I've posted elsewhere on this forum about this issue-- which is one that comes up again and again (and again, ad nauseum) in "males-only" types of settings. It's another of those things that makes me damned glad I don't have any kids. Here are my remarks:
- There are a lot of things that look a lot like rape and yet are not; conversely, there are a lot of things that DON'T look like rape and yet are. That's life, especially in the Big City.
- Taking advantage of a drunk girl is something generally acknowledged by all guys as shabby behavior. To some guys, shabby behavior is something only indulged in on rare occasions. To others, it's an elixir. No guy, however, goes through his whole life without acting shabby at least once or twice. (Most of them do it in military service, where their families and reputations are less likely to be affected by it.)
- A girlfriend of mine and I once had sex with the same guy on two separate occasions, under nearly identical circumstances: We were at a party, we became extremely drunk, we went into another room of the house and crashed. This guy (he was a friend of both of ours, too, not just some random guy) came in and when we woke up, he was screwing us. In my case, since I knew him and had already Done him a time or two anyway (one time in a kiddy park, yeeks! we were running around naked and screaming, to this day I can't imagine why no one called the police) I participated in this act, which was quickly over; then we went to sleep. In my girlfriend's case-- well one day we were talking and this guy's name came up. He was in a band and his band had just moved to another state to take advantage of gig opportunities there. My friend shuddered and said, "He raped me once!" I was like, "Oh...?" and it made me angry at him to hear that. Then when she told me the story, I realized that it was exactly what had happened to me, except that she chose to see it as a "rape". That made me go around wondering for a couple of years whether I also had been raped, and whether he had seen it as rape, and so on. My ultimate conclusion involved the realization that my friend had screwed hundreds of guys; she was what most people would term a "nymphomaniac". Even though I'm quite a bit older at this point, the total number of guys I've screwed, drunk or sober, is nowhere near 30. (If I ever hit 50, I will throw some kind of a party... hm.. or maybe that's what the party will be for: "I want to make 50 before I die! Bring a condom!") Anyway, let me add that another mutual male friend of ours recently told me of a harrowing few months of his life in which this same lady was aggressively pursuing him, calling him at all hours of the night, stopping by his place drunk and expecting for him to let her sleep there, and so on. (He managed to refuse her, though I'm not sure how he managed. Prayer, perhaps.) Therefore: My friend treated both of us shabbily, perhaps, but he didn't rape either one of us. Her saying that he had raped her was a value judgment against him, not a truly objective quantification of the facts.
- I have several real-life friends and several more on-line friends that have committed sexual assaults/rapes against other people, in a few cases garnering the usual collection of felony convictions and legal hassles, and in other cases getting clean away with it time and time again. I don't like sexual offenders or encourage people to commit these acts-- I just seem to run into a lot of this type of person, as I do their victims, and I don't really know why except to speculate that perhaps there are more rapists and rape victims out there than the average person supposes...? In any case the rapist/victim always seems more than eager to spill his or her guts about whatever happened in lurid detail, sometimes to my great discomfort. Yea, I know that a lot of the time people lie about this type of thing, but court documents and newspaper articles generally do not lie. (If they do, then God help us all, I suppose.)
Anyway, what I have grown to believe given all the above factors is this: People are stupid. Whether you are male or female, if you stick your hand in the shark's tank enough times, eventually the shark will bite you. The shark can't help being what it is-- it can't change its nature. You on the other hand can see its teeth and make an informed decision to keep your damned hand out of there.
Yes-- if you are just walking down the street and some guy jumps out of an alleyway, hits you over the head, and forces sex on you, then you are in no way to blame and it's a terrible crime; if you are lying in bed asleep in your apartment, and some guy climbs in the window and forces sex on you-- even if you left your window open, it's a terrible crime and you are in no way to blame.
If you are out in public getting wildly drunk and teasing everyone in sight, macking with complete strangers, flashing body parts at people, and begging for rides on the street corner, and some guy comes along and takes advantage of you-- he's a cad. Perhaps charges should be filed if he damages your body or steals your property. But it's not as clear-cut. To call it "rape" is a fine distinction that is perhaps not worth arguing over. When the guys start arguing about this type of thing, this girl puts her headphones on and turns up the volume.
If I had kids-- well, first off I can't even imagine it. Going through pregnancy and childbirth seem horrifying to me, and I'm someone who's seen my own patella hanging out after I crashed my bike once. If I had actually gone through the experience of having a child, I would want to make that experience count for something by not dropping the child into the sharks' tank before the child is old enough to know that the sharks will bite.
I would never leave an infant with someone I didn't completely know and trust, and I probably wouldn't leave it anywhere, period. I would personally escort the child to and from its school every day, or have it be escorted by another adult whom I trusted. I would supervise its play time with other children, and only allow it to go to homes of people I knew personally and had visited with myself. I would take the child with me to the library and store and never allow it to go by itself. If the child was involved in extracurricular activities such as sports I would unfailingly arrive before the activity was over to pick the child up, and let the child know in no uncertain terms that if I ever arrived to pick him up and found that he was somewhere other than where I expected him to be, he would never be allowed to participate in that activity again.
I would only allow my child to use a computer not connected to the internet-- if he needed to do research on something I would mandate that he submit that request to me so that I could look it up myself. If I found that he was using another person's internet service, or if he had rigged internet service on his own by stealing wireless or whatever (like one friend of mine, now age 16, has done several times), I would ground him for a very long period of time and not let him touch a computer at all. (I've told this one friend that he should be very glad I'm not his mom; his reply was: "If you WERE my mom, we'd BOTH be in jail right now!")
The above measures probably seem extreme to many, and kinda mean. But what seems extreme to me is the number of boys and girls who have told me that they have been raped or taken advantage of by opportunists.
Parents today seem to be overly preoccupied with their own careers and relationships, and I think that's a large part of the problem.
