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 you’d 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 men’s 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 it’s 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 woman’s rape and immediately look for an excuse to justify the man’s behavior. This is the other side of the coin – but it’s 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.
That’s 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 don’t 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. It’s as though they are being raped all over again.
The truth is, before we open our mouths to discuss someone’s 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.
...who won the Nobel Prize in 1954 (after his earlier observation that "no son of a b*tch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards").
Drinking beer and "reading" Playboy in college? Say it isn't so! The nutcase forgot to mention eating pizza.
"Somewhere in America, a woman is raped every 2 minutes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice."
"The FBI estimates that only 37% of all rapes are reported to the police. U.S. Justice Department statistics are even lower, with only 26% of all rapes or attempted rapes being reported to law enforcement officials."
What do you make of that?
You?
I'm still eating pizza. Not as often, though. ;-)
Poor thing. You'd think that woman would have bought a gun by now, after the first few hundred rapes.
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