clear that's not the correct takeaway.)
Anyway, imo, they're looking at what additional things lead to repeated victimization- what else these repeated victims are having, unfairly, tragically, and not purposely- to deal with. It's not blaming the victims. It's trying to look at and talk about the full scope off the damage.
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ooh, El's got three plusses (so far) for the above :)
i like to keep an eye on the karma, cos it helps me find the good posts (it really does! though not always, ofc. Sometimes it helps me rediscover the really annoying posts :fp: )
and also, sometimes, like today, it reassures me that I^2 is not brain-dead after all.
Go, El!
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It is in a woman's best interests to see every guy as a potential rapist.
Don't think it's overly common for females to view all males as potential rapists. Though do believe it's common for females to view all females as potential rape victims. The latter is important and likely unavoidable in teaching/learning personal risk assessment; the former strikes as unhealthy.
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It is in a woman's best interests to see every guy as a potential rapist.
Don't think it's overly common for females to view all males as potential rapists. Though do believe it's common for females to view all females as potential rape victims. The latter is important and likely unavoidable in teaching/learning personal risk assessment; the former strikes as unhealthy.
The point is not to demonise every man as a potential rapist.
The reality is that most women are not attacked by random strangers or by acquaintances who have personality types or reputations which make them identifiable as potential rapists.
A woman may not, for example, accept a lift home from a colleague who has a reputation for trying to force himself onto women, or from a colleague who makes inappropriate jokes and comments about sexual violence. And that is wise. But that guy who is married with 3 kids or who seems charming and gentle..... they might not be so careful. And the reality is that a woman is just as likely, actually more likely, to find herself in a scary situation with a guy they thought they could trust than with a guy they felt they couldn't trust and so avoided allowing him the opportunity.
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Oh I agree with all that, except that I'm very surprised by that 3% figure. that suggests to me that modern-day US is hugely better that Britain in the seventies and eighties! My experience was that every girl/woman I ever talked with about it with had been groped without her consent on several occasions by several different men. The number of boys/men who were well-known to be to much too free free with their hands was closer to 50% than 3%. and that probably went up to 50% or more when they were drunk.
That said, I moved in a number of radically different social circles , as it happens, and I found that college kids (who were largely middle-class, back then. That might have changed somewhat?) were , on average, a lot more civilised in their sexual behaviour than working-class men were.
Again, I suppose that goes to reinforces the part that prevailing cultural attitudes play. You can't just dismiss culltural influences and put it all onto the individual, like Al does.
My first proper job, starting in 1984, was in a predominantly male office environment. Females would have been maybe 20% on average out of a workforce of about 40. But we did turn over quite a few staff so there were maybe a couple of dozen ladies who worked there during the time I worked there.
If you had run a survey of females who had been there more than a few months I would estimate that you would have been lucky to find one or two who had not been groped. Tall, short, old, young, pretty, not-classically-beautiful, fat, thin. It didn't matter, they (almost) all got groped.
What % of guys were participating in this groping? Just the one guy out of 30+. No HR in those days, of course, so if a female employee didn't appreciate the attention she could take it to his male boss who couldn't care less.
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ooh, El's got three plusses (so far) for the above :)
i like to keep an eye on the karma, cos it helps me find the good posts (it really does! though not always, ofc. Sometimes it helps me rediscover the really annoying posts :fp: )
and also, sometimes, like today, it reassures me that I^2 is not brain-dead after all.
Go, El!
When was it even remotely applicable that the forum membership may be braindead? Who falls into that illustrious category? (Don't say no one. If there was no one then it would not have taken El's post to placate your fears of the membership or some elements of it being braindead)
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ooh, El's got three plusses (so far) for the above :)
i like to keep an eye on the karma, cos it helps me find the good posts (it really does! though not always, ofc. Sometimes it helps me rediscover the really annoying posts :fp: )
and also, sometimes, like today, it reassures me that I^2 is not brain-dead after all.
Go, El!
When was it even remotely applicable that the forum membership may be braindead? Who falls into that illustrious category? (Don't say no one. If there was no one then it would not have taken El's post to placate your fears of the membership or some elements of it being braindead)
oh! FFS , Al, you are really going out of your way to take offence at my posts, aren't you?
Just consider for a moment just how many members have complained abut the dearth of stimulating, intellifgent discussion on this forum? Scrap and Jack spring to mind, instantly. Did you challenge them to name which particular members are responsible for that sad state -of-affairs? Of course you didn't. Because " braindead forum" is clearly a very different thing from "braindead membership"...unless it's Walkie who says it, and Al who reads it.
I 've been hoping against hope that if just i stop talking to you, then your relentless campaign to force me to explain myself (or rather force me to agree agree that the point of my post was to insult you, even if it wasn't) would just tail off, for lack of fuel. Well, maybe it will work eventually. So I'll shut up now and go back to hoping, if that's alright by you? (or even if it isn't)
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No, hang on , I'll say one more thing: The last time I had people picking my words apart to hunt for the non-existent insult, and cross-examining me over every little syllable, there was a reason for that. It was because some malicious rumours about me were circulating, behind the scenes, and those people believed the rumours. But that was somewhere else, and more than a decade ago. I didn't think the same the thing would happen here,
However, much to my surprise, it has come to my attention that malicious rumours about Yours Truly are in circulation again - amongs members of I2! I don't know the content, exactly, nor do I know how many people have given them credence and passed them on (probably not many at all) But I do know they exist.
I am extremely hesirtant to put two-and-two together here, because I do believe it would be totally out- of-character for Al to give credence to anything like that. But I can't help wondering can I?
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Shit, hun. I haven't seen any myself walkie, I will keep an eye out though. If we find them, given your mobility my dear, shall you pour the acid and I pour the rumor-monger down into the sewers? I do have a spare pair of goggles. And I do have a power saw (at least three of them actually), so I think we could get the job done pretty quick. We can use my bathtub too, since I never take a bath, now that since my mom was all fucked up before she barked her last, I have a walk-in shower. Would be the perfect place for the bits, once cut up into little segments like bites of steak, since they could marinate in a bath of 98% (strongest I have atm) H2SO4. We just root 'em out, tie 'em up and dip them slowly, toes first, to conserve my sulfuric acid.
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Shit, hun. I haven't seen any myself walkie, I will keep an eye out though. If we find them, given your mobility my dear, shall you pour the acid and I pour the rumor-monger down into the sewers? I do have a spare pair of goggles. And I do have a power saw (at least three of them actually), so I think we could get the job done pretty quick. We can use my bathtub too, since I never take a bath, now that since my mom was all fucked up before she barked her last, I have a walk-in shower. Would be the perfect place for the bits, once cut up into little segments like bites of steak, since they could marinate in a bath of 98% (strongest I have atm) H2SO4. We just root 'em out, tie 'em up and dip them slowly, toes first, to conserve my sulfuric acid.
Hey! Thanks for the back-up, Lestat ! :LOL: :plus: but, I do tend to very much favour non-violent solutions , don't ya know?
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The solution would only be violent if water were added. Otherwise, the worst its likely to do is smell pretty foul and greasy until we go round the well-flushed out bath tub with a mop and some detergent. Once IN solution, they will stay there though. I can guarantee that much. At least they will until it is time to pour them down the toilet and flush them away in portions. Can't imagine at that point any rumour-mongering dog-fellator or fellatrix is going to do any more kicking and screaming. And iron chains and duct tape can keep that down to a minimum, and then the chains can be dissolved and given the flush too. Problem solved.
Or rather, solvated.
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oh! FFS , Al, you are really going out of your way to take offence at my posts, aren't you?
I don't think so. It seems a pretty natural reaction. Especially given the site's history not of granting
thumbs for clever discussion so much as discussion which agrees with one's point of view (which was
likely the case for some of the other thumbers involved in this one - certainly was with me). Singling
a post out on that criteria is shallow; using it to insult everyone else's contributions mean spirited.
Why would you be surprised that people take your post that way?
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oh! FFS , Al, you are really going out of your way to take offence at my posts, aren't you?
I don't think so. It seems a pretty natural reaction. Especially given the site's history not of granting
thumbs for clever discussion so much as discussion which agrees with one's point of view (which was
likely the case for some of the other thumbers involved in this one - certainly was with me). Singling
a post out on that criteria is shallow; using it to insult everyone else's contributions mean spirited.
Why would you be surprised that people take your post that way?
well, at least you take it as an insult to everyone else's contributions. I'm [retty damned sure that Al read it as a snide attack on himself. And I'm really getting sick of him of doing that. It;'s been a problem for months on-and-off.
I read your karma comment Cal. You called El's post "nuanced" , which was the exact same thing that impressed me about El's post , though I tried to put it in different words, rather than look like a copy-cat. So I'm surprised to hear you say, now, that you were merely agreeing with her POV.. I guess I read rather too much into that word? I thought you were plussing that post for the exact same reason I did. *shrug*
.But nuanced it is, and we don't get an awful lot of that sort of thing on this forum, but I'm sure it's mostly because people just can't be arsed ., not because they can't think . In fact, we haven't been getting much intelligent discussion at all, as numerous people have observed, though I do think it's on the up , lately. And i like to show my appreciation for that
I didn't "single the post out just because it got three thumbs-ups or rarther two (excluding mine) , though i can see how my reply could be read that way. I was just navigating by karma , when I found it, like I said (actually, a lazy way of catching most of the intersting post when I don't have time to read everything. Often disappointing, as I said, cos it casts to wide a net, and still misses some good bits. But hey ho. I do find others' reactions intersting, anyway, so there's a bonus.
I surely don't slavishly agree with popular opinion! (I'm more often accused of the opposite *chuckle* ) But I was genuinely pleased that other people liked Elle's post for the same reaon I did (or so it seemed)
I know karma is relatively meaningless, but, still, a lot of us do quite often give positive karma for totally sincere reasons, self included
Anyway, the real point was that Elle's post was a breath of fresh air. Not the only breath of fresh air on this forum, nor even on this thread. I've plussed a whole bunch of other posts, from a bunch of opther posters for the same reason, as you ought to know, cos you were one of the people I plussed! So why the heck would i suiddenly want to insult all those people now? I didn't intend to insult anybody at all, just referring to an oft-repeated complaint about this place.
Now, I'm willing to explain myself in great detail to yiou , Cal. cos you haven't aggressively demanded explanations, then demanded explanations for the explananation, and so in, until it's practically a full-time job, and clearly a futile endeavour.
I'm very sorry if you, or anybody else ( with one exception) read an unintended insult into my post. I really didn't expect that!
But, here's the exception: I'm not sorry if Al did, because he does that all the time, and I'm past caring . I'll just be happy if he leaves me alone.
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well, at least you take it as an insult to everyone else's contributions. I'm p[retty damned sure sure that Al read it as a snide attack on himself. And I'm really getting sick of him of doing that. It;'s been a problem for months on-and-off.
I read your karma comment Cal. You called El's post "nuanced" , which was the exact same thing that impressed me about El's post , though I tried to put it in different words, rather than look like a copy-cat. So I'm surprised to hear you say, now, that you were merely agreeing with her POV.. I guess I read rather too much into that word? I thought you were plussing that post for the exact same reason I did. *shrug*
I meant what I said. But, if it didn't agree with my own stance, I'm not sure I would've plussed it. It was a more detailed
and nuanced version of what I stated concisely.
I didn't "single the post out just because it got three thumbs-ups or rarther two (excluding mine) , though i can see how my reply could be read that way. I was just navigating by karma , when I found it, like I said (actually, a lazy way of catching most of the intersting post when I don't have time to read everything. Often disappointing, as I said, cos it casts to wide a net, and still misses some good bits. But hey ho. I do find others' reactions intersting, anyway, so there's a bonus.
Indeed it does miss a lot. Because of the way folk thumb here. It will also likely create ideological bias.
I know karma is relatively meaningless, but, still, a lot of us do quite often give positive karma for totally sincere reasons, self included
post for the reason I did- or so I thought!)
The real problem with karma is that it serves too many meanings. So, any reasonable usage for it becomes muddied.
So why the heck would i want to insult those people now? I didn't intend to insult anybody at all, just referring. an oft-repeated complaint about this place.
I don't think it was intentional. I think the tone managed to come across that way. My reaction was a brief moment of
"ah...so El gets the credit for what I spake." Unlike Al though, I just didn't worry about it. Figured some folk needed more
fleshing out to 'get' things. Then, re-reading it, it seemed derogatory to the forum as a whole. And well, I wanted to register
my own reaction then, because it seemed less personal once I read Al's objection.
I'm very sorry if you, or anybody else ( with one exception) read an unintended insult into my post. I really didn't expect that!
No biggie. I don't much mind insults anyhow - just what seem like inconsistent statements.
In fact, if you had ignored Al's tldr statement, I wouldn't have gotten involved at all. :cbc:
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My reaction was a brief moment of
"ah...so El gets the credit for what I spake." Unlike Al though, I just didn't worry about it. Figured some folk needed more
fleshing out to 'get' things.
Read to me like her post was inspired by yours, in the natural flow of conversation.
I think obsessing over karma is silly, though I admit to checking mine sometimes, cause it's useful to know what people did and didn't enjoy reading. :P
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My reaction was a brief moment of
"ah...so El gets the credit for what I spake." Unlike Al though, I just didn't worry about it. Figured some folk needed more
fleshing out to 'get' things.
Read to me like her post was inspired by yours, in the natural flow of conversation.
Yes. But inspired in fleshing out some details from her own experience. I'm not saying that my
initial feeling about Walkie's post was particularly justified mind you.
I think obsessing over karma is silly, though I admit to checking mine sometimes, cause it's useful to know what people did and didn't enjoy reading. :P
I like to masturbate to mine.
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Yes. But inspired in fleshing out some details from her own experience. I'm not saying that my
initial feeling about Walkie's post was particularly justified mind you.
I got that, on first reading. (yayyyy me! :asthing:) and that's one of things I really admired about your response to me (hope you noticed the plus?) . Thoroughly candid and unpretentious. No attempt to disguise the fact that you being teeny bit petty there. Sorry if that ain't the effect you're after , but you just keep going up and up in my estimation lately, Cal.
I think obsessing over karma is silly, though I admit to checking mine sometimes, cause it's useful to know what people did and didn't enjoy reading. :P
I like to masturbate to mine.
:lol1:
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Regarding karma, IMO its fine for multiple people to plus or ghey someone, because it serves as an indicator of post quality. If twenty people each say 'aren't you great for ABC' then its less likely to be asskissing than a single comment from a single user. If 20 people say 'WHAT a CUNT' then again, less likely to be a vendetta.
As for personal stance on checking it, if mine changes I look to see who and what. That way I get an idea why opinions are as they are, and whatever might be going on behind the scenes, and if it has changed, it makes sense to find out why.
And being a pretentious cunt, that just ain't walkie. She's bright and sparky, and her heart is in the right place. She's certainly no backstabbing cunt. At least I have no reason at all to believe so. I've good reason to think otherwise. Walkie, along with 'raxy is one of only two people here who know pretty much the full story about a certain event in my life, and I would NOT just talk about it to any old cunt. I'd have to have damn good reason to consider them trustworthy before they so much as heard the name of one of the actors in it, much less wrote it with their own fingers. Were many people to so much as SPEAK that name I'd fucking break their kneecaps.
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If I might take this thread even further off-topic ( too late to stop me :p) ...
Karma is lot more interesting than you guys think. Rather than giving a biased view of the forum , like you said Cal, it tends to show up people's biases, and I'm often happy to notice that people are not near so biased as you'd think. Often people will plus their worst enenemy, if they happen to like their worst enemy's lates post. Anyway, the sum of everybody's bias adds up to no bias at all, doesn't it?
Then there's sympathy karma. Trivial ,you might say, if you're looking for intelligent discussion,. But I don't only care about intelligent discussion. I also care about people, so I nearly always click on the sympathy karma to see what's up.
There's karma given to a mate, just because. Totally transparently, and I've no problem with that. It's a quick way of finding out who's mates with whom.
I notice that a very small minoriry are intensely clicky , and plus their mates almost exclusively. That tends to make me groan. But the vast majority of us, for the vast majority of the time, judge by the merit of the post, not the poster . I'm pretty damned impressed with us!
