Police in Toronto are on the hunt for four heavyset women in their 30s who sexually assaulted a young man in a parking lot after he left a bar in the their company and accepted a ride from them.
This story is both horrifying and interesting at the same time. It opens up two conversations that I think we definitely need to be having.
The first conversation has to do with male victims of sexual assault. There are no details about exactly what went down in the parking lot, other than the man in question felt sufficiently violated to go to the police, and he did not require medical treatment.
That could mean a lot of things, and Kristina Hansen does a great job exploring the stigma and shame that follows ALL victims of sexual assault, but men in particular.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/four-women-sexually-assault-19-year-old-man-in-toronto/
This case makes it patently clear that women CAN and DO sexually assault men. Rosie DiManno, writing for the Toronto Star, takes a snicker at the young man, and writes that “one man’s sexual assault is another man’s fantasy”.
Nice. Would you ever write that about a woman being sexually assaulted by four two hundred pound men? I doubt it.
There are enough accounts of women raping men on the internet to demonstrate that male victims of rape find their ordeals just as harrowing as women do. Here’s just one:
http://www.salon.com/2011/08/03/male_rape/
Hansen, and others, have made the argument that the stigma and shame attached to men who are raped by women results in massive underreporting of male rapes.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/528821
I want to put forward another suggestion: that even when a sexual experience meets the LEGAL definition of rape, men often don’t regard it that way, and that has everything to do with how a man perceives his influence on the world in general.
Here’s a true story: I’m not going to preface it with any “trigger warnings”, but I will say that I have complete authority from the man involved to write about this. You know him as PrinceCharming.
http://judgybitch.com/2012/12/21/prince-charming-you-really-are/
PrinceCharming is a good-looking, intelligent, very accomplished man who works in senior management in an aspect of healthcare, and he is an adjunct professor at the local college. By all accounts, a good catch. He hasn’t been caught yet, but not for a lack of trying from the ladies.
He works with a woman that I’ll call CourtneyCougar. She’s 45, never married, and in very good physical condition. For 45, she looks great! And she likes Charming.
Very, very much.
Charming is more than a decade younger than Courtney, but that isn’t the barrier to exploring her attraction a little further. Charming, you see, has a “don’t shit where you eat” policy when it comes to fucking his co-workers. And that’s very sensible.
That doesn’t stop Courtney. She enjoys making her attraction obvious, and makes lots of crude, raunchy comments to Charming. Astonishingly, he hasn’t collapsed in despair and become a quivering shell of his former self under her constant harassment. Hell, he hasn’t even reported Courtney to HR. His whole attitude is “Well, duh. Of course she wants to fuck me! I’m awesome!”
Imagine the genders reversed. If Courtney was the 30 something manager and Charming was the 45 year old aggressor, there would be a lawsuit brewing.
We’ll come back to that in a second.
Cue an office party, held at Charming’s house. Charming has a bit too much to drink (oops!), and Courtney stays close by him. Eventually, everyone staggers home and it’s just Charming and Courtney left at his house.
And we know what happens next, right? She straddles him and makes her desires very clear, and the Laphroaig has gone to his head and his resolve against sleeping with colleagues wavers a bit.
They start making out and things look like they are headed for naked.
But then Charming comes to his senses and decides “this is a terrible idea”. So he tries to put the brakes on the train to poundtown.
Courtney is having none of it.
Here’s where I should mention that Courtney maintains her awesome body with mixed martial arts training, and Charming is an experienced wrestler. That probably made for an interesting tussle.
At some point, Charming realized that whatever happened, the outcome was going to suck. He could either have an earnest fight with her and physically chuck her out of his house (and that would by no means have been an easy thing to do), creating a very awkward situation at work, or he could give in and fuck her, and still face an awkward situation at work.
So he went with fuck her. He decided not to risk getting hurt in a physical fight with her, which he didn’t want to do anyways, because he likes Courtney. He complied with her demand to have sex to avoid getting physically hurt (or hurting her), under the influence of way too much Scotch.
Legally, he was raped. Charming sees that the experience meets the legal definition of rape, and it’s not shame or embarrassment that keeps him from charging her criminally.
Not at all. While he regrets the experience, he also owns his role in it. He had a whole bunch of choices to make, and he made bad ones. He drank too much, he let her stay after everyone else had left, he got physical with her and then changed his mind. And then he decided to go ahead with it anyways because first of all, sex! And second, getting rid of her wouldn’t be easy.
The idea that Charming would hold Courtney responsible for all of his own shitty decisions is alien to him. His mind just does not work that way. He is a manager at work, with tons of responsibilities and a large budget to administer and he is accustomed to making decisions and facing the consequences. Yes, Courtney behaved in a totally inappropriate way, but it’s not like it was a mystery to Charming that she wanted to have sex with him. He let a situation get out of control, and he takes the responsibility for that.
In other words, he’s a grown-up.
I don’t want to diminish the experiences of men who respond differently to their experiences of sexual assault. Of course men experience the full range of human emotions, and some men are much more emotionally vulnerable than others, and will be preyed upon for precisely that reason. Men should have the full force of the law at their disposal when they experience sexual assault, just as women do.
But I also think that far more men respond to situations that meet the legal definition of assault like Charming did. He understood the role he played in the situation, and also understood that while he could have physically removed her from his house, and he would have been well within his rights to do so, there would be consequences for that action, too.
He’s just taken the experience as “lesson learned – no more drinking with Courtney”. And life goes on.
I think that attitude from men explains why there is such an underreporting of rape and sexual assault from men. The Toronto case is an anomaly not because women rarely behave in sexually aggressive ways that meet the legal definition of assault, but because men don’t feel the need to report those experiences, or even define them as assault.
Men tend not to cast themselves as victims, even when they are. Charming was definitely a victim in the scenario with Courtney, and not just a victim of assault. He was primarily a victim of his own reluctance to physically restrain or hurt Courtney, which he certainly could have done. He faced a choice: unwanted sex or beat the crap out of a girl who really likes me.
Charming HAD that choice, and he made it. I’m guessing that kid in Toronto had no such choice, facing down 800lbs of sexually aggressive womanhood. Yikes. It must have been scary, and he was absolutely right to report the assault to police.
I caught a shit-ton of flack for calling out the Steubenville rape victim as an idiot for putting herself in such a vulnerable position in the first place, and I’m going to do the same for the kid in Toronto, too. Four two-hundred pound cougars in their thirties? Are you crazy? Of course he didn’t DESERVE to be taken to a parking lot and assaulted, and those bitches deserve their comeuppance, but honestly? He didn’t see that as an intensely vulnerable position to put himself in?
My guess is no. He honestly didn’t, because as a culture, we like to pretend that rape is something that only ever happens to women. That women are blushing maidens when it comes to sex, and that sexual aggressiveness is the sole domain of men.
The Toronto story is a warning shot across a cultural landscape that is changing, and that’s a good thing. Obviously, it’s not a good thing that a young man was sexually assaulted, but it is an unmitigated good thing that women are being held responsible for how they take advantage of and abuse men, especially in a sexual context.
The lessons here are manifold:
Men DO get raped and sexually assaulted
Two hundred pound women are SCARY. Four of them are downright TERRIFYING.
