Posted on 10/24/2003 8:29:20 AM PDT by Scenic Sounds
Today, I was sitting outside my education classroom waiting for a friend with whom I was having lunch. While I was relaxing, I could hear the sounds of a film that was being shown for a sexual trauma class next door. The door was open, and with careful listening, I figured out that the film being shown was an educational documentary about date rape. Curious, I moved my chair closer to the door so that I could hear more clearly. The more I heard, the more interested I became.
Men are, by nature, predators, explained the narrator. Women, especially young women on college campuses, are surrounded by rapists. These rapists are in the guise of your closest male friends. You may think they are on your side, but youd be wrong.
This was only the beginning. After a few more statements which I missed because I was scrambling for my notebook the female narrator began to explain the warning signs that women should look for in their male friends to see if he was a rapist. The first signal, said the woman, was drinking. Rapists tend to drink alcohol and become drunk at least once a month. The second was a fondness for exploitative mens magazines. The narrator listed Playboy and Penthouse as two of the magazines that are popular with rapists.
It sounded a bit ludicrous to me assuming that guys who drink and look at Playboy are automatically rapists especially college guys, since sometimes it seems that their only pastimes are drinking and looking at Playboy. This view, however, is typical of the paranoid outlook that some liberal feminists are teaching on college campuses.
On the other hand - there are so many varying ideas about rape these days that its hard to keep up with them all. There are people who think that women ask for rape by a look or a short skirt or a tight shirt, and there are people who think that any sex at all is rape, because men always prey on women. The pure version of these two ideas is served up mostly by fringe groups, but the more watered down versions are what get touted as truth to different groups of people at different times.
Sometimes the line between rape and intercourse is so finely drawn that it cannot be distinguished. There seems to be a new criterion for rape, which can be anything from saying no and then consenting to not specifically saying yes. There are new definitions of consent now. As Susan Estrich once put it: "Many feminists would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing a 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided. For myself, I am quite certain that many women who say 'yes' to men they know, whether on dates or on the job, would say 'no' if they could. I have no doubt that women's silence sometimes is not the product of passion and desire but of pressure and fear."
Then, on the other hand, there are people (oddly enough, most seem to be women) who hear about a womans rape and immediately look for an excuse to justify the mans behavior. This is the other side of the coin but its equally wrong. There are brutal people in the world that will not hesitate to take advantage of someone weaker than themselves, and both women and men need to realize this. There cannot be excuses made for rapists.
Thats what rape boils down to: brutality. Rape is about power and violence, not about sex or the pursuit of sex or even lust. It is about dominance. It is not about regret the morning after, and it is not about whether the girl who was raped had consensual sex with another man the night before. It is about the act itself; it is about the emotional scarring that it causes; and it is about the physical damage that it causes.
Extreme definitions of rape dont help rape victims. Instead, calluses build up on the public consciousness and more victims of rape find themselves being given the cold shoulder by the courts and by the press. Its as though they are being raped all over again.
The truth is, before we open our mouths to discuss someones rape or accusations of rape, we should stop and think about the consequences of the ideas that we are promulgating. Are extreme opinions and ideas from either side going to help us see the issue of rape with more clarity, or less?
Cathryn Crawford is a student at the University of Texas. She can be reached at cathryncrawford@washingtondispatch.com.
I stand corrected. Crawford's work, using your definition of Hemingway's writings, is on par.
Yes as opposed to the Liberal Clintorati that thinks that all rape isn't sex.
So is, "you are an a$$hole". Just an opinion.
I would rather when describing the works of someone to stress the positive, and seek to encorage, then to come off as a classless jerk.
Just another opinion.
How about: "Porn Trial Ends in Hung Jury,", which, although it gets points for a really awful double entendre, is subpar editing for a major metropolitan newspaper.
However, if you, or any other of Crawford's detractors, would care to post some of your literary attempts, I'm sure you would finally be given proper credit for those efforts.
Oh, okay.
A lot of the fringe groups do. After all, all men are predators. Excuse me. I am the proverbial visiting Martian Anthropologist. I'm hoping you can help me out with something here. You seem to be making light of the idea that men are predators, as if it were a joke. In the article you positioned it as a somewhat ludicrous view promoted by the people I refer to in my notes as 'feminist extremists.' Let me show you a passage that I have found puzzling. I hope you can help me make sense of this:
I interpreted this as the author trying to draw a distinction between the "bad feminism" of NOW et.al., which seeks to tear down everything except women, and a non-controversial "good feminism," the basic tenet of which is to protect women against bodily harm, and of course to promote equality. What stumps me is that the author does not bother to tell us why women need to band together for protection against bodily harm. Apparently this is something you Earthlings all know, but it has left me guessing. As a Visiting Martian, I must assume that there is some predatory force out there that, in the absence of this women's movement, would be visiting bodily harm upon women... and apparently only women. For while the Good Feminism seeks "equality," it does not bother itself with any bodily harm that might be visited upon men, or children, or really anyone except women themselves. (As a Visiting Martian, I have found this to be typical of feminisms of all kinds. I have classified them in my notebook as "Equality movements which seek special privilege and protection," a classification I had not previously encountered in my travels.) To understand this passage better, I need to know what the predatory and apparently quite brutal force is that the Good Feminism seeks to protect women from. I hope you can help me out, because the author seemed to think it was obvious. |
Obviously, I didn't see the movie itself so I really can't guess what points were being made. However, I think the part of the movie which this columnist quotes suggests that the movie had a somewhat inflammatory purpose:
Men are, by nature, predators. Women, especially young women on college campuses, are surrounded by rapists. These rapists are in the guise of your closest male friends. You may think they are on your side, but youd be wrong.
As for me, I agree with your parents even though there were times long, long ago when I was drunk and would have been the focus of your parents' apprehensions. I never raped anyone, though, at least not if we stick to anything resembling traditional definitions. LOL. ;-)
I bet my husband will also encourage our daughters to avoid drunk males. I guess my Daddy was a closet feminist. And hubby must be a feminist, too.
I don't know, but it sounds to me like your husband's a pretty good father.
All that sort of avoids the point of this article. I wonder what my father's definition of rape was.
I suspect he probably had a pretty rational view of things. ;-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.