Some people have a very strong preference for certain sections of the board, and will therefore give karma more often in that section (one must therefore be caredul not to confuse that bias with other forms of bias)
There;'s vendetta karma. Pain the ass cos it tends to target posts totally randomly, and you're a bloody fool to click on it. But I do like to know who's feeling that grudgeful towards whom. Helps build up a picture of forum dynamics.
Sudden flare -ups of nergative karma also help me find the latest drama quickly and easily !Oh! and , more importantly , alerts me to the presence of drama. I can then decide if I really want to read the fucking board right now, or if I'd rather watch the drama on TV :LOL:
And there's LOL karma of course. To help you find the funniest posts really fast
Oh! and you can find Al plussing Odeon, and Odeon plussing Al surprisingly often. Sometimes. Hmm. That probably belongs in one of the above headings, but one could equally call it "Restore your faith in human nature" karma :)
All useful and interesting info, IMO.
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Yes. But inspired in fleshing out some details from her own experience. I'm not saying that my
initial feeling about Walkie's post was particularly justified mind you.
I got that, on first reading. (yayyyy me! :asthing: ) and that's one of things I really admired about your response to me (hope you noticed the plus?) .
I almost never notice Karma changes, I fear. If I did, I might behave differently - lots of people didn't like what I say.
Thoroughly candid and unpretentious. No attempt to disguise the fact that you being teeny bit petty there. Sorry if that ain't the effect you're after , but you just keep going up and up in my estimation lately, Cal.
I just like to tear everything down. Including myself.
Where you should be amazed is if I ever actually compliment someone. I suck at that.
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Walkie has a point.
It can be tedious skimming over the countless inane posts full of confected butthurt, long-winded insults, trolling, and so on. Particularly considering that many contributors are obviously very intelligent.
So yes, it is a breath of fresh air to read something that is intelligently written and thought provoking.
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No, hang on , I'll say one more thing: The last time I had people picking my words apart to hunt for the non-existent insult, and cross-examining me over every little syllable, there was a reason for that. It was because some malicious rumours about me were circulating, behind the scenes, and those people believed the rumours. But that was somewhere else, and more than a decade ago. I didn't think the same the thing would happen here,
However, much to my surprise, it has come to my attention that malicious rumours about Yours Truly are in circulation again - amongs members of I2! I don't know the content, exactly, nor do I know how many people have given them credence and passed them on (probably not many at all) But I do know they exist.
I am extremely hesirtant to put two-and-two together here, because I do believe it would be totally out- of-character for Al to give credence to anything like that. But I can't help wondering can I?
Maybe there are (I'm not plugged into the grapevine here so wtf do I know), but Al specifically has also kind of gone off the deep end the last year or two (I've lost track) and often finds fights where there are none.
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It is in a woman's best interests to see every guy as a potential rapist.
Don't think it's overly common for females to view all males as potential rapists. Though do believe it's common for females to view all females as potential rape victims. The latter is important and likely unavoidable in teaching/learning personal risk assessment; the former strikes as unhealthy.
The point is not to demonise every man as a potential rapist.
The point may not to be to demonize every male, but generalizing males that way does demonize males. Rape is no exception to violent crime, as primarily perpetrated by males; this is true, but the population percentages of violent criminals related to any type of violence in no way justify generalizing all males as potentially any type of violent criminal. Every male is a potential murder, batterer, robber, whatever; it's a bunch of demonizing crap.
The reality is that most women are not attacked by random strangers or by acquaintances who have personality types or reputations which make them identifiable as potential rapists.
It's also a reality a major risk factor for both victim and perpetrator is alcohol and/or drug use. Studies indicate at least 50%, with some studies citing focusing on young people being much higher up to 80%. That's a big risk factor and a single simple thing both females and males can consider. The risks are age, inebriation, promiscuity, education, and income, in that order. It's true; it's usually not the stranger and the reality is, one's own circumstances, state of mind, and lifestyle choices do play a role.
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It's also a reality a major risk factor for both victim and perpetrator is alcohol and/or drug use. Studies indicate at least 50%, with some studies citing focusing on young people being much higher up to 80%. That's a big risk factor and a single simple thing both females and males can consider. The risks are age, inebriation, promiscuity, education, and income, in that order. It's true; it's usually not the stranger and the reality is, one's own circumstances, state of mind, and lifestyle choices do play a role.
Can you cite your source for this?
I'm not doubting you, I'd just be interested to see source material.
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Walkie has a point.
It can be tedious skimming over the countless inane posts full of confected butthurt, long-winded insults, trolling, and so on. Particularly considering that many contributors are obviously very intelligent.
So yes, it is a breath of fresh air to read something that is intelligently written and thought provoking.
I find it easiest to ignore anything that isn't easier to assess than looking at the karma.
Or, just pick a couple words out, and worry about them.
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The point may not to be to demonize every male, but generalizing males that way does demonize males. Rape is no exception to violent crime, as primarily perpetrated by males; this is true, but the population percentages of violent criminals related to any type of violence in no way justify generalizing all males as potentially any type of violent criminal. Every male is a potential murder, batterer, robber, whatever; it's a bunch of demonizing crap.
Why?
I mean, we seem willing to demonize butter, smoking, and drinking and driving based upon such statistics, why not
clearly identifiable segments of a population? It may well be worth study - but for those who want a rule of thumb,
it seems reasonable to adjust based upon such data.
Incidentally, I'm a safer driver when slightly inebriated. I remember a study (no, I'm not gonna look it up) that
showed not only is the legal limit for alcohol safer than even no-hands cell phones, but it ended up safer than
their control group; I don't remember seeing any follow-ups on it, probably due to politicization of science
and what gets funded.
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It's also a reality a major risk factor for both victim and perpetrator is alcohol and/or drug use. Studies indicate at least 50%, with some studies citing focusing on young people being much higher up to 80%. That's a big risk factor and a single simple thing both females and males can consider. The risks are age, inebriation, promiscuity, education, and income, in that order. It's true; it's usually not the stranger and the reality is, one's own circumstances, state of mind, and lifestyle choices do play a role.
Can you cite your source for this?
I'm not doubting you, I'd just be interested to see source material.
Okay. Let me find some stuff.
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It's also a reality a major risk factor for both victim and perpetrator is alcohol and/or drug use. Studies indicate at least 50%, with some studies citing focusing on young people being much higher up to 80%. That's a big risk factor and a single simple thing both females and males can consider. The risks are age, inebriation, promiscuity, education, and income, in that order. It's true; it's usually not the stranger and the reality is, one's own circumstances, state of mind, and lifestyle choices do play a role.
ermm.. so you're more likely to rape or be raped if you're old, intoxicated , promiscuous , highly educated and rich? or are some of those factors inveresly correlated with rape?
sorry to ask a stupid question, but if I assume that you meant the inverse of what you said here and there (and I'm very much tempted to do so) then your statement will only be reinforcing my preconceptions won't it? which is counter to your actual intention (I think I can safely assume).
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The prevalence of alcohol and drugs is why Department of Justice in 2012 amended the definition of rape, to include anyone who is too mentally incapacitated to give consent. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition-rape
Female risk factors are identified by the Center for Disease Control on pg. 11. http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/global_campaign/en/chap6.pdf
As for the drug/alcohol percentages, it's a mixed bag. Sort of like rape stats in general; they're largely based on surveys. So even if one were to take the lowest numbers, 50% is about it.
The National Institute of Justice states 'at least half' https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/campus/pages/alcohol.aspx
The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse states 'about half' https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/campus/pages/alcohol.aspx
The US Department of Justice states 47% https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsavcaf9513.pdf
This article cites 80% from a university age study that isn't open source so can't verify the quote, but here's the article and study.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/10/sexual_assault_and_drinking_teach_women_the_connection.html
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/JACH.57.6.639-649#.UliRFCSE6kA
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It's also a reality a major risk factor for both victim and perpetrator is alcohol and/or drug use. Studies indicate at least 50%, with some studies citing focusing on young people being much higher up to 80%. That's a big risk factor and a single simple thing both females and males can consider. The risks are age, inebriation, promiscuity, education, and income, in that order. It's true; it's usually not the stranger and the reality is, one's own circumstances, state of mind, and lifestyle choices do play a role.
ermm.. so you're more likely to rape or be raped if you're old, intoxicated , promiscuous , highly educated and rich? or are some of those factors inveresly correlated with rape?
sorry to ask a stupid question, but if I assume that you meant the inverse of what you said here and there (and I'm very much tempted to do so) then your statement will only be reinforcing my preconceptions won't it? which is counter to your actual intention (I think I can safely assume).
It's just the nature of the prevalence of violent crime in general. Young, drugs and alcohol, uneducated, poor; these are the common denominators of violent crime for both criminals and victims. That's not to say it doesn't happen outside of these traits, but it still is what it is.
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Jack , closed access? not any more it isn't. Just let I2's chemist and part-time witchdoctor in residence grab his voodoo human skull and spine rattle (the name for that if you wondered, in actual voodoo, is an 'asson;
doi.org/10.3200/JACH.57.6.639-649 one paper
I'd be inclined to agree. If somebody is pissed out of their head and unsteady on their feet, then they are a more viable target for somebody out to rape. Sheerly because their coordination is impaired, judgement is off, they are less likely to be vigilant and they are likely to be disinhibited and more trusting as a result, allowing a predator to get in closer before attacking.
On a strictly biological basis, it makes sense. If it were to be put in a less emotionally laden context, say I am to fight twice, the same opponent. One on one. First time I'm stone cold sober, there is a good chance of the assailant ending up seriously damaged. If I were force fed a pint of vodka, chances are I'd hit the deck like a sack of potatoes, unless I got a lucky crippling shot in first by chance. Without the impairment I've as good a chance as any at taking down the opponent. With, I'm screwed, unless I happen by sheer chance, to get in a lucky tendon-avulsing blow to the knee or something like that by just chance.
Its not going to be different for the rape victim or potential rape victim; and there are pieces of flesh in people-suits who would undoubtedly go out looking for a drunk potential victim. Just to make the rapist's time of it easier. Disgusting, but true. There are a lot of fucking shitbags about. It doesn't mean every man is one of them, nor does it mean everyone is even a potential rapist. But women (the most likely to be raped, compared to men by far) should take extra care when they are drunk, knowing that such impairment is imparted by consuming large amounts of alcohol, and knowing that such scum as will take advantage are around. I'd suggest travelling in groups personally, that way, even if the girls are drunk, ten on one is probably going to mean the wouldbe rapist is driven off, and potentially, hopefully, the recipient of serious bodily harm. You'd have to have a group of REALLLLY pissed women for ten on one to be even odds most likely.
Against a pack of sober fighters then its likely messy unless the number is relatively small and the single fighter prepared to not think twice about using strikes which break ribs, shatter kneecaps, rip tendons from bones, shove fingers in eyes, reach down trousers to grab nuts, twist and rip. If your willing to fight dirty (and in a self-defense situation its the only way to go. There is no such thing to consider as the queensberry rules, or 'no below the belt' when someone is trying to mug you, kick your head in and leave you for dead for personal amusement. You just do it, no fucking about, and make sure the first fuck to swing a punch ends up cripped severely, and likely as not, permanently. No worrying about morals, no wasting time, just jump the fuck in and smash a bottle in the pricks eyes, kick him in the nuts and knee him in the face. If you want to walk away, you can't afford to mess about worrying about oh dear, is my assailant going to be able to walk again at some point in life, or is he going to end up a quadriplegic fed through a stomach-tube)
Think some really badly drunk girl is going to be alert, mind on the surroundings she is in and of who is in them? it is less likely and if an attacker is detected first their chance of managing to abduct, rape, rob, assault etc. is far higher.
The more focus and self-control any person has against any attack, the less likely the attacker is to end up executing their attack with success.
Doesn't make it that any woman DESERVES to be raped. But it does increase the likelihood of somebody succeeding in doing so, being fucked up. Of course nobody deserves to be raped, not unless they are some cunt like oprah or jenny mccarthy. And like THAT is going to happen, nobody could beg somebody THAT hard as to deter the rapist from running away screaming whilst clawing at their eyes. with fingers dipped in some hastily begged bleach. But it IS logical that the less able to defend themselves somebody is, the more likely they will come to harm should somebody seek to do so.
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The point may not to be to demonize every male, but generalizing males that way does demonize males. Rape is no exception to violent crime, as primarily perpetrated by males; this is true, but the population percentages of violent criminals related to any type of violence in no way justify generalizing all males as potentially any type of violent criminal. Every male is a potential murder, batterer, robber, whatever; it's a bunch of demonizing crap.
Why?
I mean, we seem willing to demonize butter, smoking, and drinking and driving based upon such statistics, why not
clearly identifiable segments of a population? It may well be worth study - but for those who want a rule of thumb,
it seems reasonable to adjust based upon such data.
Missed this. Why what? Think there's a difference between demonizing butter and people. Maybe am just an optimist. :laugh: Sure, people can walk around viewing everyone everywhere as potential demons, but it seems like doing that would be unhealthy in forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships. The facts show the overwhelming vast majority of people have the greatest potential to not be violent criminals. Rules of thumb are great and all, but they're also widely accurate.
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Yes. They are accurate. At least enough so to provide some protection.
Personally, I like butter a lot more than males.
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Might as well revert to the karma discussion. Can't be any more off-topic than butter :green:
I almost never notice Karma changes, I fear. If I did, I might behave differently - lots of people didn't like what I say.
Be afraid, Cal, be very afraid:
Top 5 smited users: Calandale 1159
You're no . 1 on the forum hate stats! Legendary!
On the other handm, subract this figure from your present karma (-173) and it's clear that you've had a total of 986 plusses. Considerably more than I have,
Recent karma reveals that you're going up fast, with plusses far exceeding negs; which in turn betrays that you actually have changed your behaviour. So if this is bad thing, then tough. Get used to it.
On the bright side, though: I'm pretty sure that we all prefer the new improved Cal
If you want to continue looking badass , then you'll just have to revert to old behaviour berfore it's too late, won't you.? But that would be a stupid reaction to a bunch of silly stats. Glad you're resisting :)
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I haven't changed. All those negs came from the democratic experiment really.
It was easier to get karma (in either direction) back then, so it could be quite volatile.
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Yeah, it was everyone else. :zoinks:
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Of course it was everyone else. He didn't ghey himself. :M
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Is it even POSSIBLE to give karma by an account owner TO the same account? in either direction. I CBF testing it, so figured you'd probably know.
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I doubt it. My account is speshul, though, so I can't test it.
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The interface doesn't support it. Should be able to fake a request, but there might be a constraint.
Not really interested in testing it.
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Is it even POSSIBLE to give karma by an account owner TO the same account? in either direction. I CBF testing it, so figured you'd probably know.
A user doesn't see the option the change their own karma.
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I haven't changed. All those negs came from the democratic experiment really.
It was easier to get karma (in either direction) back then, so it could be quite volatile.
I was there, Cal. I wasn't participiting much , cos it was a lot more fun chatting with Wolfie and Pyraxis on Yahoo! Heck, i never even made it to the 500-post mark til a couple of years or so back; but i was there. and you've changed IMO. I think we all have. Grown up a tad, perhaps?
...or not, if you insist.
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I haven't changed. All those negs came from the democratic experiment really.
It was easier to get karma (in either direction) back then, so it could be quite volatile.
I was there, Cal. I wasn't participiting much , cos it was a lot more fun chatting with Wolfie and Pyraxis on Yahoo! Heck, i never even made it to the 500-post mark til a couple of years or so back; but i was there. and you've changed IMO. I think we all have. Grown up a tad, perhaps?
...or not, if you insist.
I doubt it. I'm not capable.
If an opportunity exists to play the game of political formalism again, I am sure that
I would annoy everyone every bit as much.
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Admitting that you would, and have, is progress. :-*
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I was completely aware that my special interest in that topic was driving people mad at the time.
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The prevalence of alcohol and drugs is why Department of Justice in 2012 amended the definition of rape, to include anyone who is too mentally incapacitated to give consent. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition-rape
Female risk factors are identified by the Center for Disease Control on pg. 11. http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/global_campaign/en/chap6.pdf
As for the drug/alcohol percentages, it's a mixed bag. Sort of like rape stats in general; they're largely based on surveys. So even if one were to take the lowest numbers, 50% is about it.