EVERYONE has some responsibility to make good decisions
And finally, for the love of god,
DO NOT ACCEPT RIDES FROM PEOPLE WITH NECK TATTOOS.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
As bad as this needs to be said, it unfortunately going to be marginilzed with ‘oh, no guy is really raped’ or ‘he needs to man up’ or ‘for every 1 male raped 99 females are’
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Two thoughts here:
1) The majority of rapes reported by women are false, ranging from completely fabricated to ex post facto/morning-after regrets (“He didn’t CALL me the next day after taking me “around the world”, the %$#@!!!! I”m SO getting him back!!!”).
2) More men are probably forcibly raped in this country than are women, when prisons are factored in.
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Oh, and false accusations should carry the same penalty as the crime of which someone is accused, not just filing a false police report or perjury. If that means 15 to life, so be it. A few well-publicized cases with that result would drop the FA frequency substantially. Crystal Magnum (of the Duke lacrosse team rape FA case) should be breaking big ones into little ones until after my infant children are learning how to drive.
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Crime statistics actually show an almost 50/50 split. The only reason you see those stats that way is that by the legal definition, a woman cannot rape a man.
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It might also drop the “coming clean” frequency. I think there should be some sliding scale that carries a lesser penalty the sooner you come clean.
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BTW JB, thanks for being consistent. I wouldn’t accept this article from a hypocrite.
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The FBI has updated their definition to include men, but they also removed the requirement that force be used. The definition simply states that the sexual act takes place without consent.
There is no requirement to communicate consent.
Isn’t that interesting?
As long as you FEEL like you were raped, you were.
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Worth noting also that, if he’d done what would likely have been necessary in order to prevent sexual intercourse and throw her out, she’d certainly have had the necessary ammunition to cost him his livelihood, and very likely his liberty too. His word vs hers, after all, and she’d be the one with the photogenic bruises and the sympathetic HR department and the pre-radicalized jury pool.
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There were more clear-cut examples than the one above, but due to lack of “gender neutral” legislation the justice was not served. A rather old case of “Mormon sex in chains” involving the former Miss Wyoming World. What was the feminist response, if any?
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Charming sounds like a stand up guy (sincerely. I know it’s hard to tell tone on the internet.)
At least she didn’t feel “used” the next day and decide to report HIM for sexual assault. Someone chasing and harassing a man that hard… that kind of behavior is not outside of the possible.
It would actually probably be wise for him not to be alone with her at all. Not necessarily just because of scenarios like the one that happened, but because at some point… she could get tired of “chasing him” and decide to level a false allegation to punish him for not “wanting her”.
Women seem to get really offended if any man for any reason doesn’t want to screw them because of course men are not human beings with rights to have feelings and opinions and likes and dislikes… nope, their penis is a carnival ride and any woman can just jump on. /sarcasm
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He’s going to log on after work today and reply to some of these comments. Especially regarding how Courtney behaves now and how he responds.
That should be interesting.
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Awesome. 🙂
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Have you seen the Loius CK scene that caused such a dustup, and the fallout therefrom?
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/06/was_louie_date_raped/
http://www.alternet.org/story/156317/a_closer_look_at_louis_ck%27s_shocking_rape_scene?page=0%2C1&paging=off
It’s amazing how some people cannot see a blatant act of violent rape for what it is.
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It’s a wise idea for no man to be alone in a non-professional setting (anywhere outside work) with a woman he works with who is sexually attractive. It leaves the man open to all kinds of claims.
I’ve had to fend off claims of sexual harassment since I was sixteen – the first was when I hugged a girl I was acting in a production of the Passion Play with. Did so multiple times over the course of rehearsals with her and a few others – we had a lot of down time and were friends. She claimed I tried to force a kiss upon her.
Most recently a company I worked for started hating me (I’m an independent contractor for theatre). They decided the easiest way to get rid of me was accuse me of hitting on the female minors in the cast. No one else besides the head of the company that I talked to knows of anything, but I had to cut my losses and leave the situation.
No man is safe when he’s with a woman and there are no cameras around. But it’s not until you work with them that it both gets more dangerous and more likely to be an issue.
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If this goes to court (and I hope it does), I’ll be interested to see if the same standards get applied to the case. Things like victim being anonymous while perps don’t, what kind of ‘proof’ gets brought up to both sides, etc. It would really show the legal issues that are so prevalent right now.
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That’s not bad advice.
And an interesting by-product of institutional feminism and the victim-mentality. A big part of my husband’s job is to mentor new interns, and he won’t go near the female ones. None of the senior men will. The slightest whiff of impropriety can destroy a man’s career, which is hugely reliant on reputation where Mr. JB works. If he hands out a negative performance review to a woman, he can find himself on the receiving end of “hell hath no fury”.
When female interns come into his office, he immediately escorts them to a more public area, or he makes sure one of his admin assistants is there to overhear the conversation. He won’t be alone with a woman, attractive or not. His admin’s are both 50 year old women who are very protective of all the guys in the office. Old school ladies who understand that young women can and will destroy men on a whim.
The practical reality is that the women who are just starting out on the job are shut out of mentorship relationships. The young guys my husband mentors regularly come for dinner at our home, and he walks them through what they’re doing wrong and how to correct problems and how to foresee future problems. It’s the kind of advice that is very hard to learn on the job. And there is no way in hell he will ever have a woman over for dinner. Just not going to happen. She could claim anything, and he would immediately be assumed guilty.
That effectively means that the men outperform the women. Because women have the power to claim something sexual happened in a relationship with a mentor, they get shut out of the mentoring process. And it’s hard to do the job without the hand’s on advice of more experienced managers.
So nice job, feminists. You’ve made sure the women at Mr. JB’s workplace will always come up short against the men.
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Just….wow!
She slams his head against the side of a truck and forces him to perform oral sex and that’s NOT rape?
That is one hell of a hamster spin.
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“My guess is no. He honestly didn’t, because as a culture, we like to pretend that rape is something that only ever happens to women. That women are blushing maidens when it comes to sex, and that sexual aggressiveness is the sole domain of men.”
Rape Hysteria is a girls only club. Nobody tries to convince vulnerable young men that everything with two legs and a vagina is a potential rapist. Why would a guy thing women are predators when he has been convinced HE’S the predator?
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Sounds like he does everything extremely well. I’m glad to hear that it’s also not just him that takes these precautions but a majority of the men.
It’s unfortunate that the young women get shut out in the process. But it’s hard to feel too sad for them when it’s women exactly like them that take advantage of the laws set in place by old, angry feminists for the young women to ruin the lives of men the old, angry feminists can’t control.
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With the gender pandering judiciary in Toronto and lets me honest the rest of Canada they won’t even get a slap on the wrist. The court (most likely a affirmative action appointee judge) will dismiss the charges.
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May I also point out, that if Charming physcially injured Courtney r while fending off her rape attempt, it’s quite likely that she would have vindictively made a false accusation against HIM. And then HE… not she!…. would face the possibilty of prison, being branded as a sex offender, massive legal costs, career loss, and a host of other negative consequences, for daring to resist the rape.
One could say, that Courtney used (implictly or expliclty) the threat of false rape accusation, as a weapon of rape!
