An argument in favour of teetotalism

[the0lady]

 
According to an Ipsos Mori poll commissioned by the Home Office, a rape victim who has been drinking should be held responsible for her rape - or so think 11% of respondents. A further 25% think that she should be held "partially responsible".

So, ladies, don't drink. Because a full 36% of your fellow country-people - that's over a third -

Comments

[the0lady]

That "for clarity" at the beginning of a four sub-clause mammoth sentence really gave me a laugh first thing in the morning, so thanks.

To answer your question, a sexual act that is imposed on a person against or despite their will is rape.

It becomes a lot more straightforward of you don't look at it through the lens of the actions of the woman - which is of course why people don't, because it's so starkly unambiguous then - but analyse the actions of the man.

Put quite simply, to initiate and follow through on sex with someone who DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE SEX is rape. It doesn't really matter to me if the power imbalance involves a gun, a £20 bill, some strategic nagging, a car parked in lover's lane, or what. If a man has sex with a woman who DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE SEX (but yields, relents, gives in, succumbs, surrenders, or any of the other lyrical euphemisms we employ to excuse rape) then that man is a rapist who's just raped.

What possible reason would a normal healthy human being have for wanting to engage in such an intimate activity with someone who doesn't want them, anyway? If one allows the fact that a woman is a human being with feelings and emotions to enter one's mind, and just how scared and impotent it makes her feel to have strange hands affecting an ingress into the private intimate space underneath her clothes, then even a teenage visit to the cinema and trying to get to second base begins to look as creepy as it actually is. The fact is, women are taught to be coerced into sex from puberty, and men are taught to coerce them. Is it any wonder that nobody knows where the line really lies, when it lies nowhere?

It's so crazy ass crazy that only our culture of wilful blindness could have come up with it. At least in Africa, where they cut off women's clitorises and labia, every act of penetration is overtly painful, punishing rape. There is far less ambiguity. Here, we want men to rape women and enjoy it, and impose this cognitive cat's cradle on them whereby they have to do it to prove their virility but have to believe that they didn't do it to prove their humanity.