The National Institute of Justice states 'at least half' https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/campus/pages/alcohol.aspx
The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse states 'about half' https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/campus/pages/alcohol.aspx
The US Department of Justice states 47% https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsavcaf9513.pdf
This article cites 80% from a university age study that isn't open source so can't verify the quote, but here's the article and study.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/10/sexual_assault_and_drinking_teach_women_the_connection.html
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/JACH.57.6.639-649#.UliRFCSE6kA
I'd plus you if you didn't want blank karma. :thumbup:
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I doubt it. My account is speshul, though, so I can't test it.
Just tried testing it with altered userid- just went to you anyway.
The interface doesn't support it. Should be able to fake a request, but there might be a constraint.
Not really interested in testing it.
Tried on your post (because spam protections) with user id and message id altered and it still didn't work. So I assume the rest of the url (it's a get request, yes?) is more important, and I can't parse what that probably references. :/
One more edit: I was silly and was modifying the urls but not refreshing under the new urls. Tried modifying a request with my userid and got "An Error Has Occurred!
Sorry, you are not permitted to modify your own karma."
One final edit:
but I *was* able to applaud gopher gary for this post: Yeah, it was everyone else. :zoinks:
and have it link back to this current post. So you can applaud someone for a post they didn't actually author.
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So, saw this article today and saved it for reposting here- it adds to the discussion a bit tangentially, but adds nonetheless IMO.
The Sexual Assault Epidemic No One Talks About
Pauline wants to tell her story — about that night in the basement, about the boys and about the abuse she wanted to stop.
But she's nervous. "Take a deep breath," she says out loud to herself. She takes a deep and audible breath. And then she tells the story of what happened on the night that turned her life upside down.
Pauline sits after practice for a Christmas show with fellow group members of a day program at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania. Pauline, who has intellectual disabilities, has been with the Arc program since 2014, after an emergency removal from her previous caretaker's home by Adult Protective Services when she was sexually assaulted.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
"The two boys took advantage of me," she begins. "I didn't like it at all."
ABUSED AND BETRAYED: KEY FINDINGS
At a moment of reckoning in the United States about sexual harassment and sexual assault, a yearlong NPR investigation finds that there is little recognition of a group of Americans that is one of the most at risk: people with intellectual disabilities.
People with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate seven times higher than those without disabilities. That number comes from data run for NPR by the Justice Department from unpublished federal crime data.
People with intellectual disabilities are at heightened risk at all moments of their daily lives. The NPR data show they are more likely to be assaulted by someone they know and during daytime hours.
Predators target people with intellectual disabilities because they know they are easily manipulated and will have difficulty testifying later. These crimes go mostly unrecognized, unprosecuted and unpunished. And the abuser is free to abuse again.
Police and prosecutors are often reluctant to take these cases because they are difficult to win in court.
Pauline is a woman with an intellectual disability. At a time when more women are speaking up about sexual assault — and naming the men who assault or harass them — Pauline, too, wants her story told.
Her story, NPR found in a yearlong investigation, is a common one for people with intellectual disabilities.
NPR obtained unpublished Justice Department data on sex crimes. The results show that people with intellectual disabilities — women and men — are the victims of sexual assaults at rates more than seven times those for people without disabilities.
It's one of the highest rates of sexual assault of any group in America, and it's hardly talked about at all.
Pauline was part of that silent population. But she says she decided to speak publicly about what happened to her because she wants to "help other women."
NPR's investigation found that people with intellectual disabilities are at heightened risk during all parts of their day. They are more likely than others to be assaulted by someone they know. The assaults, often repeat assaults, happen in places where they are supposed to be protected and safe, often by a person they have been taught to trust and rely upon.
Pauline is 46, with a quick smile and an easy laugh. (NPR uses rape survivors' first name, unless they prefer their full name be used.) She has red hair and stylish, coppery-orange glasses.
In February 2016, Pauline was living with her longtime caretaker and that woman's extended family.
Pauline (far right) leads fellow group home housemates into a day program at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
On the night of Feb. 20, she was in the basement of the family's second home, in Pennsylvania. According to the police criminal complaint, Pauline was raped by two boys who were part of the family.
She told them repeatedly to stop. They warned her not to tell.
But she did.
Raise your hand
At a conference in a large ballroom, Leigh Ann Davis asked the audience in front of her a question: How many of them had dealt with sexual assault or sexual harassment in their lives? Davis was referencing the #MeToo campaign on social media. Almost every woman — about 30 of them — raised her hand.
Davis runs criminal justice programs for The Arc, a national advocacy group for the 4.7 million people with intellectual disabilities, their families and the professionals who work with them. This was at the group's convention in November in San Diego. The room was filled with professionals and parents as well as people with intellectual disabilities themselves.
Then Davis posed a second question: How many in the audience knew someone with an intellectual disability who had been the victim of sexual harassment or assault? Only two hands went up.
Pauline stands in her room after coming home from a day program for adults with intellectual disabilities.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
"What does that say about where we are as a society?" Davis asked. "Where people with intellectual disabilities are more likely to be victimized, but we don't see more hands being raised."
Davis focuses on the issue of sexual violence. She is familiar with the high number of rape reports among people with intellectual disabilities.
"It means people with disabilities still don't feel safe enough to talk abut what's going on in their lives," she said. "Or we haven't given them the foundation to do that. ... That there are not enough places to go where they'll feel they'll be believed."
Unrecognized, unprosecuted and unpunished
Intellectual disability is now the preferred term for what was once called "mental retardation." The American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, which represents professionals and helps determine the official definition, describes an intellectual disability as "characterized by significant limitation in both intellectual functioning and in adaptive behaviors." Those adaptive skills include social skills — such as the ability to deal with other people, to follow rules and avoid being victimized — and practical skills, things like being able to work and take care of one's health and safety.
"Developmental disability" is another commonly used term. And while this mostly refers to people with intellectual disabilities, it describes a larger group of people, including some without intellectual disabilities. People with cerebral palsy and autism, for example, are counted as having a developmental disability.
Completed jigsaw puzzles are displayed at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
NPR reviewed hundreds of cases of sexual assault against people with intellectual disabilities. We looked at state and federal data, including those new numbers we obtained from the Justice Department. We read court records. We followed media accounts and put together a database of 150 assaults so serious that they garnered rare local and national media attention. We talked to victims, their guardians, family, staff and friends.
We found that there is an epidemic of sexual abuse against people with intellectual disabilities. These crimes go mostly unrecognized, unprosecuted and unpunished. A frequent result was that the abuser was free to abuse again. The survivor is often re-victimized multiple times.
"It's not surprising, because they do have that high level of victimization," says Erika Harrell, a statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. "That high vulnerability is just reflected in our numbers."
Harrell writes the Justice Department's annual report about crime against all people with disabilities. But the report doesn't break out sex crimes against people with intellectual disabilities. When NPR requested those data, she came up with the stunning numbers that show people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at much higher numbers — "more than seven times higher than the rate for persons with no disabilities."
"If this were any other population, the world would be up in arms," says Nancy Thaler, a deputy secretary of Pennsylvania's Department of Human Services who runs the state's developmental disability programs. "We would be irate and it would be the No. 1 health crisis in this country."
For people in the field, like her, the high rates of assault have been an open secret.
"Folks with intellectual disabilities are the perfect victim," says Thaler, who has been a leader in the field for more than 40 years — in top state, federal and national association jobs. She is also a parent of an adult son with an intellectual disability.
"They are people who often cannot speak or their speech is not well-developed. They are generally taught from childhood up to be compliant, to obey, to go along with people. Because of the intellectual disability, people tend not to believe them, to think that they are not credible or that what they saying, they are making up or imagining," she explains. "And so for all these reasons, a perpetrator sees an opportunity, a safe opportunity to victimize people."
Harrell could think of only one other group that might have a higher risk of assault: women between the ages of 18 and 24 — but only those who are not in college. Those young women tend to be poorer and more marginalized. Compared with women with intellectual disabilities, they have an almost identical rate of assault, just slightly higher.
Erika Harrell writes the Justice Department's annual report about crime against all people with disabilities.
Jennifer Kerrigan/NPR
But the rate for people with intellectual disabilities — the Justice Department numbers count people ages 12 and older — is almost certainly an underestimate, the government statistician said. Because those numbers from household surveys don't include people living in institutions — where, Harrell said, research shows people are even more vulnerable to assault. Also not counted are the 373,000 people living in group homes.
The 1998 law that requires the Justice Department to keep statistics on disabled victims of crime — the Crime Victims with Disabilities Awareness Act — actually only mentions people with developmental disabilities. It calls for a report to spur research to "understand the nature and extent of crimes against individuals with developmental disabilities." But the DOJ expanded its collection to look at people with all disabilities and made a more useful annual report.
Vulnerable everywhere
Most rape victims — in general — are assaulted by someone they know, not by a stranger. But NPR's numbers from the Justice Department found that people with intellectual disabilities are even more likely to be raped by someone they know. For women without disabilities, the rapist is a stranger 24 percent of the time, but for a woman with an intellectual disability it is less than 14 percent of the time.
And the risk comes at any time of day. Half the sexual assaults take place during the day. For the rest of the population, about 40 percent of sexual assaults occur during daytime. The federal numbers, and the results of our own database, show that people with intellectual disabilities are vulnerable everywhere, including in places where they should feel safest: where they live, work, go to school; on van rides to medical appointments and in public places. Most of the time, the perpetrators are people they have learned to count on the most — sometimes their own family, caregivers or staffers, and friends.
Often it's another person with a disability — at a group home, or a day program, or work — who commits the assault. Pennsylvania, at NPR's request, compiled data from more than 500 cases of suspected abuse in 2016. Of those, 42 percent of the suspected offenders were themselves people with intellectual disabilities. Staff made up 14 percent of the suspects; relatives were 12 percent; and friends, 11 percent.
One reason for the high rates of victimization is that so many adults come in and out of the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, according to Beverly Frantz of Temple University's Institute on Disabilities. Frantz estimates that a typical person with an intellectual disability who lives in a group home or a state institution deals with hundreds of different caregivers every year.
"If you think two to three different shifts, five days a week, 365 days a year, it adds up pretty quickly," she says.
Pauline helps set the table for dinner at her group home. "I was scared the first day I went to the house," she says, referring to the group home she currently lives in. "I didn't know anyone." Since coming into the group home, Pauline says, she is happier.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
The high number includes the consideration of weekend shifts, too; high staff turnover, staffers on vacations or on sick leave, plus assistance from family members.
The vast majority are professional, dedicated and caring. But for someone who wants to be abusive, the opportunity is there. Caregivers have a role that gives them power. They may assist with the most intimate care — dressing, bathing, toileting — for some with significant physical disabilities. A person with intellectual disability is often very dependent upon those caregivers.
"We treat them as children," Frantz says. "We teach them to be compliant."
For many people with intellectual disabilities, caregivers — including professional staff — become their friends, often their best friends, among the people who know them best and care about them the most. But that, too, is a line that can be easily crossed.
"We use the word 'friend' a lot, and the boundaries are sometimes nonexistent," Frantz explains.
"It was a predator's dream"
Stephen DeProspero is serving 40 years in prison for filming himself sexually assaulting a severely disabled 10-year-old boy he cared for at a state institution in New Hartford, N.Y.
"There was nothing in the back of my mind that caused me to seek out a job with vulnerable people so I could take advantage of them," he wrote in response to a query from NPR. "I wholly prided myself on doing a selfless job for people who are disabled and can tell you many nice stories about all the lives I touched in a positive way."
When the boy's family sued the state, DeProspero said in a handwritten affidavit that it was easy in the house to abuse the boy unseen. "I could have stayed in that house for years and abused him every day without anybody even noticing at all," he wrote. "It was a predator's dream."
DeProspero now regrets those words, he told NPR in his letter, because he says he wasn't a serial predator. He blames his crime on an addiction to pornography, including child pornography.
In Interviews With 122 Rapists, Student Pursues Not-So-Simple Question: Why?
GOATS AND SODA
In Interviews With 122 Rapists, Student Pursues Not-So-Simple Question: Why?
NPR wrote to several men in prison or awaiting trial for sexually abusing an adult or child with an intellectual disability. Most of the men did not write back. Some claimed that the sex was consensual.
In his letter from the Attica Correctional Facility, DeProspero says he has spent years trying to understand why he raped a disabled child. He speaks of having a difficult childhood. As an adult, he had few friends, he says.
He took a job at a group home for children with severe disabilities in 2004. There he met and cared for the young boy who could not communicate with words.
"I took a liking to him," DeProspero wrote. "I spent the most time with him and taught him how to brush his teeth, tie his sneakers and even ride a bike. I would often take him for [shoulder] rides, at his request, and carry him around the residence."
One day, DeProspero wrote, the boy was upset and alone in his room. "My memory of child porn videos sprang back into my mind," he says, and he forced the boy to perform a sex act.
For weeks afterward, DeProspero says, he was "beside myself with guilt and grief."
He says he looked for another job. He got one, at a group home for adults with intellectual disabilities. But first he went back to sexually assault the boy one more time, and this time filmed it as "a momento [sic] to remember him."
That act, too, went unnoticed. Five years later it was discovered, by accident.
Police investigating Internet child porn seized DeProspero's computer and cameras — and found images of children. He was given a six-month sentence.
Afterward, his lawyer asked police to return DeProspero's computer and cameras. They agreed but first did one last check of the equipment. That's when they discovered more pictures, including the film clip of DeProspero, from years before, assaulting the 10-year-old boy.
"I let this child down in the worst way imaginable," DeProspero said the day he was sentenced.
The state of New York paid the boy's family $3 million in damages.
"People who perpetrate these crimes are always looking for justification for what they do. It's never their fault. It's always someone else's fault. ... They're very manipulative people," says Dawn Lupi, the Oneida County prosecutor in the case.
One of the most memorable moments in the case, Lupi said, was when she met with the other staffers in the large group home where the boy was raped by DeProspero. "They were very caring," she says. "They were devastated that they didn't stop it."
Barriers to prosecution
It's rare for these cases to go to court. Some people with intellectual disabilities do have trouble speaking or describing things in detail, or in proper time sequence. Our investigation found that makes it harder for police to investigate and for prosecutors to win these cases in court.
Even when these cases do go to court, there are barriers. In 2012, a jury in Georgia found a man guilty of raping a 24-year-old woman with Down syndrome three times over one night and the following morning. Appeals Court Judge Christopher McFadden, two years later, overturned the decision, saying the woman did not "behave like a victim." McFadden, who presided over the original trial, questioned why the woman waited a day to report the rape and said that she did not exhibit "visible distress." The jury had heard evidence that the man's semen was found in the victim's bed and that a doctor who examined the woman found evidence consistent with a sexual assault.
Pauline leaves for home after a day program at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
The man was retried in 2015, and a new jury convicted him. The woman's mother said afterward it had been traumatic for her daughter to go back to court and tell her story again.
In another case, a psychologist hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District said in court in 2013 that a young girl with an intellectual disability probably was less traumatized, because of her disability. The trial was for damages for a 9-year-old girl who had been sexually assaulted five times by an older boy at her school. Stan Katz, the psychologist, testified it was "very possible" that the girl had a "protective factor" against emotional trauma because of her low IQ.
The jury didn't buy it and awarded the girl $1.4 million in damages, far more than the girl's family was even seeking.
"It's not your fault"
When Pauline — the woman who wants her story told — was raped on Feb. 20, 2016, she was living with her longtime caretaker, a social worker named Cheryl McClain, and that woman's extended family. Pauline had lived half her life with McClain and called her "Mommy."
The family lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., but had bought that second home in the Pocono Mountains, in Pennsylvania.
That's where the rape happened.
Pauline was assaulted by two boys, just 12 and 13. These details come from the police criminal complaint. One boy, McClain explains, was her foster child. The other, she says, was her adopted son.
According to the police complaint, the two boys confessed right away to the police that they had raped Pauline and that she had told them to stop. Both boys, according to the complaint, "confessed to raping the victim and both related that the victim repeatedly told both juveniles to stop assaulting her."
It was McClain who called the police that night. But after police charged the boys with rape, McClain seemed to have second thoughts.
Pauline, 46, puts together a puzzle at her day program. Adults with intellectual disabilities are among groups with one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the United States, according to previously unpublished sex crime data from the Justice Department.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
She pressured Pauline to change her story.