Genesis 39:1-20 is instructive here. Joseph was the household slave of Potiphar, and Potiphar’s wife tried repeatedly to seduce him. Eventually, she simply grabbed him, and he escaped by slipping out of his cloak. In her anger at being sexually rejected, she accused Joseph of the very thing she was guilty of — attempted rape — and Joseph was sent to an Egyptian prison for quite some time.
I guess Charming grew up in Sunday school too, and unlike Joseph, he decided that a fuck was better than going to prison for throwing her off.
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Gross. I can’t believe they portrayed it as A-okay. WTF? I bet some feminist watched it and was all like “yay, girl power”. Meanwhile twits like Adria Richards whine about dongle jokes and the feminists get in line to go on about how women aren’t even safe on Twitter. Yeah, that must be it. It can’t be that she ruined a father of 3 over a mild off-color joke not even directed at her.
I hope the bitch never works again and becomes either reliant on the state or on a man (which would mean she would have to be nice and appealing in some way. Something I’m sure she’d find very degrading.)
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I met my husband at work. I’m glad he didn’t have that attitude, but I understand why men do.
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Rape is about revenge. It’s an attempt to replace humiliation with pride. I figure these fat unattractive women were going to get revenge on a man after a lifetime of being ignored and ostracized, which most people would consider humiliation,
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Yeah this is why I don’t mess around with women at work. I miss out on some nice opportunities. But its just not worth the risk.
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Two hundred pound women are SCARY. Four of them are downright TERRIFYING.
Indeed, four two hundred pound women in a group is quite terrifying. Even if they’re on the far end of the bar.
I don’t even know Charming, but I like him already. He made the right choice, as a physical altercation coupled with rejection of her advances could have undoubtedly led to an assault and battery charge and very like a rape charge as well.
In my 20s I was stupid enough to mess around with girls I worked with. But fortunately escaped unscathed. Now that I’m much older, I only engage the many young female interns we have rotating through the office in public spaces.
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Sounds like Mr JB is smart.
He’s also fortunate he isn’t in a career field that would make that tactic infeasible or impossible. Like the military (paradoxically, not a lot of women percentage-wise, but wow they create a lot of problems).
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Most likely you’ll be correct, but if that happens the case and dismissal would be tangible evidence we can point to of how the system is broken. Rather, tangible evidence besides the mountains of studies that Feminists like to dismiss. It likely wouldn’t bring more than a minor number of minds to the cause, but that’s how snowballing movements like this work.
If it goes to courts, most of the likely outcomes would work in our favor. Sadly, few of them would work out in favor of the individual man involved in this case, and those few are the least likely to occur
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Eh. I’ve taken a couple risks personally – but always when I’ve set up the situation so that I’ve been publicly seen to have her chasing me and me turning her down. Even then I’ve had to bat clean up and do damage control a few times so that it didn’t lead to fall out. I work as an independent contractor though, so there’s different mixtures of freedom and risk for myself than for the typical career.
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I thought of Dave Chappelle’s bit on ‘man-rape’ (albeit, a man raping men, but still applies):
He’ certainly right, in all seriousness, that if a man gets sexually assaulted or raped, by whichever gender, he will generally take it with him to the grave. And there really is no point for men to even try to get justice for being sexually assaulted. In addition to nothing happening about it, they get to be perceived as gay, weak, tattle-tales, whatever, as a result of it. So why bother. And if a guy’s girlfriend or wife found out that he got raped, I wouldn’t be surprised if many women today simply dismiss at cheating on his part (or would call him a fag if raped by a guy). No, better to keep it to oneself. We can have no idea how many men have been raped, as almost none of them have or will report it. And feminists will make sure it stays that way.
And that comment DiManno is a nice illustration of how, even as feminists blame men/patriarchy for men being afraid to report being raped, almost in the same breath they mock male rape victims.
No offense to people from Toronto, but that city is beginning to look like a terrible place. Who wants to bet that when these women get caught, they don’t spend a day in prison? Hopefully I’m wrong.
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Indeed. They may as well codify the “erection=consent” theory of male-rape into the law. At least it’d be honest about ‘the way of things.’
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I feel so violated!!!!
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Really?!?!
You laughed your ass off telling me this story!
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Very good post. Especially the part about the stand up guy part. That was my favourite.
The funny thing is if you told some women to not be alone and drunk around certain guys, some people would flip out. You hear all of the time of people saying that the rapist is the only one to blame. While I agree that the rapist is the person to blame, you also have to protect yourself. I would not walk down the streets of Harlem with a gun in my hand. I am just asking for trouble.
Rapists are sick people. So do your best to protect yourself from them.
I didn’t, and now I am just a fragile sliver of my former self.
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Honestly, no.
The worst part of the whole thing is regret for shitting where I eat. The thing is that I am responsible for my own actions and I knew what I was getting myself into. It was a bad decision.
But a bad decision does not make it rape. Being more open to sex, because you are drunk, does not mean that the person did something against your will.
The way I see it, the whole ideal of rape is not so much about someone saying “no”, but instead that the person never said “yes”. When drunk, a lot of people will deny that “yes” was consent, because you could not make that decision. However, if I decided to drive that night and killed someone, could I deny responsibility because I was drunk? No.
So in the end, regret never equals rape. Being forced into sex against your will is rape. There is a big distinction. Those who want to blur that, are insulting actual rape victims.
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I wanted to respond here, because the question is how things have been.
Definitely awkward. Still hits on me daily. I mean how do you react when a co-worker, at work, tells you that she masturbates to thoughts of you?
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I’d avoid all contact with her except in the presence of numerous witnesses (ideally female ones, since male ones won’t be trusted once she decides she doesn’t like you anymore and this goes to court), for as long as was necessary for the recruiters I know to find me another job.
I mean, that sort of thing just makes this sound even _more_ like the second act of a modern-day version of a Greek tragedy.
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“The worst part of the whole thing is regret for shitting where I eat.”
Why? Was there any fallout after that?
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I had a situation happen to me in my 20’s. It’s what I regard as very poor judgement on my part that got way out of control. It ended up with me being manipulated by an older woman to have sex with her when I didn’t want to. By current legal definitions, I guess it would probably be called rape. I don’t consider it as such. I’ve never discussed this with anyone. The after-effect? It’s been ~20 years since then and I still deal with a mild sexual dysfunction. Emotionally and every-day life I’m fine – but when I think back to that time I just shake my head as to how I let it get to that point.
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No, but there could have been.
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They updated it again from the definition in which for a man to be raped by a woman his anus would have to be penetrated by her vagina? Because the last time I checked, the definition was that a man could be raped,but only if the woman penetrated him in some fashion. You know,like chicks are always doing,sticking their vaginas into any giant,six inch wide, bowl-shaped,3-inch deep orifice in the human body.
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I used to have a chick in my class who would stick her hand in my pocket and fondle my junk in front of everybody. I know how you feel.
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What I think a lot of people seem unable to understand is that crime really can be solely and completely the fault of the criminal, yet separately and independently, smart people don’t make it easy for criminals to take advantage of them. Whether you’re stealing something, shooting someone, or raping, everyone knows damned well what they shouldn’t do, and even if someone makes themselves easy to victimize, decent people don’t do it. From a legal standpoint, I don’t think people have the responsibility to protect themselves from things that shouldn’t happen.
But from a ‘I don’t want to be raped, robbed, hurt, or anything else’ standpoint, I do what I can to lower the risks that can be lowered.
