Or is this victim blaming?

Do you also take off your vagina when you are around men you don't know or before you have a drink?

To summarise, OP thinks the following things make women more likely to be raped:
Going to a man's hotel room for a ONS
Getting drunk
Walking alone after dark
Getting a taxi alone
Wearing " revealing" clothes..

Is there anything I have left out? But none of this is victim blaming. Just a dispassionnate analysis.

If it’s so straightforward why isn’t it working? Rape has generally been a criminal offence in the UK for the last 750 years (though has obviously the exact definition has evolved in that time). As disgusting as it was, the marriage exemption was repealed before I was even born. I went to university in 2012 and we had talks on consent - that was not the first time I had been ‘educated’ on it.

Presumably, parents of boys have been telling them not to rape women for decades if not centuries. At a societal level, rape is often seen as equivalent in severity to murder and child molestation.

Men know it is wrong, they know they shouldn’t do it, and in my view, no amount of education is going to eradicate it. If we lived in an ideal world no one would ever harm anyone else! But that isn’t the reality.

Because these men say “come to my hotel room, just for a drink”, “you’ll be safe, I promise”, “I won’t try any funny business, we’ll have a chat about …”

And they think “he said it’s just for a drink, he’s told me sex is off the table and that I’ll be safe”

yes, you’re victim blaming.

Yes its a criminal offence, but its woefully unreported, conviction rates are atrocious, so where is the deterrent? Men know they shouldn't do it, but they also know the odds are stacked in their favour.

You only talk about women at risk from men-it can apply to men (either as victims of other men, or as victims of women, though we don't know how many there are as so few report).
And women can be assaulted by other women, yet that is not talked about enough.
But you're right. When there is a data breach, we don't blame the thief-we blame the victim for not protecting the data! If a thief drives of with your car when you left it unlocked, we blame you! No, that's not the same as rape, but your principle is the same.

Man can rape other men, women cannot commit rape. SA is not what the OP was asking about, this thread specifically asked about rape, hence the responses.

So a very long time ago, fresh out of postgrad, 23 year old girl, I worked for a firm of solicitors who dealt with a lot of sex crime.

I was tasked with getting a statement from a client charged with rape and had previous convictions for the same. My male boss insisted I went to his home, the other side of the country, to take his statement. He lived alone btw. I refused - he'd have to come to the office instead. Boss pushed back on me.

If I'd gone and he'd attacked me, do you think my boss would have been negligent in sending me?

I agree with you, OP. Too many people don’t think they have a personal responsibility to try and protect themselves. We were all brought up with stranger danger being drilled into our heads, and yet as adults we all want to live our lives in the world we want to live in rather than the world we actually live in. This isn’t just about sexual assault…it’s about all types of crimes or daily risks we may encounter. We risk assess in our heads constantly to try and avoid anything that may threaten our survival. That doesn’t mean we deserve it if we are attacked or mugged or raped. But we can try and do things to limit the chances of being a victim to someone else’s violent impulses.

100% disgustingly victim blaming. Women should be safe from being raped , especially if they are in a vulnerable situation. The fault lies entirely with the perpetrators, who, rather than think this woman needs looking after, sexually abuse them.

I assume this is sarcasm?

Just because a person agrees to lick a bumhole doesn't mean they agree to anything else.

If it isn't sarcasm it sounds exactly like something a rapist would say.

She does have at least one daughter.

The poor girl if she ever does anything that suggests to someone out there that it might have been risky and she is raped. Sadly, lots of women are raped and sexually assaulted in all sorts of situations by all types of men. This blaming women for putting themselves in situations that the OP considers unsafe is basically sending excuses to rapists. Not on and frankly quite sick that a woman? would do this.

Why do some women not just blame the rapist for his crimes?

So your argument is that a woman consenting to perform one sexual act on a man means that man has carte blanche to do anything they like to that woman going forward?

It must be surely! We cannot possibly still need to counter the argument that if consensual sex has taken place previously, the woman is not allowed to withdraw consent in future. The sort of archaic thinking has no place in 2026.

So I had sex with a man 1000 times, then decided o didn’t want sex with him, if he then had sex with me again, he would be raping me.