One way we know: Cheryl McClain recorded herself coaching Pauline. Telling the woman with an intellectual disability that maybe it wasn't really rape, that she'd enjoyed the sex.
"You wanted to do it," McClain tells Pauline on the recording.
NPR obtained parts of the transcript from the recording, which was attached to the police complaint.
McClain goes from expressing anger at the boys who assaulted her to telling Pauline that she was at fault, too.
"Even though I know they started with you first," McClain told Pauline, "a lady has to say 'No.' She has to mean 'No.' "
McClain told NPR that she had warned the boys to be respectful of the woman with an intellectual disability. "They knew not to touch her, that I love her so much, that to touch her would be trouble," McClain says. "I would throw them out of the house."
Pauline puts together a small bag with two screws each for Arlington Industries as a part of prevocational skills training during a day program at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
But on the recording, it's Pauline who, McClain threatens, will have to leave the house. If Pauline's charge against the boys stands, McClain tells her, "the only way to fix this, the only way it could work out, you just would have to not be with me. ... You wouldn't be able to live with me if I had any boys here."
McClain says if she had known the boys were abusing Pauline, she would have stopped them. But Pauline says she did tell McClain about previous assaults. Just the week before that assault in Pennsylvania, Pauline had told McClain that there had been earlier assaults, according to the police complaint. She said both boys had abused her, in the house in New York and the house in Pennsylvania. The police complaint shows that McClain said she called the police in New York. As a result, the 13-year-old was detained at a New York juvenile facility for four days, and then released back to the family.
That was just days before the sexual assault in Pennsylvania. This time, both boys were removed to a juvenile detention center, this one in Easton, Pa.
McClain and Pauline had lived together for more than 20 years and were like mother and daughter. Pauline said McClain was often nice to her, but sometimes mean. She'd sometimes yell at her. "Used to call me names. Call me 'stupid.' 'Retarded,' " Pauline says.
McClain denies that she ever mistreated Pauline or used those words.
But Pauline says that in the days after the sexual assault in Pennsylvania, there was a lot of tension.
"Because of the boys and stuff," Pauline recalls. "She said, 'It's your fault, Pauline.' "
Pauline pauses, and then reassures herself: "It's not your fault."
Roxanne Kiehart, one of the caretakers at Pauline's group home, puts in a movie for Pauline and a housemate after they returned home from a day program.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
On Feb. 22, two days after the assault, McClain called Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Shamus Kelleher, who had investigated the rape. She told the officer that Pauline had changed her story and now said the sex acts had been consensual and that Pauline said she "enjoyed it."
But when Kelleher asked to talk to Pauline, McClain refused to let Pauline speak. In his complaint, Kelleher noted that McClain's claim that Pauline had agreed to sex with the boys had been made "solely" by McClain "and was not in any way verified by the victim even after requested by this Trooper."
Kelleher already had a sense of Pauline. He had taken her statement two days before, when she was "visibly upset and I observed her to be crying," he reported, as she talked about the assault. Pauline had told him she never wanted to see the two boys again.
Then, on March 1, the night before the boys were to appear in juvenile court, McClain took Pauline — the rape victim — to the office of the public defender who was representing one of the boys — a rape suspect. McClain told the lawyer that the sex acts were consensual. The attorney, William Watkins, stopped her. If that were true, then Pauline might have been guilty of committing a crime against the two boys.
The next day at the Monroe County Courthouse, news of McClain's bringing Pauline to the public defender's office was relayed to the judge. The Monroe County district attorney, police and an Adult Protective Services worker tried to speak to Pauline to see whether she had, in fact, changed her story. But every time someone approached Pauline, either McClain or her husband, Kinard McClain, "would physically restrict any possible communications with the victim," according to the police criminal complaint against McClain.
Pauline, Kelleher would write in a police criminal complaint, "became visibly upset and agitated during these proceedings and on numerous occasions stated she did not want anyone to go to jail."
Pauline helps pour juice for dinner at her group home.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
But she did not change her story that she had been raped.
That's when McClain revealed she had those recordings on her phone.
McClain played one of the recordings. Kelleher wrote in the police complaint that rather than hearing — as McClain claimed — Pauline retracting her story, he heard "a heated discussion regarding the sexual assaults."
Police ordered McClain to turn over her cellphone with the recordings as potential evidence. But she refused, and hid the Samsung Galaxy phone inside her shirt.
The judge had taken an unusual step. To protect Pauline, he assigned her a lawyer. Usually, a crime victim is represented by the district attorney. But to prosecute crimes against people with intellectual disabilities, courts often need to take extra steps, sometimes creative or rare ones. Now, in addition to the district attorney prosecuting the crime, Pauline had her own lawyer.
Syzane Arifaj, a former public defender for juveniles, had worked with clients with disabilities. When she met Pauline for the first time, the thing that struck her was that Pauline was "consistent." Her story about how the two boys raped her did not change. That was important, Arifaj says, because "a lot of people who have intellectual disabilities are very malleable. So if you just repeatedly tell them this happened and this didn't happen, they're sort of prone to taking the suggestion."
Pauline was torn, though, facing heavy pressure from McClain, whom she had long relied on.
"Pauline didn't want to upset anybody," Arifaj says. "From the start, her thing was, she didn't want anybody to be mad at her."
She had learned to survive by pleasing the people she depended upon for help. And when told she was putting people she lived with in danger with the law, Pauline said she didn't want anyone to go to jail.
The difficulty of prosecution
Arifaj says it's harder for people with intellectual disabilities to seek justice.
"They don't act independently so if someone who is taking care of them is not advocating for them, that makes the situation very difficult because they're not in a position to take care of themselves," she explains. "Mrs. McClain was taking care of her. That's all she knew."
There's long been reluctance by many prosecutors to take on rape cases against people with intellectual disabilities. That's largely because a person with an intellectual disability may have difficulty recalling details from a crime, or remembering them consistently. And they often have difficulty remembering time sequence — when something happened or in what order.
That made prosecuting crimes against Pauline difficult. She was unsure of dates of the different times she had been assaulted and which assaults had happened at the family's house in New York or at the house in Pennsylvania. And it wasn't just Pauline who found it confusing; prosecutors did too.
Pauline dances along to a video during a morning exercise routine at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
It helped prosecutors in Pennsylvania, Arifaj says, that the boys had quickly confessed to police investigators that night.
According to court records, the two boys were charged with rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and other sex crimes.
Separately, McClain became a defendant, too. She was charged with six felonies — including intimidating a witness and interfering with an investigation — and two misdemeanors. Prosecutors would eventually drop the felony charges.
Last June, McClain pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of giving false information to police with the intent to try to implicate someone. She was fined $15,000 and put on probation for two years.
A calendar detailing the weekly schedule for adults with intellectual disabilities hangs in a room at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
In 2016, the two juveniles were found guilty — "adjudicated delinquent" is the terminology — and sent to a state treatment center, according to attorneys involved in the case and what Pauline's new guardian in Pennsylvania was told.
McClain still disputes the charges against her. She notes that she was the one who called the police the night Pauline was assaulted. And when McClain told authorities a different story — that it wasn't rape but consensual sex — she thinks police and prosecutors refused to believe her because they thought she was now fearful of losing Pauline's Social Security disability benefits. Social Security sent Pauline's check to McClain as her representative, according to the police complaint.
"If I was afraid I would lose the check, I never had to pick up that phone and not tell anyone," McClain says.
She says she pleaded guilty because she feared prosecutors. "I felt those people were coming to destroy my life."
McClain says that she loves Pauline and wants her to come back to the home in Brooklyn.
A new life
When Pauline was raped in Pennsylvania, her life turned upside down. Suddenly, she lost the life she had worked hard to establish in Brooklyn.
McClain, for more than 20 years, had helped Pauline make her way in the world. In Pennsylvania, Pauline would have to make a new life for herself.
Most days, it starts at a busy day program run by the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania. At this center in a city in the northeastern part of the state, people with intellectual disabilities, like Pauline, spend the day, get meals, socialize and do some work for minimal pay.
One day last April started with an exercise video. Nine adults lined up in a row, faced the screen and moved their arms and bodies to the music. A woman in a wheelchair scooted back and forth.
Erica Francis, a direct support professional, helps Pauline as they restock a vending machine at Arc of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
Pauline smiles during the cha-cha step. She's a smooth dancer.
"I like any kind of music," Pauline says. "I like Michael Jackson. Stevie Wonder. Diana Ross. I like any kind of music. They play music. I'll dance to it. I like to dance."
As it was just a few days before Easter, the big excitement was around an impending visit from the Easter Bunny.
And when the guest of honor — the staffer who fit into the furry costume with straight-up ears and a goofy smile — arrived with a basket of chocolates, the room of adults — in their 30s, 40s, some in their 60s — erupted in delight, with applause and cheers.
Sometimes adults with intellectual disabilities still take joy in childish things. And maybe that's because they're often treated as children for so much of their lives.
There's debate among professionals about moments like this. Many argue that to do things with adults that are normally done with children is condescending and "infantilizing." Some argue that it stops adults from learning adult skills appropriate for their age.
A view of the outside of the day program room.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
Pat Quinn, who runs adult day and residential services at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania, points out the difficulty around this dilemma. His agency makes respect a primary value. But as he watches the excitement of the adults receiving candy from the Easter Bunny, he asks, "How could you deny them this?"
Often people with intellectual disability are described this way: They're 30 years old or 40 years old, but they have the "developmental age" of a child.
Many professionals in the field say that kind of description can be misleading.
Mainly because, as Quinn notes, adults with intellectual disabilities are not children. They have a lifetime of experience. They want things other adults want: jobs and community; friendships, relationships — and that includes romantic relationships, sex, and maybe marriage.
But it's difficult because there are limits when it comes to learning, problem solving and everyday social skills.
Pauline stands in her neighborhood. She is slowly adjusting to her new life away from Brooklyn.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
Often, it's the law that treats them like children. In 32 states, according to an NPR count of state statutes, the same laws that protect children from physical and sexual abuse are used to protect adults with intellectual disabilities.
And there's some good reason for that. Like children, adults with intellectual disabilities — who grow up trusting and relying upon other people — may have trouble telling when someone tries to trick them. Like kids generally, they're just more vulnerable to abuse. Often they need the assistance that they find in a place like a group home.
Pauline lives with three other women in a group home now. It's a one-level red brick house with white columns in a residential neighborhood.
At first, Pauline says, she was upset coming to this unfamiliar house. But those feelings evolved.
"I got used to it," she says. "It took me a while."
Now she thinks it's better for her to live here — "Because I feel safe. I feel happy. The staff take good care of me. I'm really happy here."
Pauline shows a photograph from her wedding day. After the wedding, her husband, David, moved into a room with Pauline in her caretaker's home. Now they talk on the phone most nights and David sends her cards to stay in touch.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
The staff at this group home — run by the Arc — took Pauline to doctors. She has a new pair of glasses — the coppery orange ones. Pauline and her caregivers said she had gone for years without glasses. McClain disputes that and says Pauline lost glasses she had previously had. Pauline and Roxanne Kiehart, the house supervisor, say the day Pauline got those new glasses, she was stunned by how her vision changed. She ran around the optometrist's shop, yelling, "I can see. I can see."
She can see the TV screen now. In New York, she says, she never had time to watch TV. Her day began making the beds in the house. Then she went to a job busing tables at a pizza parlor in Brooklyn. She took two subways, by herself, to work. The money she earned went back to McClain, to the house, to pay for groceries. Most nights, the family went to church.
At the new house in Pennsylvania, it's still hard to get Pauline to relax and just take time for herself, Kiehart explains. Pauline likes to set the table and help with dinner.
"She always wants to be busy," Kiehart says. "She always wants to help."
Part of that, Kiehart explains — and Pauline agrees — is that Pauline stayed busy doing chores at the house in Brooklyn.
Now, Pauline says, she gets to keep money from her Social Security check and from her job. And, for the first time, she goes shopping and picks out her own clothes. McClain says she gave Pauline money and that there's an entire closet at the house in the Poconos with Pauline's dresses, ones that she bought herself.
Pauline gives a tour of the house: The kitchen where she likes to help make pasta stuffed with cheese, the backyard with the tall trees, her bedroom with seashells over the bed.
There was one more thing Pauline wanted to show off: the pictures from her wedding.
They are in frames on the dresser in her bedroom. "I have a beautiful wedding dress," she said. "It's white. And it's like a thing you put around your hair" (her veil).
When Pauline was living with McClain, she met David, a man with an intellectual disability, at church.
Pauline says McClain told her if she wanted to be with David, they would have to get married. The wedding was at the church, where McClain is active; Pauline in the white dress, David in a dark tuxedo. They had a white wedding cake with red rose petals.
Pauline sits in her room in a group home in Pennsylvania. Like other adults with intellectual disabilities, Pauline wants love, romance and marriage.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
David moved into the house, sharing a room with Pauline.
She holds out her left hand to show the twisted silver wedding band with a small stone.
Pauline reflects on what it means to her to be married and to have a husband.
"He really loves me so much," she says. "That's where you feel special."
But now, miles apart and in different states, David and Pauline talk on the phone most nights. On the dresser in her bedroom, there are pictures of David and the cards he sends — birthday cards, holiday cards, romantic cards. He signs them with his first and last name.
Pauline misses David's kisses. She misses him in her bed. But she won't go back to her old family. That's where she was raped. And David won't, on his own, leave that house and move to a new state. He lives with McClain and depends upon her. McClain insists David doesn't want to move. He has a job he likes and is active in the church.
Like other adults with intellectual disabilities, Pauline wants love, romance and marriage. But like so many other adults with intellectual disabilities, a history of rape gets in the way.
Meg Anderson, Robert Benincasa and Barbara van Woerkom assisted with reporting for this story.
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but I *was* able to applaud gopher gary for this post: Yeah, it was everyone else. :zoinks:
and have it link back to this current post. So you can applaud someone for a post they didn't actually author.
I vote that Elle should give me karmas for all of her posts. :zoinks:
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I just gave her karma for true geek curiosity. :green:
:plus:
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Lol 'Raxy, I plussed Elle too, for the exact same reason. Geek Chic :)
And poor Pauline. Jesus. Elle, that article, that is heartbreaking. And that fucking BITCH 'mother'...christ fucking wept. To not only take all the money she earned (and good on her for getting the work to begin with, that must have been hard for her) only to have it all taken away from her. That in and of itself sickens me. But to threaten to throw HER out if the rape charges she brings stand....fucking christ. Its not her fault she was raped, fuck no. Its the fault of the fucking bastards that not only did it but tried to pressure her into saying she wanted it and it wasn't rape.
I admire, I really, really admire the way she shined there with inner strength and fire, insisting that when she was raped, that no matter what pressure they tried to put on her, it is still rape. There are so many MR girls or guys or that matter who wouldn't have been able to, or might but would have caved in. Pauline didn't. And was strong enough to find her own niche, her own place in life the way she deserves. Although for her to be split up by distance, because she can't go back to her 'mother' to be closer to the MR guy she took as her mate, that is heartbreaking. I hope, I even pray, although I am not religious, that she will be able to one day, one day real soon, find a way to not just write to her husband. Not even BF, but HUSBAND...throwing her out because she brought a rape claim against her rapists...her so called 'mother' needs to be fucking fucked up. And damn would I love the opportunity to be the one to bring her her karma on a silver platter, to be shoved right up her ass, flat-ways.
Poor, poor pauline *wishes for a kneeling and weeping 'smiley' to use here*. But at the same time, strong, powerful pauline, pauline the lioness who did not back the fuck down and, whilst I would very, very rarely EVER lavish praise upon of all, a judge, good on the bugger, for assigning her her own personal lawyer in addition to the district attorney. Judge or not, praise be upon him, and may he live long, and prosper, for that act of personal compassion, there, there was a man who stood up for who needed someone to stand by her side, and who did what was right.
