SylviaSmile wrote:
drivel wrote:
drivel wrote:
sorry, gonna elaborate on this one. every girl who's ever wondered if it was really "rape rape" despite the fact that she never said he could put his dick in her, that maybe it was her own fault for being at that party/flirting with him/taking her shirt off, that maybe he could not be
expected to stop? that is the result of teaching girls and women that they are the sex objects of men. consent is ASSUMED. their bodies are assumed to be available. that's is what is implied in "no means no." because it's yes until she screams no amirite?
[it should be "yes means yes," and we *should* have a culture of requiring affirmative consent, but we don't.]
you gonna respond to this one, GO?
also, I see what you're trying to get at with saying there are alternative messages. But the fact remains that every girl DOES get the negative messages, even among the ones that also manage to get some positive ones as "alternatives," the positioning of which is itself problematic, as 'biner pointed out.
I'm going to be controversial here and say that the issue with rape/not reporting rape goes a bit deeper than just women being trained to think of themselves as sex objects, though of course that is extremely pertinent. I think another part of it also has to do with the fact that
women have a peculiar ability to internalize intuitively others' needs and desires and give them preference to their own needs and desires, often more so than men. Obviously that's a very general statement, but it's probably linked to a maternal instinct so that mothers can sense what their children need without having to be told. When this tendency is wrapped up with the complicating factors of sexual desire and a
man's unique ability NOT to internalize another's feelings (or easily to ignore them), it can get very dangerous. I agree that "we should have a culture of requiring affirmative consent," yet I can also see how this is still a work in progress when I don't see that guys even from a young age have a tendency to ask permission for things...nature vs. nurture, I don't know, but it does sort of connect back to the risk tolerance issue in just seeing different approaches to doing something that might be considered unacceptable, scary, daring, etc.
I'm still aghast whenever I think of the statistics that show that rape, the most awful of violent crimes, is most often perpetrated by someone who actually KNOWS the victim. In fact, this also happened to one of my friends (a "date rape" scenario, which I think is an awful, stupid, and oxymoronic phrase), but she did end up reporting it. I recall her saying that the police in our southern town told her that probably they wouldn't do much to prosecute the guy.
Why aren't MEN more up in arms about rape, anyway?? When you think about it, the problem of rape is at the core a MEN'S issue, not a woman's issue--no matter how self-confident a woman is or sure of herself or NOT seeing herself as a sex object, it can still happen to her, simply by the fact of a man being violent and evil. (And yes, I know that women do commit rape, but those scenarios are by far more rare.)