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Is something in the water or have certain demographics of women always been this aggressive? I mean group sexual assault? That too of a grown man? The world’s gone mad.
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Eek, that must be awful. The only thing I can think of (other than avoiding her as much as possible) is to make yourself unappealing somehow. The cold shoulder should eventually do it. But she might just read that as the ‘strong, silent type’. You might try emasculating mannerisms around her.
Maybe wait for an appropriate moment (during her inappropriate moment), and whisper “Please be gentle”.
A young man once said that to me (he intended it to be a joke) and from that moment on I not only found him to be completely physically repulsive, I was unable to have an orgasm for a couple of years at least (even by myself).
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Has Toronto ever looked like a good place? Even people who choose Toronto really just want to be in New York…
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Women have completely ruined it for women.
My husband recently noticed a young girl at his fencing club had missed a number of training sessions, and it turns out that her father had been away and she couldn’t get a ride. The girl lives right on his way to the club, and he’d be happy to give her a ride when she needs one – but he’s smart enough to know that he could never make such an offer, and that it would be horrifically dangerous to drive the girl anywhere. So she misses class when her father’s away, and my husband drives past her community.
Based on the evidence, I’d have to urge men I know to never be alone with a woman at/from work either. Despite this being to my detriment, it’s just not a safe world for a man who wants to have a future.
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The problem with that is that no one who already did file a false report will ever admit it, for fear of harsher punishment, and the accused is the on who gets screwed in the end, as it’s very difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt that somebody filed a false report unless they admit it.
It’s sort of a dilemma. If the punishment for false accusation is too light, too many people will do it, if it’s too heavy, then once it’s been done, no one will come clean.
One thing that should be done, however, is if someone’s accusation leads to imprisonment, then is later found to have been false, the false accuser should at the very least serve as much time in prison as the false accused did up to that point. Similar to what the poster above me just suggested, only directly proportional to time wrongly served; the crime would basically be false imprisonment. This would incentivize false accusers to at least come clean before the accused is imprisoned. More important, I think, is that the anonymity of the accused be preserved until conviction. If the system will effectively deny the accused to confront his/her accuser in court, then it is only fair that he/she be protected from the public’s reaction until a verdict is delivered.
It’s interesting you mention Crystal Magnum, because had she been tried and imprisoned for some kind of felony back in 2007, she might not have ended up murdering her boyfriend, which she did just last year. In the past five years the justice system has had numerous opportunities to give this woman serious time (as it should have), but in the end just kept giving her passes, and now a guy is dead because of it.
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“And then he decided to go ahead with it anyways because first of all, sex!”
That sentence makes it sound like he wanted it.
” More men are probably forcibly raped in this country than are women, when prisons are factored in.”
That’s by other men though.
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Eeeek. Doesn’t she have any pride? Saying that to someone who is clearly interested in you is one thing… saying that to someone who has rebuffed you at every turn is quite another. Also, if YOU were telling HER that you masturbated to thoughts of her, that would be sexual harassment.
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And it’ll be worse when they start having to sign up for selective service. Yay, equality. /sarcasm
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That’s so sad, and so true. Ugh I hate us (women). lol
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Also, it wasn’t a “career job”. He was doing some contract work on the side and it was just a side shit job. We were both in “in between places” at the time. That might have factored in as well.
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Women in general seem to have a problem owning up to their own side/responsibility in things. They act completely shocked when you even suggest that some of their behavior might have contributed to them being in a vulnerable position. Not like it’s not the rapist’s fault. Of COURSE it’s the rapist’s fault, but women can’t get falling down drunk and half dressed with a guy also drunk and operating at less than best judgment and then be shocked if things go pear shaped. But no, it’s evil to suggest women use some common sense.
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EXACTLY, Kai! You said it perfectly. It’s the question of: “Would you rather be a ‘survivor’ or just not be a victim at all.” it’s not about pointing blame or shifting it away from the criminal, it’s about doing what you can to stay safe.
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Then they would have to say if a woman has an orgasm it wasn’t rape. Women can, without consenting or wanting sex, become physically aroused and even have an orgasm DURING a rape. It’s taboo to talk about, but there are some statistics on it. Often those are the most troubling and traumatizing cases for women who have experienced it because their body completely betrayed them. So no, erection doesn’t equal consent.
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That’s a really good point.
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I’m glad you don’t really feel like a fragile sliver of your former self.
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There still could be if she gets all embarrassed and offended that you are rebuffing her, and if she gets tired of telling you she masturbates to thoughts of you without any positive feedback.
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A woman like this needs to prove she’s still got it. If you don’t validate that… watch out.
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I’m sorry you went through that.
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Whenever she’s around you, try just start talking about your (presumably fictitious) stamp collection, model trains, or conspiracy theories about the Bermuda triangle/aliens/anything on the history channel (make these the topic of EVERY conversation with her); whenever she says something, stare awkwardly into the abyss for three seconds before responding; and start wearing pocket protectors all the time. With these and a few other nuances she will start to think you’re a serial killer or necrophiliac or something really weird within a week and will avoid you like the plague.
Subtly weirding people out is an art and a science, of course, that I have mastered after countless hours of practice. lol.
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This was brought up a few times on Law and Order SVU (which I used to watched frequently). In a rare episodes that actually portrayed victimization of a male, I believe when it was suggested that he was erect, so he was ‘asking for it,’ one of the detectives did draw that analogy, saying female victims often experienced physical pleasure as well. That the experience of physical pleasure should not, in either case, be construed as mitigating in any way the absence of consent.
Of course, male arousal is virtually a prerequisite to female rape of a male; since feminists are generally revolted by men, they have no interest in learning about male sexuality; adding that they are consider themselves anointed experts on rape, they are in a perfect position to horribly misunderstand male sexual nature. It seems many women, for example, still think erection is entirely voluntary. Forgivable, of course, for women in general, but not for feminists who insist on talking about male victimization even though they have utterly no knowledge about or interest in the male’s experience of sexual assault.
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What do you want to bet that they’re going any sexual arousal he may have experience as grounds for dismissal of the charges?
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If you don’t hire women, you get hit by a sexual discrimination suit. If you do hire women, you could lose your best men due to sexual harassment complaints. Either way, you lose. Adria Richards got this conversation going in an interesting direction.
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To me, it’s about what you can do for yourself, completely separately from also wanting to blame the criminal, change the society to make the crime less likely, or any other thing. So often feminists see this as an either/or situation instead of an additional good idea.
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I took martial arts for years (black belt) and always avoided putting myself in sketchy situations. I actually had a stalker when I was 17 (before anyone knew the term) who was calling into my work and describing the clothes I was wearing that day to whomever answered the phone. I’ve been pretty aware of my surroundings ever since then. I have *never* assumed all men were creeps like that guy– most men I’ve known have been great.
That part of my background also makes Prince Charming’s story even more repugnant to me.
I would never use my training to intimidate anyone. I have enough actual fighting experience to know that in a real one-on-one situation with a strong man I don’t really have a chance to win the fight–but I bet I could get away, which is all I’m really aiming for. But a decent guy like Charming (who is also probably physically imposing if he’s impressing a female MMA fighter) knows that a physical confrontation isn’t going to end well even if he does restrain her because all she has to do is cry “assault” and he’s the one in trouble.