I admire, as well as feel terrible pain, for pauline. Pain, for what happened to her, and the way she was exploited for her earnings and disability benefits (christ...not wanting to lose them and that being a factor....what I wouldn't do to give that bitch foster-mother a piece of my mind, and for that matter, a piece of my knuckle sandwich). IMO someone should still stand for her, and force that socalled foster 'mother' to repay each and every penny, plus the interest she could have earned had she spent not a single fraction of a penny for the entire time of her earning both disability benefit and the income from her job, and had that put in THE single-most high-paying interest bank account extant in her country, for the entire time the first penny of income came to be her rightful property. And for that matter, brutally punitive damages from her, and the rapist fucks. That foster 'mother' makes me almost as sick as the rapists themselves. She's as bad at least. I can't say 'worse' since she herself did not actually commit the act of rape. But she protected them, she tried to turn it to her advantage, and kicked HER out for making the report to the filth. Fucking bloody shit, I hope she burns in hell. And if no hell there is, I hope somebody fucking well burns her alive here on this plane of existence.. I know nothing of there being deities or otherwise, but all-forgiving or not, I doubt some of the ones that are, if there are any, would forgive those bastard sons of whores all. If *I* were omnipotent and of infinite, unbound, all-encompassing mercy....I would still come down incarnate and beat the living fucking shite out of the 'mother' and the rapists all. Until they shit blood and faecal matter from their noses, my god-size combat boots having been rammed so hard up the arses of those bastards. That would BE my mercy. My mercy for poor, yet strong Lioness Pauline. May she ever be loved by her husband and may they be reunited both by day and by night, both sharing breakfast and sharing bed.
Strong woman. I admire her immensely for not caving in, no matter how much support she needed for it. And for having the guts to say 'fuck you then, I'm going' if her foster 'mother' was going to be like that. Having the guts to do that to keep her husband. And having the guts to tell HIM that if he wanted to be with her, that he must offer his own hand in marriage to her. I hope she made him ask upon bended knees and beg her permission to speak her name when he asked her permission.
And now that they are husband and wife, IMO the state ought to support their right to be together as man and wife. No. As wife and husband. For she comes first here. She is the Lioness. The tiger-souled, strong woman with the ass-shaped boot. And ever may she be so. What a woman. If strength alone, and neither personality nor looks, was the candidate entity by which we as human beings sought mates and sought to pledge our love, and judged whether or not we loved another, I could see myself pleading my case to offer myself, body, mind and soul to that woman, for her strength of character. I don't know her, I never will. But were that the ONLY way people in human society sought a loved one, I could see myself doing so, with great admiration and humility just to be in her presence. For such does she deserve from all who would speak her name or look upon her face.
Live long, and prosper, Pauline.
Live long, and prosper, Pauline's Husband and true lover. Live long and prosper TOGETHER, both of you, live long and love long, you both deserve it and both deserve to be in each others arms, to grow rich and to grow strong, to cultivate joy in one another's life and heart. MR? fuck the MR, what is important is that you stood up for yourself, strong tigress, and you pulled through, and bowed not your head like a meek sheep to the slaughter to exploitative filth and those who sucked the dicks of said filth for their own gain.
If I could plus pauline, I'd do it. As many times as the forum software would allow it. For a full 366-day leap-year.
Honor to you, strong tigress. Honor, joy and prosperity.
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So you can applaud someone for a post they didn't actually author.
Not surprising. Karma is applied on a user ID, not a post.
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You can't applaud the same post 2x in less than half an hour though. Apparently.
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Would make total sense that last one, given people are able to change their names here, like your going from 'elle' to 'el'
(BTW if you don't mind the insatiable autie curiosity (this particular one has been nibbling at my curiosity-cortex for some time now)..why the spelling change. Is it to rhyme with 'hell' or does 'El' have a connection with the old either personal pronoun for the particular semitic monotheistic religious deity, or earlier semitic language derivations meaning the same, but not necessarily personal (vis a vis 'El', Lord of Hosts, titled Adonai 'Lord', Elohim (in hebrew, a plural form all the same, but nevertheless often taken as a personal pronoun or title for the semitic, israeli monotheistic deity of the old testament; although gramatically valid that 'Elohim' in particular, be taken not as the name of A or The god, but a group, or perhaps race or species of gods, whilst in the bible in its original hebrew, 'Elohim' whilst gramatically plural is often used for the one known as 'Adonai', 'JWVH' (Jehovah), 'Lord of Lords', 'Lord of Hosts' etc in clearly the intended grammatically singular as relating to a single entity as WELL as separate instances relating more defintively to 'gods, plural, nonposessive, and the Sumerian 'El' etc.)
I'm just curious about it on that basis, so take no offense. Its just part autie insatiable archaeolinguistic curiosity and part that depending on the precise semantics and perhaps in conjunction, in certain cases with your newer avatar, the arm-stretched-out one, there are several hidden lexicological jokes and ironies I could derive from it that would have me laughing somewhat (not at your expense, just, that there would be (perhaps?) accidental humor in them, in various ways)
Pretty much all of them being ones only an autie, with an autie's tendency to cross-thread skeins of thought and weave most peculiar a tapestry as a result, would get/do. And pretty much DEFINITELY only a spazz could laugh at. Except perhaps a linguistics expert and archaeologist specializing in the ancient near middle east could possibly get, if they were not a spazz.
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Would make total sense that last one, given people are able to change their names here, like your going from 'elle' to 'el'
(BTW if you don't mind the insatiable autie curiosity (this particular one has been nibbling at my curiosity-cortex for some time now)..why the spelling change. Is it to rhyme with 'hell' or does 'El' have a connection with the old either personal pronoun for the particular semitic monotheistic religious deity, or earlier semitic language derivations meaning the same, but not necessarily personal (vis a vis 'El', Lord of Hosts, titled Adonai 'Lord', Elohim (in hebrew, a plural form all the same, but nevertheless often taken as a personal pronoun or title for the semitic, israeli monotheistic deity of the old testament; although gramatically valid that 'Elohim' in particular, be taken not as the name of A or The god, but a group, or perhaps race or species of gods, whilst in the bible in its original hebrew, 'Elohim' whilst gramatically plural is often used for the one known as 'Adonai', 'JWVH' (Jehovah), 'Lord of Lords', 'Lord of Hosts' etc in clearly the intended grammatically singular as relating to a single entity as WELL as separate instances relating more defintively to 'gods, plural, nonposessive, and the Sumerian 'El' etc.)
I'm just curious about it on that basis, so take no offense. Its just part autie insatiable archaeolinguistic curiosity and part that depending on the precise semantics and perhaps in conjunction, in certain cases with your newer avatar, the arm-stretched-out one, there are several hidden lexicological jokes and ironies I could derive from it that would have me laughing somewhat (not at your expense, just, that there would be (perhaps?) accidental humor in them, in various ways)
Pretty much all of them being ones only an autie, with an autie's tendency to cross-thread skeins of thought and weave most peculiar a tapestry as a result, would get/do. And pretty much DEFINITELY only a spazz could laugh at. Except perhaps a linguistics expert and archaeologist specializing in the ancient near middle east could possibly get, if they were not a spazz.
Name and avatar are a reference to Stranger Things. Character's name is Eleven, el for short.
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Rings a bell....stephen king? dean koontz?
The pun I saw was that the avatar looks as if it is performing a Heil Hitler salute, whilst 'El' is the proper noun for a deity or for deities, plural, in several semitic languages. It was somewhat ironic. Although there were a couple in there somewhere. Some better than others. But there was definitely some irony, if it were the god/s of middle eastern area corresponding to the babylonian/Sumerian and especially judaic regions 'El', a name as semitic as names GET, performing just about the most antisemitic gesture that ever was. I got a mental image of one of those long, kinda braided-bearded babylonian sphinx-like guardian-figures by the side of the sumerian 'El' (of Enkidu/Gilgamesh fame), a bunch of the most semitic semites ever to walk semite-dom giving the biggest antisemitic salute there ever was.
Along with a slight uncannyness, not that I see any reason you would, since you aren't my biggest fan, but there was more irony in, minus the sieg-heil salute, the fact that that picture actually looks enough like me to make me do a momentary double take and check. Because if that photo had a gas mask and goggles on, it could be me taking a selfie-pic in a mirror, with arm stretched to hold the camera. And that would be ironic as hell, given its you, my number one fan on I2 with the avatar. Just found the thought kinda funny, not that I actually thought it likely you'd pick me as your avatar. Not unless there was a feud going and a joke at my expense somehow (btw, no accusation here, none whatsoever intended) would I expect that, it was just kinda funny seeing the resemblence. Its uncanny. Right down to the narrow 'tache and the pointed spock-ears. (no joke there, I've got em. One more so than the other. Kind of apt, considering Spock was a half-blood vulcan, the other half human. And I am..well...lets just say there are rather a lot of resemblences between myself and a certain half-vulcan science officer from star trek TOS. The pointier of the two is pointy enough that the only kind of headphones I am able to use are the type with the headband, I can't use the kind with little buds that you are meant to insert into the ear, they fall out within seconds. One ear takes a little longer than the other, but they come straight out of both quick as a bat out of hell :autism:)
Don't mind me there Elle/El, my autie mind was doing its autie wandering thing a while ago late one night and quite a few of those weird ass spazzy tangents flew up all at once.
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You can't applaud the same post 2x in less than half an hour though. Apparently.
Correct. It's a setting in SMF.
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Back to the OT- saw this yesterday and it struck me as a good example of culture and education making a difference in someone's attitude towards their own sexual behaviors.
(Before anyone gets all het up saying I'm screaming rape where there is none- I don't think the article I'm linking describes assault, but I do think it describes shitty behavior. I also don't think the babe.net Aziz Ansari story describes assault, and I'm actually a little more ambiguous on whether it even does describe shitty behavior on his part or not, but that's a qhole side-quagmire.)
I thought I was one of the good guys. Then I read the Aziz Ansari story.
She told me to stop. I ignored her. It took me years to realize how wrong I was.
By Anonymous Jan 24, 2018, 9:30am EST
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First Person
Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays.
Last week, I read the Babe.net article describing an encounter between comedian Aziz Ansari and a woman identified only as “Grace.” I read about how Ansari allegedly pushed past several verbal and nonverbal cues suggesting that Grace was not comfortable with their sexual encounter. I had a sickening moment of truth: I’ve done that.
RELATED
The controversy around Babe.net’s Aziz Ansari story, explained
It was just over four years ago. I was 22, newly single, and in college. I had just broken up with my long-distance girlfriend of five years and had spent the past few years hearing all about my friends’ and roommates’ hookups. I was excited to be single and date around. I kept a mental list of several women around school whom I wanted to sleep with.
I had an acquaintance, “Julie,” who was on that list. I’m not using her real name here, and I’m writing this piece anonymously, to protect both of our privacy. We had been to parties together, laughed together, and on a couple of occasions, I had walked her home. We liked each other enough to flirt, which eventually turned into the occasional texting conversation or phone call. I got the sense she was attracted to me.
After a couple of weeks of texting, Julie invited me on a trip to her home a few hours away from campus. I felt a little weird about going, as we didn’t know each other very well. But I said yes — to me, the invite felt like a pretty big sign that she wanted to hook up, and I was eager to have sex.
We arranged our travel plans. She would drive her car, and I would sleep over at her place the night before we left because we had to wake up early.
That night, Julie and I hooked up — and I ignored several of her verbal and nonverbal cues telling me to stop. Years later, I have come to believe that I came alarmingly close to raping her. I’m still disturbed by how normal it felt at the time.
The verbal and nonverbal cues I ignored
I arrived at Julie’s house at around 11 pm. We walked upstairs to her bedroom, which was small and cozy, lit by a star-shaped lamp.
I looked around. Her mattress was basically the only thing to sit or sleep on. It was clear — we would be sharing the bed. My face flushed, and my heart beat faster. I took this as a sign that a hookup would happen.
I lay in bed with Julie, her head resting comfortably on my chest, and we talked about this and that. We were dozing off a bit when we both turned on our sides to face each other. I could see her eyes were closed, but I sensed she was still awake. I touched my forehead to hers. She brought her mouth to mine, and we kissed.
As we were making out, we couldn’t find our rhythm. It felt like either her mouth was too small for mine or my mouth was too big. It seemed like she didn’t want to open hers all the way. I kept finding her teeth with my tongue, or going in for a mouth-half-open kiss, only to land on her pursed-shut lips. In the moment, I blamed first-hookup awkwardness.
I moved my hands under her shirt, pulled her close, grabbed her ass, and hoisted her above me so she could straddle my waist. It seemed sexy. She was still kissing me. I took off her shirt and bra.
At some point, I went down on her. I don’t remember any verbal cues to stop, but what I do remember is a significant nonverbal cue: She wasn’t making any sound. No moans, no breaths, no words. She seemed stiff. But I kept going because, well, I thought that oral sex was something people typically enjoyed. I worried I wasn’t doing it right, so I tried different spots and techniques, but nothing changed.
After some time, which I now realize was far too long, I stopped and asked if she was okay. She hesitated before speaking, and sat up.
“I don’t think we should have sex. We’re friends, and I think having sex will make things complicated.”
I responded almost immediately. “I don’t think it will make things complicated. I’m totally fine with figuring that out later.” I kind of laughed, I think, because I thought I was being charming. My feelings at the time were: We’re in the middle of having sex. It’s already complicated. Stopping now doesn’t make it less complicated. I was also horny, and Julie was hot, so I disregarded her feelings; I lurched toward her and starting kissing her neck.
“Are you sure you want to stop?” I whispered in her ear as I moved my hand toward her crotch.
“I just don’t think we should, because we’re friends.”
She never physically stopped me from touching her. At the time, I took that as a sign that she actually wanted me to continue. Her verbal objections, I convinced myself, were her poetic way of telling me she liked me enough to want to be in a relationship with me.
She was telling me to stop. And I didn’t. At least not at first. Instead, I continued to touch her clitoris, kiss her neck, and take off my underwear. She continued to say nothing and do nothing, and she was still stiff. I rubbed my penis across the outside of her vagina. She was wet. I convinced myself that this was further evidence that she wanted it.
I positioned myself for penetration but paused right before pushing inside her. At that point, things kind of snapped together for me. She didn’t want this — maybe she hadn’t pushed my hand away, but she had verbalized not feeling comfortable doing it. So I stopped.
It took me years to realize that even though I stopped, I’d still violated her.
I don’t remember what I said then. I don’t remember what she said either. But I remember that we talked in bed for a while. It felt normal. The next morning, we drove to her house. I met her mom and her old friends. We saw her old neighborhood. It was polite and pleasant but much less flirtatious. We didn’t have sex. I kissed her on the cheek when I said goodbye. After that, nothing really happened between Julie and me. I saw her around school, but that was it. I still follow her on Instagram.
I remember talking with my roommate after I got home. She wanted to know how my weekend went — I told her that Julie and I didn’t have sex because she wanted us to stay friends. I remember saying, “I hate when people aren’t clear about what they want. She seemed like she wanted to fuck me, so I kept going, but all she kept saying was that it would be weird. If she didn’t want to fuck me, she should have just said so.”
I realize now that this was my problem, not Julie’s.
Toxic masculinity affects all men
I considered myself a feminist back then. I still do — I fight for gender equality, and I actively try to be a better man every day. But it still took me years to realize that what I did to Julie was wrong. It was coercive. She told me she “didn’t think we should have sex,” and I kept trying anyway.
I thought I was getting signals from Julie that she wanted to have sex before the encounter started — the flirting, inviting me to her home. Maybe she did want to have sex. But at some point, she changed her mind or, at the very least, wasn’t sure how she was feeling. It wasn’t enthusiastic consent throughout, and at two different points, she objected. I ignored that.
In the years following the incident with Julie, I began to realize, often while reading articles online about enthusiastic consent, that what had happened between us wasn’t fully consensual. But it wasn’t until I read the Aziz Ansari story and the media conversation surrounding it that I realized the extent of what I had done.
I’m still not sure what to call what I did — assault? Coercion? A violation? What I do believe is this: If I hadn’t stopped when I stopped, I would have committed rape. But in that moment, it didn’t feel that way — it felt normal. I had convinced myself that she still wanted me despite her objections.
I don’t think I’m the only man who has done something like this. I think rape culture is so pervasive that men sometimes don’t realize when we’re actively committing assault. When Grace confronted Ansari via text message after their night together, he responded: “Clearly, I misread things in the moment.”
With Julie, I was aware of her verbal and nonverbal cues. But I had been socially conditioned to believe that women would want to have sex with me if I could convince them. I remember watching teen movies like Superbad and American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile, where men were portrayed as entitled to sex with women simply because these men were virgins and it was their “rite of passage.” My first orgasm was while watching internet porn, where consent to have sex is implicit. My middle school health class taught me about anatomy and drugs, but never consent.
