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This article has begun making the rounds of the f'list, and I thought I'd post it here.
Schrodinger's rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced
For, you know, your reading interest. Potential emotional triggers within for some, but thoughtful and articulate (at least, I think so).
Sadly, men are clueless about this. Most of them don't even know what rape is, as I'm finding in criminal law. They think it's creepy-guy-in-trenchcoat hides behind bushes in the dark of the night and waits for beautiful young women to come by and drags them off to the bushes, threatening with a knife or gun, as she tries to scream, and then he goes the whole way, brutally beating or killing her at the same time.
That is maybe 5% of sexual assaults. They forget date rape, rape by a friend or family member, rape by a long-term partner or a husband who thinks that it's the wife's duty to have sex with him, rape by consensual sex going too far.
I think for most men, sex is about a balance between what he wants and what she wants. OK, so sometimes we do what she wants, like go see a chick flick. But sometimes we do what I want, we have sex. If I have to go to the chick flick although I hate them and say no five times, then she has to have sex although she doesn't want to and says no. So he should be able to nag and pressure her the same way that she nags and pressures him (but in man terms, it's usually in a physical way like groping and fondling and initiating sex).
I think the majority of men don't understand how horrific non-consensual sex can possibly be to the non-consenting person because their brains are hard-wired to want sex, and they usually due to their size and aggression hold the de facto cards.
And yet they are socialised to abhor rape. So what do they do? Conceptualise rape in a way that is so narrow and extreme that they would never think of doing it.
Re-education? I hope. Certainly in law school we had a lot of "What the hell's" from men in crim class, who were saying "How can *that* possibly be sexual assault?" They didn't say it out loud in class, but they would sure talk about it afterwards.
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