It’s certainly interesting that all this female “empowerment” just leads to a whole lot of harassment at the hands of modern women. I could weep for my gender.
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I think you can set up some kind of plea-bargain system where it is better to confess that be found out, similar to how other crimes are treated.
I too feel a need to stop allowing conviction-by-media by not publishing names of accused, but rather only those convicted of crimes. But I have a hard time with it, because I also see the reason we *don’t* do it that way, to ensure that the judicial system is visible and not a secret behind-closed-doors thing, which was probably feared for the potential of abuse.
But then, today, it’s not hard to get attention if you do want it. So maybe we could stop publishing names of accused, while still making it easy for anyone who wants to invite media to their trial to do so. Thoughts?
I am, of course, speaking entirely in ‘should’ questions here, as the reality of whether change could occur, and whether silence could be maintained are a whole different issue.
But I find it a very interesting question, and one I definitely don’t know enough to make a clear call.
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In those sorts of discussions, I generally like to remove the question of blame or fault from the equation altogether; it’s simply about cause and effect. If you leave your car outside during a hurricane and your engine floods, you’d blame yourself, not the hurricane obviously, which would be ludicrous. But if you park your car under a bridge in the worst neighborhood in town, an it gets stolen or damaged, of course the person who committed the crime is “morally and legally” completely at fault, as much as if your car was parked safely in the garage when said criminal committed the crime.
But strictly speaking, for the victim, both situations are essentially the same; they engaged in behavior that increased the likelihood of their car being compromised; whether by a criminal or a storm is irrelevant to the car.
Intelligent people approach crime this way. By understanding that you cannot control the behavior of others any more than you can control the weather, you adjust your behavior in order to minimizes chances of victimization, depending on how much you want to avoid being victimized. The idea that women shouldn’t be encouraged to avoid risky situations with enhanced likelihood of assault but instead we should just try to eradicate every rapist off the face of the planet first is stupid and dangerous. Just as surely as there will always be hurricanes and blizzards, so will there always be rapists and murderers. It’s unavoidable. And while every woman has a right to pretend that there aren’t such people, the question is, would she rather live like her actions do not have indirect consequences and wallow in indignation at the cruelty of the world if they ever do, or would she rather avoid said consequences altogether? Same question applies to men, of course, but that’s beside the point.
Of course one can never be 100% certain of not being attacked, but one can improve one’s odds considerably. Why anyone would adamantly insist on remaining ignorant of how to improve said odds is truly beyond me, but some do it seems.
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The only thing I can think of (other than avoiding her as much as possible) is to make yourself unappealing somehow.
That would be impossible for Charming.
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Here is a comment I made over at a feminists blog that is relevant to the discussion:
Leap, much of the data is contained in the links and it would take too much time to put all that in but you can follow the links for the precise data:
The people debating here are in serious need of some basic information regarding rape. While there may or may not be some attitudes in the wider culture that contributes to rape the fact is MOST rapists have been sexually abuse when young by a WOMAN:
Most rapists were subjected to some form of sexual abuse in childhood. A startling amount is perpetrated by females. Peer-reviewed studies conclude that between 60% to 80% of “rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men” were sexually abused by a female. […] According to a 2004 U.S. Department of Education mass study of university students, 57% of students reporting child sexual abuse cited a male offender, and 42% reported a female offender. Interestingly, 65% of the survivors of female abuse who opened up to a therapist, doctor or other professional were not believed on their first disclosure. Overall, 86% of those who tried to tell anyone at all about their experiences were not believed. According to a 1996 report from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN), about 25% of child sexual abuse is committed by women, but that figure may be low, because survivors are far more conflicted and shamed in admitting abuse by their mothers than by fathers. In one study of 17,337 survivors of childhood sexual abuse, 23% reported a female-only perpetrator and 22% reported both male and female. A U.S. Department of Justice report finds that, in 2008, 95% of all youths reporting sexual misconduct by staff member in state juvenile facilities said their victimization experiences included victimization by female personnel, who made up 42% of the staff. […] One study found 8% of female perpetrators were teachers and 23% were babysitters.
http://feck-blog.blogspot.no/2011/10/rapists-who-were-sexually-abused-by.html
The discussion is also always framed as being about MEN raping women and it frames men in general as having something wrong with them that leads them to rape that women do not have. In other words men gets framed as evil and women as benign. But the actual number of men who experience rape in a given year is not trailing far behind the number of women who get raped in a year and a huge percentage of the men that get raped get raped by women. Why doN`t most people know this you ask? Because in government statistics rape is defined so that only men being anally or orally penetrated by a woman with a hand or object rapes a man but a woman who forces a man to have vaginal or anal intercourse with him where his penis is inside of her is not raping him. Legally this is rape but in government statistics it is not defined as rape. When you inlcude htis form of forced “envelopment” as rape, which of course it should be and it legally is, then the number of raped men skyrocket. Have a look for yourself:
http://www.genderratic.com/p/836/manufacturing-female-victimhood-and-marginalizing-vulnerable-men/
I am sure you all have hear about the extremely high levels of rape of women in South Africa. I am sure this has contributed to your view of women as uniquely oppressed by men. However, if you look at the rape statistics from South Africa the number of men parallel those of women and they are mostly raped BY WOMEN:
Some 9% (weighted value based on 13915/127097) of male respondents aged 11–19 years reported forced sex in the last year. Of those aged 18 years at the time of the survey, 44% (weighted value of 5385/11450) said they had been forced to have sex in their lives and 50% reported consensual sex. Perpetrators were most frequently an adult not from their own family, followed closely in frequency by other schoolchildren. Some 32% said the perpetrator was male, 41% said she was female and 27% said they had been forced to have sex by both male and female perpetrators. Male abuse of schoolboys was more common in rural areas while female perpetration was more an urban phenomenon.
Why don`t feminists ever tell you this?
http://www.genderratic.com/p/category/its-shit-like-this-feminists/page/2/
I am also guessing you have been repeatedly told about how many women get raped in war and this has made you see rape as a tool men use for repressing and abusing women in war. Yet look at the numbers from Congo:
http://www.genderratic.com/p/661/the-rape-culture-of-rape-awareness-advocates/
The number of raped men is huge and women also partake in the rape of men and are responsible for over 40% of the rapes of women that men are blamed for. Also keep in mind that the real number of raped men is obviously a lot higher because a disproportionate number of the men that were in the war zones where mass rapes took place are DEAD and so can`t answer studies like the greater number of surviving women can.
You would think feminists would be helpful in bringing these numbers to public attention. In stead they have worked as hard as they can to cover them up and to make sure male victims, which make up a huge number of the total victims, DO NOT GET HELP:
“Her study cites a review of 4,076 NGOs that have addressed wartime sexual violence. Only 3% of them mentioned the experience of men in their literature. “Typically,” Stemple says, “as a passing reference.”
“The organisations working on sexual and gender-based violence don’t talk about it,” he says. “It’s systematically silenced. If you’re very, very lucky they’ll give it a tangential mention at the end of a report. You might get five seconds of: ‘Oh and men can also be the victims of sexual violence.’ But there’s no data, no discussion.”
“As part of an attempt to correct this, the RLP produced a documentary in 2010 called Gender Against Men. When it was screened, Dolan says that attempts were made to stop him. “Were these attempts by people in well-known, international aid agencies?” I ask.