As I aged, I ignored discussions of consent because I believed all sorts of myths about rape: that it’s only something that happens violently between strangers, when the woman is completely drunk, or between a powerful older man and a much younger woman. I never got the message that rape and assault was happening to women all around me and being perpetrated by men just like me.
Toxic masculinity praises sexually active men. Sex is conquest, competition, and a measure of self-worth. There is rarely a punishment for pressuring a woman to have sex with us — there is only, we are taught, the reward of sexual pleasure if we succeed.
But what we need to do is admit our faults. There are a million ways to say no, and we need to stop ignoring them. We need to make “enthusiastic consent” our mantra and keep it in mind whenever we might have sex.
I’m engaged now and have been with the same partner for four years. In the years following the incident with Julie, I’ve changed my behavior in bed. I try to let go of penetrative sex as a goal. I spent my younger years learning about foreplay and intimacy as a “means to an end.” Now intimacy, in all forms, is the end. The best way to get there is to listen to my partner’s words, actions, and body throughout sexual encounters — even if that means stopping sex in its tracks. That is its own form of intimacy.
I haven’t talked to Julie in years. I’ve thought about reaching out to apologize to her, but I’ve decided against it because it could upset her. Instead, I’m committed to continuing to change how I approach sex, and always making sure there is “fuck yes” affirmative consent.
I also want to talk to other men about this issue — it’s a conversation I’ve had with male friends, though not regularly. I remember one instance when two male friends and I were talking about sex, and we all admitted to engaging in some type of coercive behavior. None of us were proud of it. These are the kinds of discussions that need to keep happening.
Men, especially the most liberal, caring, and self-aware among us: look harder at yourselves. Rape culture ends when we stop raping.
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Geeze, I don't know how 'shitty' that is even. From his PoV, it isn't really until
“Are you sure you want to stop?” I whispered in her ear as I moved my hand toward her crotch.[/size]“I just don’t think we should, because we’re friends.”
That it starts to get really weird. Yes, he's ignoring her reticence prior to this, but having been on
the receiving end of such situations, I certainly haven't felt 'violated' when I express things so
weakly. It strikes me that this is an invitation to being convinced. Now, I am pretty sure that
I'd stop at this point - hell, I wouldn't have even initiated as much as he has up to it - but,
I'm not one into 'selling' the idea of sex when there is even a smidgen of doubt; what I do
have is a pretty good idea of the reluctance 'game' - it's nice to be convinced.
I just don't agree with him that she shouldn't be expressing things more clearly. Maybe she had
her own little game going though, enjoying him going down on her, and would have been more
forceful if he had taken things just a tad further. That's a position I've been in - and I consider
that rather shitty, on my part.
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Calandale, that is an interesting take on it.
I read it quite differently.
I got the impression that she valued their friendship and trusted him, but didn't want to fuck him.
She didn't feel disgusted or violated by his actions, it just wasn't something that she wanted to do with him. She didn't want to outright reject him and make him feel bad, so she gave him gentler messages that she hoped he would pick up on. And which he should have picked up on, but didn't.
I'd be interested in knowing how it affected his friendship with the girl. Did she want to hang out alone with him after that?
The stuff about toxic masculinity I do agree with. In some circles your value as a man really is judged according to your sexual conquests.
-
Geeze, I don't know how 'shitty' that is even. From his PoV, it isn't really until
“Are you sure you want to stop?” I whispered in her ear as I moved my hand toward her crotch.[/size]“I just don’t think we should, because we’re friends.”
That it starts to get really weird. Yes, he's ignoring her reticence prior to this, but having been on
the receiving end of such situations, I certainly haven't felt 'violated' when I express things so
weakly. It strikes me that this is an invitation to being convinced. Now, I am pretty sure that
I'd stop at this point - hell, I wouldn't have even initiated as much as he has up to it - but,
I'm not one into 'selling' the idea of sex when there is even a smidgen of doubt; what I do
have is a pretty good idea of the reluctance 'game' - it's nice to be convinced.
I just don't agree with him that she shouldn't be expressing things more clearly. Maybe she had
her own little game going though, enjoying him going down on her, and would have been more
forceful if he had taken things just a tad further. That's a position I've been in - and I consider
that rather shitty, on my part.
Yeah, that's where it goes south for me, as well. Up until that point, sure, there's reasonable doubt that maybe she was just quiet. Past that point, it starts to sound like this was no longer something she was fully on-board with. (And if this was a head game she was playing, he had no way of knowing and no reason to assume it- it's not like they knew each other's bedroom personalities that well and they hadn't negotiated some kind of scene beforehand, so Occam's razor would be that if she went limp and quiet, that meant this was no longer going right for her.)
No way of knowing why she didn't speak up more firmly or what was going on in her head or how this affected her, without knowing. Could be it was nbd. Could be it was traumatic. Could be it was somewhere in the middle. And he doesn't know, because he didn't talk to her about what was going on. Not that he needed to go into some kind of crazy depth, but the extent of their conversation was her saying "we shouldn't," him saying "but I want to," her saying "we shouldn't" again and him going ahead anyway.
Even just asking "do you mean, we shouldn't, or do you mean, you don't want to?" would have helped clarify. Frankly, so would clarifying whether she was just specifically worried about intercourse or if everything was off the table (which, again, isn't rocket surgery- just "So, no SEX sex, or no nothing, then?" does it). Could be she did expect to have some kind of sexual activity but had a preferred limit and didn't know how to navigate that, didn't expect it to escalate so quickly, whatever.
Anyway, tl;dr what I think is shitty is that he ignored his sexual partner expressing verbal discomfort with what he was doing, and then also ignored her going limp and quiet while he kept doing stuff. :dunno:
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Calandale, that is an interesting take on it.
I read it quite differently.
I got the impression that she valued their friendship and trusted him, but didn't want to fuck him.
She didn't feel disgusted or violated by his actions, it just wasn't something that she wanted to do with him. She didn't want to outright reject him and make him feel bad, so she gave him gentler messages that she hoped he would pick up on. And which he should have picked up on, but didn't.
That's what it looks like on face value, and I wouldn't dispute that is likely how both walked away feeling, to some extent.
I just wonder, because I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in wanting to be convinced, and coming up with reasons to stop.
The stuff about toxic masculinity I do agree with. In some circles your value as a man really is judged according to your sexual conquests.
So I've heard. And maybe seen evidence at some level - but about as believable as other tall tales about fighting and the like.
Certainly not something I've felt really applied with most guys I've known. Then again, I suspect I shun folks who fit that mold.
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... and then also ignored her going limp and quiet while he kept doing stuff. :dunno:
Yeah. I think that should be a pretty good clue. I might go to that extent with someone I already
had a relationship with (and yeah, because I get off on it more than because I'm actually pissed),
but you've gotta send mixed signals if you want them to continue and they don't know you're just
a spoiled tease. :D
-
... and then also ignored her going limp and quiet while he kept doing stuff. :dunno:
Yeah. I think that should be a pretty good clue. I might go to that extent with someone I already
had a relationship with (and yeah, because I get off on it more than because I'm actually pissed),
but you've gotta send mixed signals if you want them to continue and they don't know you're just
a spoiled tease. :D
Or don't send mixed signals?
-
Back to the OT- saw this yesterday and it struck me as a good example of culture and education making a difference in someone's attitude towards their own sexual behaviors.
(Before anyone gets all het up saying I'm screaming rape where there is none- I don't think the article I'm linking describes assault, but I do think it describes shitty behavior. I also don't think the babe.net Aziz Ansari story describes assault, and I'm actually a little more ambiguous on whether it even does describe shitty behavior on his part or not, but that's a qhole side-quagmire.)
I thought I was one of the good guys. Then I read the Aziz Ansari story.
She told me to stop. I ignored her. It took me years to realize how wrong I was.
By Anonymous Jan 24, 2018, 9:30am EST
SHARE
MORE
Shutterstock
First Person
Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays.
Last week, I read the Babe.net article describing an encounter between comedian Aziz Ansari and a woman identified only as “Grace.” I read about how Ansari allegedly pushed past several verbal and nonverbal cues suggesting that Grace was not comfortable with their sexual encounter. I had a sickening moment of truth: I’ve done that.
RELATED
The controversy around Babe.net’s Aziz Ansari story, explained
It was just over four years ago. I was 22, newly single, and in college. I had just broken up with my long-distance girlfriend of five years and had spent the past few years hearing all about my friends’ and roommates’ hookups. I was excited to be single and date around. I kept a mental list of several women around school whom I wanted to sleep with.
I had an acquaintance, “Julie,” who was on that list. I’m not using her real name here, and I’m writing this piece anonymously, to protect both of our privacy. We had been to parties together, laughed together, and on a couple of occasions, I had walked her home. We liked each other enough to flirt, which eventually turned into the occasional texting conversation or phone call. I got the sense she was attracted to me.
After a couple of weeks of texting, Julie invited me on a trip to her home a few hours away from campus. I felt a little weird about going, as we didn’t know each other very well. But I said yes — to me, the invite felt like a pretty big sign that she wanted to hook up, and I was eager to have sex.
We arranged our travel plans. She would drive her car, and I would sleep over at her place the night before we left because we had to wake up early.
That night, Julie and I hooked up — and I ignored several of her verbal and nonverbal cues telling me to stop. Years later, I have come to believe that I came alarmingly close to raping her. I’m still disturbed by how normal it felt at the time.
The verbal and nonverbal cues I ignored
I arrived at Julie’s house at around 11 pm. We walked upstairs to her bedroom, which was small and cozy, lit by a star-shaped lamp.
I looked around. Her mattress was basically the only thing to sit or sleep on. It was clear — we would be sharing the bed. My face flushed, and my heart beat faster. I took this as a sign that a hookup would happen.
I lay in bed with Julie, her head resting comfortably on my chest, and we talked about this and that. We were dozing off a bit when we both turned on our sides to face each other. I could see her eyes were closed, but I sensed she was still awake. I touched my forehead to hers. She brought her mouth to mine, and we kissed.
As we were making out, we couldn’t find our rhythm. It felt like either her mouth was too small for mine or my mouth was too big. It seemed like she didn’t want to open hers all the way. I kept finding her teeth with my tongue, or going in for a mouth-half-open kiss, only to land on her pursed-shut lips. In the moment, I blamed first-hookup awkwardness.
I moved my hands under her shirt, pulled her close, grabbed her ass, and hoisted her above me so she could straddle my waist. It seemed sexy. She was still kissing me. I took off her shirt and bra.
At some point, I went down on her. I don’t remember any verbal cues to stop, but what I do remember is a significant nonverbal cue: She wasn’t making any sound. No moans, no breaths, no words. She seemed stiff. But I kept going because, well, I thought that oral sex was something people typically enjoyed. I worried I wasn’t doing it right, so I tried different spots and techniques, but nothing changed.
After some time, which I now realize was far too long, I stopped and asked if she was okay. She hesitated before speaking, and sat up.
“I don’t think we should have sex. We’re friends, and I think having sex will make things complicated.”
I responded almost immediately. “I don’t think it will make things complicated. I’m totally fine with figuring that out later.” I kind of laughed, I think, because I thought I was being charming. My feelings at the time were: We’re in the middle of having sex. It’s already complicated. Stopping now doesn’t make it less complicated. I was also horny, and Julie was hot, so I disregarded her feelings; I lurched toward her and starting kissing her neck.
“Are you sure you want to stop?” I whispered in her ear as I moved my hand toward her crotch.
“I just don’t think we should, because we’re friends.”
She never physically stopped me from touching her. At the time, I took that as a sign that she actually wanted me to continue. Her verbal objections, I convinced myself, were her poetic way of telling me she liked me enough to want to be in a relationship with me.
She was telling me to stop. And I didn’t. At least not at first. Instead, I continued to touch her clitoris, kiss her neck, and take off my underwear. She continued to say nothing and do nothing, and she was still stiff. I rubbed my penis across the outside of her vagina. She was wet. I convinced myself that this was further evidence that she wanted it.
I positioned myself for penetration but paused right before pushing inside her. At that point, things kind of snapped together for me. She didn’t want this — maybe she hadn’t pushed my hand away, but she had verbalized not feeling comfortable doing it. So I stopped.
It took me years to realize that even though I stopped, I’d still violated her.
I don’t remember what I said then. I don’t remember what she said either. But I remember that we talked in bed for a while. It felt normal. The next morning, we drove to her house. I met her mom and her old friends. We saw her old neighborhood. It was polite and pleasant but much less flirtatious. We didn’t have sex. I kissed her on the cheek when I said goodbye. After that, nothing really happened between Julie and me. I saw her around school, but that was it. I still follow her on Instagram.
I remember talking with my roommate after I got home. She wanted to know how my weekend went — I told her that Julie and I didn’t have sex because she wanted us to stay friends. I remember saying, “I hate when people aren’t clear about what they want. She seemed like she wanted to fuck me, so I kept going, but all she kept saying was that it would be weird. If she didn’t want to fuck me, she should have just said so.”
I realize now that this was my problem, not Julie’s.
Toxic masculinity affects all men
I considered myself a feminist back then. I still do — I fight for gender equality, and I actively try to be a better man every day. But it still took me years to realize that what I did to Julie was wrong. It was coercive. She told me she “didn’t think we should have sex,” and I kept trying anyway.
I thought I was getting signals from Julie that she wanted to have sex before the encounter started — the flirting, inviting me to her home. Maybe she did want to have sex. But at some point, she changed her mind or, at the very least, wasn’t sure how she was feeling. It wasn’t enthusiastic consent throughout, and at two different points, she objected. I ignored that.
In the years following the incident with Julie, I began to realize, often while reading articles online about enthusiastic consent, that what had happened between us wasn’t fully consensual. But it wasn’t until I read the Aziz Ansari story and the media conversation surrounding it that I realized the extent of what I had done.
I’m still not sure what to call what I did — assault? Coercion? A violation? What I do believe is this: If I hadn’t stopped when I stopped, I would have committed rape. But in that moment, it didn’t feel that way — it felt normal. I had convinced myself that she still wanted me despite her objections.
I don’t think I’m the only man who has done something like this. I think rape culture is so pervasive that men sometimes don’t realize when we’re actively committing assault. When Grace confronted Ansari via text message after their night together, he responded: “Clearly, I misread things in the moment.”
With Julie, I was aware of her verbal and nonverbal cues. But I had been socially conditioned to believe that women would want to have sex with me if I could convince them. I remember watching teen movies like Superbad and American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile, where men were portrayed as entitled to sex with women simply because these men were virgins and it was their “rite of passage.” My first orgasm was while watching internet porn, where consent to have sex is implicit. My middle school health class taught me about anatomy and drugs, but never consent.
As I aged, I ignored discussions of consent because I believed all sorts of myths about rape: that it’s only something that happens violently between strangers, when the woman is completely drunk, or between a powerful older man and a much younger woman. I never got the message that rape and assault was happening to women all around me and being perpetrated by men just like me.
Toxic masculinity praises sexually active men. Sex is conquest, competition, and a measure of self-worth. There is rarely a punishment for pressuring a woman to have sex with us — there is only, we are taught, the reward of sexual pleasure if we succeed.
But what we need to do is admit our faults. There are a million ways to say no, and we need to stop ignoring them. We need to make “enthusiastic consent” our mantra and keep it in mind whenever we might have sex.
I’m engaged now and have been with the same partner for four years. In the years following the incident with Julie, I’ve changed my behavior in bed. I try to let go of penetrative sex as a goal. I spent my younger years learning about foreplay and intimacy as a “means to an end.” Now intimacy, in all forms, is the end. The best way to get there is to listen to my partner’s words, actions, and body throughout sexual encounters — even if that means stopping sex in its tracks. That is its own form of intimacy.
I haven’t talked to Julie in years. I’ve thought about reaching out to apologize to her, but I’ve decided against it because it could upset her. Instead, I’m committed to continuing to change how I approach sex, and always making sure there is “fuck yes” affirmative consent.
I also want to talk to other men about this issue — it’s a conversation I’ve had with male friends, though not regularly. I remember one instance when two male friends and I were talking about sex, and we all admitted to engaging in some type of coercive behavior. None of us were proud of it. These are the kinds of discussions that need to keep happening.
