continuing comment reading in lawyers, guns, and money

[seperis]

I went back to read the comments in Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Further Thoughts from Anne Applebaum because it was sane and that was nice.

The comment, to me, is a surprisingly good expression of what makes this confusing to a lot of people, especially men.

Warning: mention and thoughts about the concept of rape.

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

Unfortunately, the impression I get is that too frequently the explanation that boys get about sex includes the points that A) "nice girls" will never openly consent to sex because only sluts give it up easily, so they'll say no even when they want to say yes, and/or that B) women don't really enjoy sex that much and always have to talked into it to keep their men happy. Which is to say, self-serving myths that serve to deny the existence of genuine female consent and blur the lines between outright rape and "mere" seduction. Which is why the victim's prior sexual history is to this day considered worthy of rehashing in the courtroom during a rape trial (proving that she wasn't a "nice girl" and therefore how much could she really have objected to one more penis?) and why some people tend to focus on the physical battering that may have been required to get the victim to submit when trying to wrap their minds around the concept of how much "harm" actually occurred.

[flaming_muse]

This is very interesting to me. I've had a series of conversations with mr. muse over recent days about this issue, and he's baffled, too, that anyone cannot understand that no means no and that rape is by definition a violent act. So it's not all men who are so clueless, thank goodness. On the other hand, over the course of our life together we've talked a number of times about how at night I'm always aware of everyone on the street and how I'd never go to an ATM after dark; I was taught as a woman that I'm always going to be seen as a potential victim. It would never occur to him to worry about it.

[shinetheway]

In totally-and-yet-not-totally unrelated thoughts, the roommate is doing an independant study this semester on gender in Italian film, and we watched an extremely disturbing movie called The Unknown Woman

[out_there]

We may be hazy on vaginas and penises, and sex still involves something that happens in beds somewhere but no idea what, but we know something will happen to us that will not to boys in our position. It's an interesting form of assumed/accepted risk, really. I remember reading an article about youth violence in the CBD here, and the stats were quite surprisingly high for young males -- I think it was 15-21, something like that -- being beaten/attacked as opposed to females of the same age (being attacked/beaten/raped). Now part of it might be a lower instance of reporting sexual attack, I'm willing to accept that the occurances might have been higher than the stats could actually verify with reports, but there was an interesting line on assumed risk

[tricksterquinn]

I want to point out, too, that when girls DO walk down that dark alley by themselves and something happens, they often don't admit it. Because they 'should have known better' and it's therefore their fault. *fume*

[svilleficrecs]

Part of the problem, I think, in understanding rape as crime rather than sex (for some men) is that in the experience of a never-raped man, pretty much all his sex (if he's always been the penetrative partner) has always had to be consensual. From a purely mechanical perspective, it's pretty much a given that to penetrate, a guy has got to have *some* level of desire for the act to occur. Yes, I realize there are potential outliers, but by and large, if your average (straight, penetrative, never molested or raped) guy thinks of his sex life, consent is a given, and a necessity. Sex = the thing that happens after you're turned on enough for your dick to get hard, and almost necessarily results in an orgasm