“Yes,” he replies. “There’s a fear among them that this is a zero-sum game; that there’s a pre-defined cake and if you start talking about men, you’re going to somehow eat a chunk of this cake that’s taken them a long time to bake.” Dolan points to a November 2006 UN report that followed an international conference on sexual violence in this area of East Africa.
“I know for a fact that the people behind the report insisted the definition of rape be restricted to women,” he says, adding that one of the RLP’s donors, Dutch Oxfam, refused to provide any more funding unless he’d promise that 70% of his client base was female. He also recalls a man whose case was “particularly bad” and was referred to the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR. “They told him: ‘We have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.’
Yeah, feminists working to restrict the definition of rape so that men can not be counted as rape even when they are. Exactly like in the west where this has caused people to be unaware of the real number of raped men which they could have been decades ago. Why? Well if it did not look like rape was something only or mostly men did to women and not the other way around feminists wouldn`t have been able to demonize men and guilt them into becoming submissive to women like they have now would they.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men
These numbers from the article are also interesting to put it mildly:
“In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped.”
Feminists have almost exclusively worked to silence the voices that have tried to bring attention to female sexual abuse:
So, people reading here. What should you conclude from this. Certainly one thing. Rape is NOT in any way an issue of what men do to women. Ii is close to symmetrical. If you don`t stop framing the issue this way you are only showing yourself to be working towards spreading hatred of men. Don`t do it again EVER. Secondly, since you have done such a good job of demonizing and shaming men on the basis of utterly false views of reality you have a karmic debt to pay. You need to compensate for having contributed to a distorted world view that makes it impossible for male victims to be believed, heard and helped and you have contributed to demonizing men and framing women as innately better than men. It is only reasonable that you put a similar effort into correcting the false damaging picture you have a part in creating by spreading this knowledge regarding rape of men, rape by females and that male rapists have usually been abused by women when they where boys.
You should also take note of the fact that male resistance to feminist lies is growing at an incredible speed and will become massive very soon. You can see yourself that you are being met with a resistance in the comment field of this blog post and others by men and some women in a way that you where not a few years ago. Suddenly men are speaking up. Online the mens movement is growing fast. In just three months avoiceformen.com grew 111% and got bigger than the important and well funded feminist site feministing.com. A little later they grew bigger than the feminist male issues site goodmenproject.com. At the rate of growth they are having it won`t be all that much time before they outgrow the biggest feminist site on the web, Jezebel.com. And they are doing this with only donations and the activism of bloggers without position or power. The MRAs are coming and when they really break into the mainstream you are going to look really, really bad having contributed to spreading lies about men and contributing to misandry. Oh, and MRAs are not just men. Avoiceformen.com has 33% female readers and an even higher number of contributors.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/a-voice-for-men/feministing-privileged-white-bitches-in-our-dust/
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/feministing-the-women-of-good-men-project/
This is the thread I posted in:
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That’s a good idea!
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true.
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The feminist response to this: “OMG I’m so OFFENDED! I can’t believe you would compare WOMEN to a CAR! You brute!” 🙂
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Same here. Honestly, and I know this sounds awful, if all women were somehow magically sent back to the kitchen tomorrow, I’d feel a quiet sort of glee about it. I can’t help it. This has all gotten so out of hand that I’m almost happy at the idea of any kind of overall retribution, even if I somehow end up thrown under the bus, too.
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Another thing… erections can be caused by lots of things besides explicit arousal. But again, to many feminists, the penis is “icky” and a weapon of mass destruction.
LOL @ voluntary erection. Wow. If a man “makes them wet”, was THAT voluntary? Did they have to think: “Turn on the liquid!” for it to happen? I think some people don’t understand what the word even means.
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Even if he serenaded her with this?
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“In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped.”
But aren’t these cases of men raping other men?
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“In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped.”
But aren’t those cases of men raping men?
Feminists don’t deny that male on male rape is common. It has a long history into ancient times. But women raping men is what is uncommon.
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“I guess that’s a compliment, but this conversation is completely inappropriate in a workplace.”
There, done.
Been there, said that, eventually pushed harassment when the individual would not back off and the choice was inflicting a public decking or being a victim.
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Those statistics are staggering. I go over to the Daily Mail every day just to see if there is another story about a female teacher getting busted for having sex with her students- and I usually find one. The reason I do this is because it’s not reported here in the States. I get more info on a foreign website than I can get at home and with less social and political bias. It’s so sad that the media is so complicit in covering up the real story about predatory women. But, like you say, the truth is starting to come out and there will be a reckoning.
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I know exactly how you feel.
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I’d have her fired and locked up for sexual assault. That’s just the way I am. Get it on recording.
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I don’t so much as talk to any woman that I don’t have to. I’ll say hello cordially to coworkers, but if I’m not directly working with them, I will not talk to them outside of that.
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Bullshit! Rape is about sex!
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Actually, I would say that it was the hurricane that damaged my car. It was just foolish of me to leave my car out where it could so easily be damaged. It would have been wiser of me to put the car in the garage. Sure, the hurricane could still sweep my garage away, but it’s a lot less likely, and that’s a pretty simple way to lower my risk of car damage.
Of course, Z has already hit on the standard feminist response. Apparently most women can’t comprehend analogies.
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Sure, transparency is also a priority. I think both anonymity and transparency could probably be preserved. Certain things like the name of the dependent (and pictures of their face), where they live could be concealed from media unless they give consent to have such things revealed. I don’t think the exposure of such details are crucial to preserving the integrity of the court, certainly no more than they are dangerous to the integrity of the court due to their impact on public reactions.
It’s always tradeoff between one principle and another, but it’s just not exactly fair to protect the accuser from the public completely (which also inhibits transparency) while giving the accused no protection whatsoever. There should be some kind of consistency at least.
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Lol. Well, strictly speaking I’m comparing one’s sexual organs to one’s car.
Is that a compliment or an insult? I suppose it depends on what kind of car one has. If you have a BMW it’s flattery, if you have a Ford Taurus it’s an insult… but what if you have a Honda Civic? Cheap, but functions well, is low maintenance, and lasts long? An insult?
Perhaps the metaphor has run its course.
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Yes, like having to pee. Of course sexually assaulting a man who has to use the restroom badly may encounter a rather disgusting surprise.
Maybe all men should have to get a concealed carry permit to where pants.
Or rather, would they force male nudists to get an ‘open carry’ permit? There’s a legal dilemma for them to think about.
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hahaha. People told me when choosing a mate, look at how he treats his mother. I did… but I also paid close attention to how he treated his car. It’s just been my experience that men who fastidiously care for their “things”, tend to have that same reaction to their women.
Wasn’t there some study that offended a bunch of women that showed when men saw a hot woman the part of their brain associated with the handling of tools lit up? LOL
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bwhahahahahahaha. Look! More. Gender. Differences. (I’m currently in a debate with a mangina about how women and men are practically interchangeable, they’ve just been socialized to be different. Ummm… not kidding. He feels pity for my “socialization in the south”.)
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And you’re a woman too, right?
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Morning wood is normally the peeing thing, right? Not that your sheets somehow made you horny? 😛
HA! @ permits.
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Have you seen me sing and dance?