Men, especially the most liberal, caring, and self-aware among us: look harder at yourselves. Rape culture ends when we stop raping.
I doubt this is what happened and I resent him deigning himself with some moral "voice of all men" position. H can go fuck himself.
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... and then also ignored her going limp and quiet while he kept doing stuff. :dunno:
Yeah. I think that should be a pretty good clue. I might go to that extent with someone I already
had a relationship with (and yeah, because I get off on it more than because I'm actually pissed),
but you've gotta send mixed signals if you want them to continue and they don't know you're just
a spoiled tease. :D
Or don't send mixed signals?
That's fine, if I never want to get laid. Which might well be the case now.
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... and then also ignored her going limp and quiet while he kept doing stuff. :dunno:
Yeah. I think that should be a pretty good clue. I might go to that extent with someone I already
had a relationship with (and yeah, because I get off on it more than because I'm actually pissed),
but you've gotta send mixed signals if you want them to continue and they don't know you're just
a spoiled tease. :D
Or don't send mixed signals?
That's fine, if I never want to get laid. Which might well be the case now.
Clarity is a good thing to aim for in general, but I do think sending perfect, "unmixed" signals isn't realistic for everyone, which just is what it is- realistically, you can't go into a sexual encounter with a new partner and assume they're going to make all their wants and needs crystal-clear (nor can you assume they'll read very subtle cues correctly, to be fair- though again, I think in the article linked, the cues really weren't subtle). But as far as how to respond to what your partner is putting out, when in doubt, err on the side of not crossing someone else's boundaries.
Calandale, that is an interesting take on it.
I read it quite differently.
I got the impression that she valued their friendship and trusted him, but didn't want to fuck him.
She didn't feel disgusted or violated by his actions, it just wasn't something that she wanted to do with him. She didn't want to outright reject him and make him feel bad, so she gave him gentler messages that she hoped he would pick up on. And which he should have picked up on, but didn't.
That's what it looks like on face value, and I wouldn't dispute that is likely how both walked away feeling, to some extent.
I just wonder, because I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in wanting to be convinced, and coming up with reasons to stop.
That concept... kinda doesn't scale well. There's all kinds of shit you might personally prefer or secretly want, but you can't assume that's how other people are operating without some kind of explicit indication of that.
Also, he really didn't try to convince her, anyway- he just forged ahead.
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... and then also ignored her going limp and quiet while he kept doing stuff. :dunno:
Yeah. I think that should be a pretty good clue. I might go to that extent with someone I already
had a relationship with (and yeah, because I get off on it more than because I'm actually pissed),
but you've gotta send mixed signals if you want them to continue and they don't know you're just
a spoiled tease. :D
Or don't send mixed signals?
That's fine, if I never want to get laid. Which might well be the case now.
Clarity is a good thing to aim for in general, but I do think sending perfect, "unmixed" signals isn't realistic for everyone, which just is what it is- realistically, you can't go into a sexual encounter with a new partner and assume they're going to make all their wants and needs crystal-clear (nor can you assume they'll read very subtle cues correctly, to be fair- though again, I think in the article linked, the cues really weren't subtle). But as far as how to respond to what your partner is putting out, when in doubt, err on the side of not crossing someone else's boundaries.
Calandale, that is an interesting take on it.
I read it quite differently.
I got the impression that she valued their friendship and trusted him, but didn't want to fuck him.
She didn't feel disgusted or violated by his actions, it just wasn't something that she wanted to do with him. She didn't want to outright reject him and make him feel bad, so she gave him gentler messages that she hoped he would pick up on. And which he should have picked up on, but didn't.
That's what it looks like on face value, and I wouldn't dispute that is likely how both walked away feeling, to some extent.
I just wonder, because I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in wanting to be convinced, and coming up with reasons to stop.
That concept... kinda doesn't scale well. There's all kinds of shit you might personally prefer or secretly want, but you can't assume that's how other people are operating without some kind of explicit indication of that.
Also, he really didn't try to convince her, anyway- he just forged ahead.
I think he wanted to morally virtue signal the evil of men, the need to teach toxic masculinity and wanted to lay a little blame on him but only because he was a little stupid/uneducated/ignorant because it is really because he is a male and therefore toxic and society is too Patriarchial and we are all too uneducated. He is leading the charge.
I doubt it ever happened but it is a narrative riddled story and one that portrays him as a victim of a bad society whilst pushing the Progressive narrative. I call bullshit.
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But as far as how to respond to what your partner is putting out, when in doubt, err on the side of not crossing someone else's boundaries.
Yep. My reading of others is bad enough that I do that. I don't even pry so much as to initiate conversation nor ask questions
during one they initiate until I know them well.
pt... kinda doesn't scale well. There's all kinds of shit you might personally prefer or secretly want, but you can't assume that's how other people are operating without some kind of explicit indication of that.
On the other hand, I feel that those who have been sexually aggressive enough to make advances on me have
been able to get a pretty good clue of when they cross my boundaries. Mixed signals or no. It's a lot easier
to say no to something you don't want than it is to say yes to something that you feel is wrong.
Am I suggesting that someone follow that as guidance? No - because if you get someone who can't say no,
it's a bigger problem. But, my own intrinsic behavior is similar enough to certain conventional feminine patterns
(perhaps these are disappearing - relating back to the over-importance of sex); if those patterns were (are?) common enough,
it makes a lot of sense why behavior of more aggressive pursuit developed and was sustained.
Also, he really didn't try to convince her, anyway- he just forged ahead.
What do you expect 'convincing' is? "Gosh, let's step back from this moment of passion and rationally discuss
your feelings?" I'm sure that's likely to be a successful seduction strategy.
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Quite, (on that last bit), turning things into a discussion, complete with theoretical propositions written on a chalkboard, thats never going to get anyone anywhere, unless the woman is of the predatory variety.
Conventions certainly do change and IMO they have. Albeit before my time, it would have been unthinkable for a girl to storm over, kick the stuffing out of a guy who got in her way just wanting to speak to her, grab somebody and make her first introduction by grabbing a guy and making out with them, after stunning them somewhat (I mean, stunning not as in 'wow, she's GREAT! but as in female uses fixed large object to apply force to male by throwing them at it and following up with a body-slam)...it would have been scandalous not too long ago for certain (hell even today it could be pretty scandalous if the girl wasn't ex-post-facto given a free pass by the guy, because the guy had just fallen for her. The one I have in mind, hell I could have pressed charges if I'd been of the inclination to do it, I just wasn't, because she really did kick arse on an industrial scale and I think looking back I was hooked from the moment she took the first step towards me, albeit not in the least expecting the way things were about to go down :P)
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But as far as how to respond to what your partner is putting out, when in doubt, err on the side of not crossing someone else's boundaries.
Yep. My reading of others is bad enough that I do that. I don't even pry so much as to initiate conversation nor ask questions
during one they initiate until I know them well.
pt... kinda doesn't scale well. There's all kinds of shit you might personally prefer or secretly want, but you can't assume that's how other people are operating without some kind of explicit indication of that.
On the other hand, I feel that those who have been sexually aggressive enough to make advances on me have
been able to get a pretty good clue of when they cross my boundaries. Mixed signals or no. It's a lot easier
to say no to something you don't want than it is to say yes to something that you feel is wrong.
Am I suggesting that someone follow that as guidance? No - because if you get someone who can't say no,
it's a bigger problem. But, my own intrinsic behavior is similar enough to certain conventional feminine patterns
(perhaps these are disappearing - relating back to the over-importance of sex); if those patterns were (are?) common enough,
it makes a lot of sense why behavior of more aggressive pursuit developed and was sustained.
Also, he really didn't try to convince her, anyway- he just forged ahead.
What do you expect 'convincing' is? "Gosh, let's step back from this moment of passion and rationally discuss
your feelings?" I'm sure that's likely to be a successful seduction strategy.
:P It sounds like his logic was "I'mma keep doing this thing that hasn't been working, but I'm gonna do MORE of it." The way he's describing it, it doesn't sound like it was a "moment of passion" for her.
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But as far as how to respond to what your partner is putting out, when in doubt, err on the side of not crossing someone else's boundaries.
Yep. My reading of others is bad enough that I do that. I don't even pry so much as to initiate conversation nor ask questions
during one they initiate until I know them well.
pt... kinda doesn't scale well. There's all kinds of shit you might personally prefer or secretly want, but you can't assume that's how other people are operating without some kind of explicit indication of that.
On the other hand, I feel that those who have been sexually aggressive enough to make advances on me have
been able to get a pretty good clue of when they cross my boundaries. Mixed signals or no. It's a lot easier
to say no to something you don't want than it is to say yes to something that you feel is wrong.
Am I suggesting that someone follow that as guidance? No - because if you get someone who can't say no,
it's a bigger problem. But, my own intrinsic behavior is similar enough to certain conventional feminine patterns
(perhaps these are disappearing - relating back to the over-importance of sex); if those patterns were (are?) common enough,
it makes a lot of sense why behavior of more aggressive pursuit developed and was sustained.
Also, he really didn't try to convince her, anyway- he just forged ahead.
What do you expect 'convincing' is? "Gosh, let's step back from this moment of passion and rationally discuss
your feelings?" I'm sure that's likely to be a successful seduction strategy.
:P It sounds like his logic was "I'mma keep doing this thing that hasn't been working, but I'm gonna do MORE of it." The way he's describing it, it doesn't sound like it was a "moment of passion" for her.
There were no mixed signals in the story case. She expressed a weak negative, and wasn't responding,
so I agree. I was disagreeing with your statements when there actually ARE mixed signals. Erring on the
side of caution and trying to 'convince' by means other than pursuing the physical seduction seem unlikely
to succeed, from my own passive experience.
I guess the key is, whatever may have occurred significantly prior to the moment simply shouldn't count
as a part of the 'mixed signals' in the moment. It's the immediate that matters, not some impression taken
out of the context of the moment of passion itself.
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There were no mixed signals in the story case. She expressed a weak negative, and wasn't responding,
so I agree. I was disagreeing with your statements when there actually ARE mixed signals. Erring on the
side of caution and trying to 'convince' by means other than pursuing the physical seduction seem unlikely
to succeed, from my own passive experience.
I guess the key is, whatever may have occurred significantly prior to the moment simply shouldn't count
as a part of the 'mixed signals' in the moment. It's the immediate that matters, not some impression taken
out of the context of the moment of passion itself.
Oh, in the hypothetical abstract where it actually is hot and heavy and you're not just groping on someone who just said no and isn't responding happily, 'convince' has a broader range of meaning. In this scenario, it's just digging the fuck-uppedness deeper. Based on the article's description, it frankly seemed more likely to be salvageable by stopping really quickly into realizing the girl wasn't participating and at that point checking in, than by doing what the author did.
If the woman had been interested in having at least some kind of stuff happen in this encounter but was having some kind of upset or fear or freeze response for whatever reason (and those are big ifs, but the other options are basically that she was just not going to be into it no matter what), stopping and checking in about what she was experiencing, what she needed or wanted to have happen at this point might have also stopped that response.
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Found yet another article to throw into this thread:
Can We Shame Perpetrators of Sexual Misconduct Into Becoming Better People?
Probably. But we need to figure out how to correctly deploy this powerful emotional tool.
By LINDA DOYLE
FEB 02, 20185:45 AM
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Man cowering in shame, man gazing upwards beginning to understand how to not be a terrible violent person.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Thinkstock.
Shame is a powerful emotion. We often need it to motivate fundamental change. Researchers have found that compared with guilt and regret, shame was the only emotion that led people to be motivated to change something about themselves in the long run.
To be effective, however, shame must be deployed correctly. As new accusations of sexual misconduct continue to surface and public outrage indicates that this behavior will no longer be tolerated, it’s worth considering whether and how we could best make use of this psychological tool. Shaming moral transgression and norm violations is one important aspect of how we shape our society. But we need to shame perpetrators effectively—if we manage to, we have a greater chance of getting them to stop reoffending.
Shame is felt when some aspect of one’s character, or indeed one’s whole self, is fundamentally flawed, regarding moral transgressions, lacking competence, or inappropriate social behavior. The focus is on being a bad person, which differs from guilt, where the focus is on bad behavior. Guilt motivates you to make up for the specific guilt-inducing behavior, and once you’ve done that, it disappears. But shame could be the most useful emotion when long-lasting change is needed because the focus is on oneself, rather than the event, which forces the individual to acknowledge that unless he or she commits to changing, the behavior could be repeated.
The sentiments expressed by some of those facing sexual misconduct allegations have spanned the spectrum of admitting culpability. For example, Mark Halperin avoided shame when he said “my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain.” Focusing on his behavior could imply that it was merely something he did, rather than his character that led to the behavior.
Shame could be the most useful emotion when long-lasting change is needed, because the focus is on oneself
Others, such as Matt Lauer have expressed regret (although, in Lauer’s case, this later changed to “ashamed and embarrassed”). Regret suggests you wish you chose a different path, but doesn’t commit you to preventing transgressions in the future.
In contrast, consider the language James Franco used on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert when questioned about the allegations against him: “In my life, I pride myself on taking responsibility for things that I’ve done … I do it whenever I know there is something wrong or needs to be changed, I make it a point to do it.” This hits home the key issue, which is that it is the perpetrator who needs to fundamentally change.
Shaming others works because people care about what others think of them, about their reputation and belonging to groups that are important to them. Shame is an emotion that lets us know we are in danger of being excluded from the group. We shame others when they have violated societal norms, which reflect the values and acceptable behavior in groups and societies.
This is what we have seen in Hollywood. First, Harvey Weinstein was fired from the company he co-founded, and Matt Lauer from NBC. Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., and Brett Ratner all had projects cancelled. John Conyers and Al Franken both resigned from their political positions, and Roy Moore was not elected to the Senate. Companies and other affiliates want to be seen as punishing perpetrators, as stripping them of their positions of power to signal that this behavior will not be tolerated, and to distance themselves from them.
A key aspect of shame motivating change, however, is that it only works if we think we can change the flawed aspect of our character, according to a recent meta-analysis. If the shameful act is repairable, then shame makes you commit to change—it lets you know you need to change and the negative feeling gives you the motivation to do so.
But if the ashamed person thinks they cannot repair the flawed part of themselves, they will hide and wait for it to blow over without any real attempt to reform. One study on competency failures found that when improving themselves was perceived to be very difficult, shame led to a greater desire to protect their reputation, rather than motivation to improve. If you try to reform and fail, it is even more painful than covering it up, because you risk losing face in front of others or damaging your self-esteem even more. This suggests that when reform appears too difficult or even impossible, shame leads to withdrawing and saving face rather than the motivation to reform (it’s important to note that this research is on competency failures, not moral transgressions).
Showing remorse and shame is just the first step; it provides the motivation to change, but it does not signal change itself.
Still, the emphasis on reform is reflected in a point made by Bryan Cranston when asked whether there is a way back for sexual perpetrators. He argues that if they show us that they are truly sorry, do not make excuses, and admit they have “a deeply rooted psychological and emotional problem,” then there is the possibility for forgiveness. He adds that “we shouldn’t close it off and say: ‘To hell with him, rot and go away from us for the rest of your life’… Let’s leave it open for the few that can make it through that gauntlet of trouble … maybe it’s possible.” It is possible for sex offenders to repent; some have.
That shame can be appropriately deployed is borne out in lower recidivism rates for sex offenders treated with respect, and higher rates for those who experienced stigma and low self-esteem. This suggests that if the emphasis is on acknowledgement and rehabilitation rather than stigmatizing and shunning, reoffending may be lower. On the other hand, life-destroying shaming may act as an effective deterrent from attempts to change.
Rehabilitation programs, by definition, instill participants with the belief that they can reform. They can be an important part of how society deals with deviance, though they are not a panacea, and this is not to say we must forgive everyone as soon as they finish the program. It may not work for everyone, but it will for some. Neither am I suggesting that we replace prison sentences with rehabilitation—simply that rehabilitation should be a key aspect of dealing with anyone who has transgressed. It’s also worth remembering that showing remorse and shame is just the first step; it provides the motivation to change, but it does not signal change itself.