I hope you’re never selected for jury service!

I feel it is largely to do with the control aspect which has already been brought up to a various degree.

The reality that actually, there is very little you can do to avoid rape as you are most likely to be raped by a man you know, trust and maybe even love is scarier than thinking you have some aspect of control over it. It's comforting to think that it won't happen to you because you make good decisions like not walking alone at night.

So you’re saying these women weren’t “victims”?

Your experience wasn't universal. I was at university at the same time and remember an ethics seminar called something like "can no mean yes?". Plenty of people, including the female lecturer, argued that women often say no during sexual encounters when they mean yes, and that this can be confusing for men. (The highlight was a girl laughing at my male friend and telling him no wonder he couldn't pull if he waited for girls actually say yes to him... not sexy back then apparently?).

We also had safety events that concentrated heavily on telling us to protect ourselves, our drinks, and our friends, no equivalent sessions were run for male students suggesting they kept their hands to themselves.

Just look at old media, raping women too drunk to say no was seen as a valid technique to gain sex not that long ago. I don't think I even heard the term 'enthusiastic consent' until my mid twenties. I didn't realise I had been raped until years later because I hadn't actually said no and nobody ever taught me that I didn't need to.

It's also wildly misleading to take rape being illegal as proof that men were historically taught not to rape women (in our modern understanding of the word). Violent rape of a woman you weren't married to might have been viewed in this way, but raping a woman who had kissed you, had gone somewhere private with you, or suggested in any way that she wasn't the perfect victim, would often not have been categorised in this way.

The issue is, boys might have always been taught not to hold someone down kicking and screaming... but that only accounts for the tiniest proportion of assaults. Most of the rapes that have ever occurred would have been committed by someone who would never have considered their actions to be rape, and wouldn't see themselves as a rapist, because we haven't taught people, male or female, what true consent looks like on a consistent level until very recently.

There has been so much stuff on consent. The thing is that there will still be rape. It is such a fantasy to think it can be eliminated and so delusional to think that these poor rapists just don’t understand that someone needs to consent. I’d say things have become worse not better. When I was at uni rape happened but nearly all guys would deny that they would ever do anything like that. Now you get men boasting in WhatsApp groups about being rapists and looking up to idiots like Andrew Tate.

They always know it’s wrong but they think they can do it anyway.

Cone on op you can see easily how it happens ...if not an attack dragging her in then it is manipulation .
"Oh we on same floor. Come by my room for a coffee. I got some paracetamol for you. We dont need to do anything. Let s talk. You understand me so well. I have a wife. "Etc. Lays on charm etc

Then he rapes her.

Ok, so if boys all understand enthusiastic consent without needing to be taught, was I just an idiot for not recognising it when it happened to me? I was brought up in the same cultural context as him, internalised the same attitudes, and received broadly the same education?

Edited to add: there will always be rapists, unfortunately. Just like there will always be thieves, murderers, racists, homophobes etc. That doesn't mean that education and a shift in cultural norms can't improve things.

Perfectly summed up. 👏

If i go to a hotel room and say no and get raped - Its HIS fault

No one, including the Op, is denying this. The point isthough, you are increaseing your chances of being raped by 100% if you go to a hotel room with a man you only just met. And I say this as someone who, when younger, has taken this risk. When I look back I count my lucky stars that the sex we had was nice, and didn't turn into something hideous, that I couldn't get away from.

I do remember a ONS where I stayed the night in a man's flat, and when I left the next day, I noticed a collection of axes mounted on his wall (his hobby), and I did think to myself, what a stupid twat I had been, being so risky with my safety.

We make calculations all day when it comes to our safety. Don't switch the light of with a wet hand. Don't walk into the road when a car is coming. Don't slam the car door on a finger, don't eat the food before it's cooled, etc etc. But all too often, when it comes to men we fancy, we forget to just stop and think about what risks we might be taking. Maybe it's lust, I don't know. In any case it's not really avoidable, because at some point you have to be alone with a man, whether it's after a 1st date or a 10th date, or you'd never move the relationship along. Not sure what the answer is.