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Yes, there is no doubt in my mind of that. The girls in our office are pretty obvious in their comments. The guys, however, know that we have to be careful.
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That’s a good point. If all details of the trial could be published, except for the identity of the accused, you’d have a pretty open trial. Again, logistics come up in terms of how much you could publish before the accused would become knowable, but that’s a different issue.
Once convicted, of course, I’m all for publicity. Other than in cases where that seems to have been the goal.
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Female is a gender. ‘Woman’ is a state of mind. I know a guy who is a woman too. It’s sad.
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So much for gender equality, huh?
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HA!
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“But aren’t those cases of men raping men?”
What the fuck does that matter? I let this go previously because I thought you were being facetious. Seems you weren’t.
“But women raping men is what is uncommon.”
How many do there need to be before you could care? Is one too few? How about five? Or a hundred?
Message to feminists…when you’ve decided how many victims there need to be before you will acknowledge them please let me know. In the meantime meet some of the victims you want consigned to oblivion…
http://www.secasa.com.au/pages/back-on-track-dvd/watch-back-on-track/
Ayurvedic Yogi, you are a pig.
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Women raping men is not that uncommon. What’s truly uncommon is men reporting women for raping men. See these links for more info:
http://business.highbeam.com/435388/article-1G1-107203500/women-sexual-aggression-against-men-prevalence-and
Click to access ID45-PR45.pdf
The stereotype that rape is virtually always committed by men is not all that accurate
Furthermore – and I’m hoping some feminist can clarify this to me someday – why is it any less wrong when a man is raped by a man. It seems as though you think that if a man is the perpetrator as well as the victim, they cancel each other out, so no harm done? Men are some collective consciousness such that when on man wrongs another man it’s ok, but when a man wrongs a woman, only then it’s a tragedy?
Should we take the same approach to black-on-black crime? It’s not really issue because they’re ‘doing it to themselves?’ No, that would be a both idiotic and disgusting point of view.
The truth is, when feminists deflect the issue of male victims of rape by men by blaming men as a whole, they are effectively blaming the victims. As men, they are construed as part of the problem, who deserved what they got. This is reprehensible, needless to say.
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Re schools…
Among female perpetrators nearly ten percent are teachers who abuse students. Among male perps it’s fewer than one percent. If an adult sexually abuses a kid in a school it’s significantly more likely to be a woman rather than a man who is responsible – at least three times more likely. The most likely victim in a school is a boy by an even greater factor.
I know it seems like there’s a sudden plague of female teacher perpetrators but they have always been there. Even to this day any scrutiny that is applied assumes male perpetrators and female victims. Cover ups aren’t the sole province of the churches. I know it seems like it’s always teachers but in reality nine out of ten female rapists ARE NOT teachers.
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Yep. Maybe it’s because I grew up with men (3 brothers, no sisters) but I have a heck of a time understanding most women.
If I stay within my own social group of primarily stay-at-home moms it’s not too bad because we’re all comfortable with traditional male/female roles. But working moms seem to have this notion that they should be looking down on me. Which makes no sense. I have way more time to take care of my family than they do- and they still get stuck doing most of the housework. I’m trying to figure out how it’s more empowering to be exhausted all the time. Oh, and the divorce rate seems to be really high among the career oriented moms I know. So yeah, the whole ‘modern’ thing doesn’t seem to be working that well…
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What irritates me is when a feminist throws out the bullshit line that now we have “a choice”. Um no. Most women do not have the luxury of being able to stay home to raise their children. And even though they talk about choices, you’re right, they look down their noses at women who do what women are naturally SUPPOSED to do. How have women so easily been turned into men? It’s disgusting. I get that there are outliers who aren’t gender-typical. But being an outlier doesn’t give one the right to push their minority viewpoint onto the rest of the world.
Here is what gets me… feminists who see a woman who “stays home” feel sorry for her or thinks she must not be too smart. I saw a woman in a comments thread a few weeks ago just go on and on about how men take advantage of and marry young stupid women they can get to stay home so they can take advantage of them. (How these women were being taken advantage of was never fully explained.)
I pointed out that, since men aren’t generally wired toward the same kind of “nesting” in a home that women are… nor are they as likely to do a ton of child-rearing and organizing of the household, rather than being liberated, these women who hold down full time jobs AND have kids AND have a husband AND have a home, are the real slaves.
I think I was pretty smart. I’m not a very stressed out person. I don’t have kids so I work, but I work from home a few hours a day, the rest is housework/errands. I think I’m actually quite smart for that.
Agreed re: divorce rate. I’ve been married 11 years now, which in itself is almost a miracle now. The bigger miracle is we actually love and LIKE each other. He still says “love you, be careful” when I leave the house.
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For some reason I can’t reply to your most recent comment- so I’ll do it here.
The whole notion that only stupid women stay home is hilarious. We struggled financially at first, okay the first ten years, but now we’re doing very, very well. My husband always tells me that he couldn’t do what he does if I didn’t do what I do. He says that it gives him so much piece of mind to know that I’m taking care of the kids versus some nanny.
I’m college educated (stupid liberal arts degree- worthless Japanese minor and all) and I can keep up with the career crowd on that level. I had some cool job experiences prior to having kids (I worked as an associate producer on a television show for awhile in the mid-90’s) but once I was pregnant with my daughter any career aspirations I ever had went right out the window. Thank goodness my husband was happy with my choice.
I know a lot of working moms who aren’t loving the experience. I’ve talked to many who want to do what I’m doing but they built their lifestyle on two incomes and don’t have the option to scale back to one. (I live in California and if you buy a house here on two incomes there’s very little chance you’re going to keep your home if you go back to one.) I feel like a very smart woman for picking the life I did.
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I know this post is about woman on man rape, but man on man rape in the prisons is a problem no one really talks about.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=131113
http://www.mintpressnews.com/prison-rape-and-the-atrocity-of-the-american-penal-system/
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I was the same, sqt.
Three brothers, no sisters.
I get along with women, but I only really love the ones who seem to get that men and women are different and that it’s okay!
Most of those women had brothers.
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I have long suspected that this was a quiet epidemic. I think the reason we hear about it more in schools than anywhere else is because schools are a feeding ground for these predatory women. I worry more about what my kids are being exposed to in school than I do any church. We’re not really church-going people anyway- but school is 5 days a week…
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Interesting pattern that never occurred to, with all the brothers you’ve all had. I didn’t have any sisters (only a brother, even my family’s cats were all male, and went to an single sex high school. Does this mean I’ll develop an allergy to women? lol.
But at any rate, I think the correlation between employment and intelligence is fairly ambiguous. There are some pretty stupid people with full-time jobs, even really good jobs; some of the vulgarest people I know are high-status private sector employees. And yet I once met a transit worker who liked to read Dostoevsky novels like me, which is apparently considered a pretty ‘high-brow’ habit.
Suffice it to say, it doesn’t necessarily take too much intelligence to sit at a desk all day and go on facebook, err, I mean, work.
Now, you housewives could have the potential to become a modern-day intellectual aristocracy, if only you would put down your copies of ‘Shades of Gray’ and start reading real literature like Dostoevsky and Turgenev. (Uh oh, they’re both male! for the sake of gender parity, better name two female writers quick!) Ummmm, and Veronica Wedgwood and Flannery O,Connor. There, now I’m safe.