The take home message is this: Perpetrators who feel like they are permanently defective people may run and hide, possibly without trying to adjust their behavior. But if they feel like a part of themselves is defective but changeable, they may be more likely to own up to their failures and be motivated to reform. This suggests that as a society, in the media and in daily life, treating perpetrators like social pariahs may not be the best path toward a healthier society. Research suggests the most effective way to shame perpetrators is to express that this is not acceptable, that their time’s up. But that admonishment shouldn’t come with irrevocable condemnation—perpetrators should be encouraged to seek professional help and to stick with it for as long as necessary. Using shame in this way could lead to fewer cases of sexual misconduct in the future—a goal worth striving for.
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I don't buy it. When shame has been used (pedophillia for example) in sex-drive related matters,
it all too often becomes an enhancement to the need.
This might work fine for someone who truly just doesn't get that their behavior is inappropriate,
but for rapists? Even someone like Louis CK, I suspect there was full knowledge that his behavior was
wrong - and yet he still went ahead with it. Just as people who fuck in semi-public, with a vague thrill
of being caught know their behavior is not acceptable.
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One thing that I learned was that you did not have to really hurt a guy to win. If you absolutely dominate a guy in a fight, you will win. Outclassing them is one way. If you go toe to toe and evade, block and strike better, that will likely work and at some point the guy will essentially give up and cover up and stop trying. That is a hard way to go.
Me? I was only fully grown at about 21-25 and only 5'9". However, I was very strong for my height and compact and had a high pain threshold. For me the sparring was not as meaningful as getting under the reach of a guy who was likely to be a lot taller and bigger and take it to the ground and press and pound and ground. Be quick and mean and brutal.
People who were not used to being manhandled as easily and being winded and thrown around would very quickly give up and be almost paralysed in fear. Some did not even have the sense to cover up. If you at THAT point seeing this and them knowing you saw it, got up, they would generally not want to try it on again. You had won, whatever point needed to be made had been made.
The reason I bought this up is that I think in many cases rape could be the same perhaps. someone pressed into a position they do not want that they are unable to break free of and ecape from and paralysed in fear. Unfortunately the Progressives pick up this ball and run with it, but I think there has to be common sense. Bad sex, drunken sex, regretable sex and sex with someone you later realise is an arsehole does not equate to rape. Unconscious sex, forcible sex, sex where someone expresses no desire at all for sex probably is.
:agreed:
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I didn't want to look at this but, I gave the article a bit of a read, and was interested by the murderers who felt remorse as compared to the rapists that didn't... I mean the only one who felt remorse is a fucking paedophile who wants to marry his victim!
I think, like the article says it does have to do with accountability but it also has to do with the mindset or a (regular) killer and that of a rapist.
A lot of murders are the result of moments of rage. A partner pushes their spouse down the stairs, somebody shoots their boss to death over an office dispute. There are obviously killings that the murderer spends months or even years planning for but many are acts of rage, some of it split-second. It costs somebody their life and ruins dozens of others. People snap or they lash out causing a death. And they have to live with what they've done for the rest of their lives.
That is those who feel remorse. Many don't, arguing that the person deserved it or something. But with a base statistic based on the people this woman talked to, there is a far greater ratio of (regular) killers who express remorse over the life they took than a rapist and their crime.
Every rapist thinks they're going to get away with it, either by the belief that it won't get reported, a drugging of the victim or they'll even "silence" them in the case of a rape-homicide. It's about power and how they can express it with the belief that they won't face any consequences and nobody will really get hurt (at least in their mind, no body=no harm done). The mindset of a sick fuck like this is actually more similar to a TV killer than a real (regular) killer is or even a serial killer.
Like I said, a lot of real life murders are caused by split-second moments, but every rapist is truly evil. I don't care what made them that way, the next time one makes a move on me I'm probably going to kill them.
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IMO the killer who reacts on adrenaline and commits a crime of passion, loses control, is going to be far more likely to be remorseful than the bugger who just doesn't give a flying fuck about others, and as far as they are concerned, what others possess is theirs if they want to take it.
As for the nonce that wanted to marry their victim, that isn't fucking remose. Bollocks it is. Thats just a pervert being a pervert.
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IMO the killer who reacts on adrenaline and commits a crime of passion, loses control, is going to be far more likely to be remorseful than the bugger who just doesn't give a flying fuck about others, and as far as they are concerned, what others possess is theirs if they want to take it.
At least SOME rapes are crimes of passion. No idea on statistics, even among prosecuted ones.
Given that such are more likely to be within relationships, I'd suspect you see less convictions.
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I could see in some instances that being the case. But the likes of a drunken rape isn't what I'd call a crime of passion, more one of negligence.
The only crime of passion that I could see including rape, would be the occasions where two people agree to fucking but one changes their mind part way through and the other fails to react fast enough in cessation of sex to be satisfactory.
Whereas drunken rape is one of callousness IMO. Or if not callousness, incoherence and negligence at best. Which is not meant to be taken, BTW, as ascribing responsibility or its inverse to either party in such an encounter.
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Your imagination is too limited. Rape is an act of violence and domination.
It often is associated with domestic violence.
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Thats what I meant by callousness.
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I don't see the increase in 'callousness' between raping someone under such
circumstances and killing them.
Maybe I value life more than pussy?
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I was referring to crimes of passion in the legal sense, and not limiting it to rapist who also murders their victim.
And of course raping and murdering the victim is worse than rape in isolation. In the former case, a woman at least has a CHANCE at remaking their life, taking back what was stolen from them. A corpse cannot do so. Someone raped has something critically important to them stolen by force, someone raped and murdered has that perpetrated against them twofold.
And as for 'value life more than pussy', IMO its pretty cuntish to play down a rape victim who isn't killed also, as merely 'pussy'. Try valuing both. In the sense of valuing women sexually not on your own part, but on theirs. Not to say one cannot value both of course, and I wouldn't say that I didn't value said part in both senses myself, but I do indeed value a woman's womanhood for their sake and not mine, in addition to valuing it for my sake, for those who wish to give of it to me. With consent. Not that I'd have it any other way, I fucking hate rapists and paedos.
(although of course, who the fuck doesn't. And if they don't they should)
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Eh? You're being obtuse.
The 'crimes of passion' here are just a difference in the outcome.
Some will murder, some batter, others will rape, within the context of a violent domestic argument.
Do you see a rape done in such a rage as somehow different? How about a punch or a shove - do
those also not qualify to you?
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The typical mentality around rape, from the rapist point of view (and no, I am not claiming to be their spokesperson :P ) is that it is around dominating, exerting power over the victim. Quite different from the mentality that would lead to somebody getting riled up and swinging a punch in the heat of the moment.
And IMO another rather telling point would be that even a usually reasonable man or woman can, if enough effort be put into it, no matter how peaceable they usually are by temperament, be provoked sufficiently that they will turn around and twat you one.
The same cannot be said for a rapist. You can't really just persuade an average, decent human being to go out and commit rape. At least, not a violent rape. serious fuckups involving issues of consent can happen, and sadly, do, but you can't really provoke someone into going out and raping someone violently, any reasonable person, in such a situation, if there was to be violence, it would with IMO very little doubt, end up as the person that someone is trying to provoke turning on the provocateur and subjecting THEM to the violence, on the grounds of anyone trying to provoke someone into committing a violent rape is a fucking piece of shit and deserves a beating.
Just trying, to persuade someone else to rape a third party is more than enough grounds to knock the howling blue crap out of the person making the persuasive attempt. About the only way I could see that most people could be 'persuaded' to go out and commit a violent rape is the application of torture as a motivating stimulus to do so, because there is only so much anybody can take before they either crack, or die due to the torture itself. Or else take their own life, if they can.
There will always be exceptions to the argument, to any argument more or less. We aspies/auties/Rett's girls ought to know that. We often ARE the exception to various arguments, rules, categories etc. (not comparing being spesh with being a rapist, obviously. I'll leave that kind of two-bit garbage to the tabloid media/toilet paper*)
*in need of either, just pick the first that comes to hand. It'll be as interesting or as devoted to the spreading of truth and awareness as the other, irrespective of which one you picked. The only real practical difference is that only one of the two STARTS OUT being full of shit. The toilet paper has to be caused to be so by being used. Something its counterpart never will know about, because to be used, somebody or something, somewhere at some time has to have a use FOR it. Bog roll, yes, it sure beats leaves or moss, all ready packaged and guaranteed scorpion-free, but the type of media that flogs that sort of image of us is already piled high with faecal matter. And perhaps not from scorpions, but there is usually plenty of poison in there too.
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Go commit a rape' is not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about a violent confrontation within a relationship. Such violence is already
going to be about power and control - likely on both sides. It is very much in keeping
with that to express dominance.
Now, I don't know 'the typical mentality' (of rapists? - that's what you seem to be saying).
I do know that some statistics (no clue as to their applicability overall: http://www.tariolaw.com/shocking-marital-rape-statistics/ (http://www.tariolaw.com/shocking-marital-rape-statistics/)
https://healthresearchfunding.org/21-spousal-rape-statistics/ (https://healthresearchfunding.org/21-spousal-rape-statistics/)) seem to show that domestic rape
is fairly common. This is just speculation, but I doubt many domestic rapists simply decide
I'm going to "Go commit a rape," and their partner is the most handy subject. I really doubt many of them
are being "persuaded by someone else to rape" their partner.
So yes, it seem to me to be someone being provoked 'sufficiently' to 'twat you one', by rooting it in an available hole.
[fucking sizing bug makes posting so damned hard ]
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Go commit a rape' is not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about a violent confrontation within a relationship. Such violence is already
going to be about power and control - likely on both sides. It is very much in keeping
with that to express dominance.
Now, I don't know 'the typical mentality' (of rapists? - that's what you seem to be saying).
I do know that some statistics (no clue as to their applicability overall: http://www.tariolaw.com/shocking-marital-rape-statistics/ (http://www.tariolaw.com/shocking-marital-rape-statistics/)
https://healthresearchfunding.org/21-spousal-rape-statistics/ (https://healthresearchfunding.org/21-spousal-rape-statistics/)) seem to show that domestic rape
is fairly common. This is just speculation, but I doubt many domestic rapists simply decide
I'm going to "Go commit a rape," and their partner is the most handy subject. I really doubt many of them
are being "persuaded by someone else to rape" their partner.
So yes, it seem to me to be someone being provoked 'sufficiently' to 'twat you one', by rooting it in an available hole.
[fucking sizing bug makes posting so damned hard ]
I'm surprised the stats were that low tbh.
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I'm surprised the stats were that low tbh.
Considering that marital rape didn't even exist until quite recently, some women (and sometimes men) may not differentiate "rape" from "my spouse really wanted sex and I didn't, and my spouse won".
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I wasn't referring to domestic incidents or/and drunken/intoxicated ones. I mean, for a normal human being, to go out, calculating to commit violent rape, it just doesn't strike me as the sort of act that one party could persuade another, second, rational, decent human being to perform, and that the most likely result of the first party trying to do so, would be unless physically prevented from doing so, quite likely feeding the rape-persuader a knuckle sandwich with headbutt sauce, served between a pair of bony kneecaps in lieu of burger buns. For being the kind of complete twat who wants a violent rape to take place. That'd be my first reaction, to kick them all the way to mars then half the way back again. (and if practical leave them there with a large water supply and oxygen tank. Knowing that they'd slowly, slowly die for being such a bastard, knowing they had no hope whatsoever of any other outcome than either suffocating/starving to death or else suiciding by opening their suit to the vacuum and having their eyeballs explode and their lungs collapse. (hopefully, but only after a long damn time spent thinking about why they would support a woman being fucking raped)
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So, this tangent started with:
IMO the killer who reacts on adrenaline and commits a crime of passion, loses control, is going to be far more likely to be remorseful than the bugger who just doesn't give a flying fuck about others, and as far as they are concerned, what others possess is theirs if they want to take it.
At least SOME rapes are crimes of passion. No idea on statistics, even among prosecuted ones.
Given that such are more likely to be within relationships, I'd suspect you see less convictions.
Your imagination is too limited. Rape is an act of violence and domination.
It often is associated with domestic violence.
It's not called a conversation if we're not reading what the other is saying.
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I'm surprised the stats were that low tbh.
Considering that marital rape didn't even exist until quite recently, some women (and sometimes men) may not differentiate "rape" from "my spouse really wanted sex and I didn't, and my spouse won".
By modern standards, I technically raped my ex wife, the first time I did her in her sleep.
Probably every other LTR I had before that as well. In no case did anyone concerned think
anything wrong was happening. But, on those first times, there was no consent, beyond the
implied that we had fucked in the past and were sleeping together.
I think the scenario you represent contains more nuance though. Depending on whether the
pressure to get what is desired was reasonable (i.e. "I'll clean the garage if...").
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I think the scenario you represent contains more nuance though. Depending on whether the
pressure to get what is desired was reasonable (i.e. "I'll clean the garage if...").
Of course it is nuanced. "I'll clean the garage if...." is soliciting prostitution, not rape.
Is it rape if you consent, then fall asleep during the act? I fell asleep on the job once, my girlfriend at the time freaked out a bit because she had been drugged and beaten and raped a few years earlier at college, and she had a bit of a phobia about it as a result. But if she'd just finished what she needed to do and let me sleep I don't think it would be considered rape. Lots of nuance there as well.
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I'm surprised the stats were that low tbh.
Considering that marital rape didn't even exist until quite recently, some women (and sometimes men) may not differentiate "rape" from "my spouse really wanted sex and I didn't, and my spouse won".
That would be why I was surprised the stats were so low- I've heard a number of female clients effectively describe being raped by their LT partners without using the word "rape," and without seeming to process it as a rape (often more as something they didn't like in the relationship, than as something they found violent or traumatic). Honestly, never really felt clear with any of them on whether they genuinely didn't experience it as an assault, or whether they didn't want to deal with the fact that their partner was assaulting them, so they compartmentalized, or didn't talk about it in those terms.
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IMO the killer who reacts on adrenaline and commits a crime of passion, loses control, is going to be far more likely to be remorseful than the bugger who just doesn't give a flying fuck about others, and as far as they are concerned, what others possess is theirs if they want to take it.
As for the nonce that wanted to marry their victim, that isn't fucking remose. Bollocks it is. Thats just a pervert being a pervert.
I think it's worse than perversion. He phrased it like, at least IMO that she was "unclean" due to the rape and now she was only worthy of him. That kind of thought process requires an individual who is truly twisted.
He should never be released and I reckon we should have the death penalty for monsters like that.
But that's just me.
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That would be why I was surprised the stats were so low- I've heard a number of female clients effectively describe being raped by their LT partners without using the word "rape," and without seeming to process it as a rape (often more as something they didn't like in the relationship, than as something they found violent or traumatic). Honestly, never really felt clear with any of them on whether they genuinely didn't experience it as an assault, or whether they didn't want to deal with the fact that their partner was assaulting them, so they compartmentalized, or didn't talk about it in those terms.
My guess is that they didn't experience it as an assault. More a tedious task that one has to submit to at times.
Especially, if they're from my generation or earlier. I have no idea how the changing perception of rape has taken
root in society as a whole.
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I'm against any government-institution of the death penalty as a whole.
But at the same time, I'd have no qualms about, in the case of an individual like that piece of shit nonce who essentially branded his child victim as 'dirty', administering mob justice. If they were caught in the act, or it was otherwise certain that they did what they were accused of then I really wouldn't hesitate to take them apart, piece by piece.
Not that I'd make an exception for any other rapist if I caught them at it. Thats the sort of crime of passion that would make a murder following it pretty certain (of the rapist). I'm downright pleased with the way an ex of mine responded, when some piece of shit raped her (or tried, I'm not entirely clear which was which, because sadly, she has suffered that way twice that I know of) She carried a long-bladed, rather odd knife, of a type I haven't seen before or since, other than on her. Similar to a lock knife. Well it was a lock-blade, but of an unusual design where it closed up partially, with the blade shortening, and doing into a sheath, where it could be drawn and used without extending it, but extending it would turn it into a shortsword, and sharp as hell.
She grabbed the guy's dick, stuck that funky ass dagger/sword sheath knife/lock blade hybrid thing of hers into the base of his dick and ripped it out again, right down the middle to bisect his knob. Just what the little fuck deserved for it. Think she might well have stabbed several of his associates there at the time (tried to gangrape her, the fucking arseholes, only to be forced to back down after getting the message that anybody who messed with her in that sense is going to end up with two half-dicks.