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I believe that is the main explanation for it.
Though sometimes if, ahem, ‘one’ falls asleep in a chair in the library, wakes up a few hours later and has to use the loo badly, and is consequently ‘standing to’, ‘one’ finds ‘oneself’ in a bit of a pickle… I mean, dilemma, of having to hold it, or curry across the crowded room to the bathroom an hope no one notices.
One supposed remedy for this (if you’ve ever seen the movie ‘Bubble Boy, you’ll know) is to recite the pledge of allegiance over and over again. No idea if it works.
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The teacher molestation crisis with the Catholic Church abuse scandal yields an interesting comparison. One researcher who’s work I’ve read on the the subject, an Anglican scholar (that is, no direct vested interest in the Catholic Church) found that the rate of abuse was at least as high among teachers as it was among clergy, and yet the clergy scandal aroused much much more negative media attention per event than teacher scandals have. One may argue this was for any number of reasons, but it is somewhat ironic that some people after the clergy abuse scandal broke found themselves virtually afraid of priests even as they continued to champion a school system that is every bit as much contaminated with abuse, and what’s more, it is funded by taxpayers.
The media reaction to teacher abuse is telling. I’ve seen numerous examples in TV where boys who came forward about being molested by their teachers were (jokingly, if that exonerates the behaviors) characterized as idiots or losers for “ruining it” for themselves and all the other boys in the class, who no doubt also wanted to get abused by their teacher. As though real life were merely an imitation someone’s weird pornographic fantasies.
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Oof. Peace of mind. It was late when I wrote this. Wasn’t it?
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Well, like Mark said… crack a book. Being home doesn’t mean one can’t continue to educate themselves, it just means they don’t have to be a wage slave. And if staying home and taking care of a house IS slavery, why would that be overly offensive to me if I was working in service of somebody I loved? I just don’t get why laundry is suddenly demeaning.
I’m pretty tired of this “slavery” analogy. I mean how many husbands beat their wives for being late with dinner or not keeping the canned goods lined up exactly right (Yes, Sleeping with the Enemy reference.) I get that ABUSERS might do that… but it’s not a “men in general” thing, certainly not a “husbands in general.”
What television show did you work on?
You ARE a smart woman. It takes intelligence and strength not to follow the herd and to do what’s best for you. Plus, staying home is a downright subversive act now. Sad but true.
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LOL *Glad all her parts are on the inside*
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I worked on a cheesy reality show (one of the first) called “Real TV.” I interviewed the people who sent in video. I was fun. I got to pilot a blimp once when we were doing promo shots for the show and, another time, go up and film a refueling mission from inside the refueling pod inside a KC-135. I didn’t stay in the industry though. Hollywood is a cesspool.
It’s interesting that people correlate abuse with stay-at-homes wives. I think I read once that the abuse stats were higher for two-career families (perhaps factoring in female-on-male abuse) but I can’t find any stats on it. Either way, I can’t imagine that a woman is more or less likely to be abused if she’s a working woman. In my view (and experience) men who support their families on one income have a strong caretaker instinct.
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I think I remember ‘Real TV.’ Can’t remember what it was about though. Was it basically them showing weird things caught on tape and stuff?
I think it might be fun to interview people for “Jaywalking” on jay Leno’s show; basically find the stupidest person you can and put them on TV to get asked questions laughed at being the point of it.
Oh and I forgot to add a ‘j/k’ or ‘lol’ after my earlier comment. Didn’t mean to imply that I seriously think all housewives compulsively read Shades of Gray-type novels. Now that would be an egregious insult. lol.
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@Mark- Yeah, that was pretty much what the show was all about. People would send us in their “caught on tape” moments and we’d interview them and put it on TV.
I did meet some very cool people. The most memorable was a guy who was a member of The Golden Knights (the Army parachute team) who collided with another member in mid-air. Horrifying video. He survived but lost both legs and the other man died. But the man I interviewed was amazing. This was many years ago and prosthetics were not as well developed as they are now, so it was incredible that he was able to recover as well as he did and function on two prosthetic legs- especially considering he lost one leg above the knee. We had video of him waterskiing. He was trying to become the first double amputee to be accepted back into active military duty. I remember checking up on him later to see if he succeeded and he did go back as a weapons instructor. Major digression from our topic- but I never forgot about him.
And no worries about the Shades of Grey thing. Most stay-at-home moms I know have that godawful book. I flipped through one chapter and put it back. Utter dreck.
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I think the big problem with the church was not so much that it was piles of priests, but that the church hid it rather than taking action against the few responsible priests. That is what turned it into a problem with the catholic church, instead of a problem with a couple individual priests.
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Rape is not about one thing. There are many possible different reasons for many possible different situations.
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I have a problem with most women. I have come to understand how they work, but I just can’t grok it (my brain works in logic). It was watching my sisters and mother, especially in comparison to my father, that has really given me the case studies.
I don’t believe men and women are different. I belive that all people are different, and looking at groups, there is a trend that is different in men and women, so the mass of men and the mass of women tend to be different from each other, but that isn’t definitive when considering an individual man or woman.
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For a change, I’m going to disagree with you, Z.
We do now have a choice. And I would argue that while it may not be that most women can stay home, it is the case that most women *could* stay home – if they start making correct choices very early on.
If you want to stay home, you need to marry a man who can provide for a family on a single income. That means getting looking right away. Then, the two of you need to save money from the beginning, and live simply. Buy a modest home. Save money when you’re both single, and when you’re newly married, from both jobs, so you can put it to things later when you’re living on one income. Having one of you at home means you don’t have a second income, but you also don’t have daycare fees, and the at-home person can spend a lot of time on various things that save money. Simple cooking from on-sale ingredients, mending and sewing, doing a lot of things around the house rather than hiring someone, etc.
Having someone at home taking care of the house also allows the one earnight the income to devote more time and energy to it (which means more income) since their attentions aren’t divide.
Very few people couldn’t make it happen to have the woman stay home, at least until the children are in school. You just can’t have that AND all the nice things 2-income families get.
Women today can choose just about anything, but they have to understand that tradeoffs come with any of the choices.
On the other hand, a woman who wants to do 50% of the work and 50% of the housework must find a man willing to do the same, and who has the same standards of cleanliness so they both agree on what 50% of the housework is.
Women who want the man to do half the cleaning to the woman’s standard of complete are lacking an understanding.
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In other words, geek her out. Tell her about your Level 15 Wizard who’s specialized in Abjuration and your collection of Star Trek memorabilia.
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It could be argued that you were coerced into it, since rejecting her advances could have caused you plenty of grief (she has the law on her side and her word has more weight than yours). That said, we men can NEVER allow ourselves to be alone with a woman who’s obviously after us, much less if there’s alcohol involved.
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“Legally, he was raped. Charming sees that the experience meets the legal definition of rape, and it’s not shame or embarrassment that keeps him from charging her criminally.”
Sorry, but Charming wasn’t raped. He participated, and never said “no” or attempted to stop the proceedings. “I was afraid she’d get upset and make a scene” would rightly not persuade the police or a grand jury.
You still make a lot of good points, and the article holds up if we change the story a bit, but rape? It would be difficult to prove even under the nonsense of college affirmative consent laws, never mind under state and fed law.
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