Casual sexual violence in dating

Shelly is a troll and is banned now. She was convincing a domestic violence victim to stay in her abusive relationship on another thread.

I hate the argument about enjoying strangling. Even if I did enjoy it, I can't imagine being with a man who enjoyed doing that to women. It is such a fucked up thing to want to do to someone.

20mum You have very clear and enlightening points of view. Thanks for posting.

I think a lot of teenagers spend more time discussing concepts than actually getting out there and, I dunno, snogging Kevin behind the bike sheds
I also find it interesting that a lot of young teens are declaring themselves asexual when they probably haven’t had a sexual experience yet.
Abigail Shrier said this generation of teens are having fewer romantic liaisons than ever.

We are too steeped in the tradition of training girls to be eager to please. An old teacher remarked "girls are easy, they will just get on with their work because they want to please teacher, but boys need more effort and attention because they will only work to please themselves".

The phrases "be a good girl" or " let's make you a pretty girl" are not intended as child abuse, but it is conditioning, because we don't think the best instruction for a boy involves being compliant, obedient, and making it the central focus of his existence, not to enjoy himself, nor to BE himself, but instead to do whatever is pleasing to others.

We certainly never make it the main focus of attention on him to do whatever it takes to be praised for his appearance, instead of for his ability, effort, achievement or work.

We have conditioned girls to want to please others, and boys to want to please themselves. Isn't that exactly what the thread is about?

P.S. I see it as all of a piece with women hanging out their skin in public, where men are covered, such as nearly any pair of t.v. presenters, she with low neck, bare shoulders or bare arms, and of course her legs out and wearing obvious makeup and painful shoes. The same with a formal dinner, or women and men singers Why?
And men can choose never to smile unless they want to, but women find it hard to resist smiling constantly. Why?
And an old fat non-good-looking man is fine for t.v., an old OR a fat OR a non-good-looking woman is unfit to be seen. Why?

Because women must be pleasing to men, men must please themselves.

I have some quite frank discussions with my soon to be 14 year old daughter, as she tells me how disgusting boys her age are because they're always looking at porn on their phones.
These discussions stemmed from the fact that she and her friend witnessing a 'little kid' (year 5 or 6) openly masturbating on the school bus - and the resulting fallout when I had to report it to school, who dealt with it atrociously (not UK).

I feel really sorry for teenagers and find it really concerning that the stuff they are watching is shaping their evolving attitudes to sex.

This is a useful campaign and website.

fightthenewdrug.org

Yes. But I have made a link between the old style 'pornography for women' of trashy romances, and the precursor of that, in the fairy tale princesses.

Women imbibe the story that their future is to find and keep the 'prince' substitute, (and of course his spawn) without whom they can have no existence.

Sexism for infants hasn't gone. It is horrifying, looking at infant t.v. programme adverts, to see the plastic tat for both boys and girls, but excessively for girls, with pink glittery plastic trash, to play at being indoors and at being fairy princesses. Very slightly older, they can also play at make up and hair styles. Admittedly some are more up to date, depicting daddy taking boy and girl children out on ordinary activities. (I wasn't sure if it was good to see him doing childcare alone, or a mistake, if it suggests mummy must be indoors doing the household slave tasks?)

A human born with a penis is born to boss and rule. A human born without, can aspire to be a womb-plus-broom breeder and domestic worker if she is lucky enough to be selected by one of these rulers, as his 'own'.

Thank you Drizzle, Blubell and Fluffy. Your experiences are important and your voices deserve to be heard. This is such a huge issue, one that is likely to affect most of our young people, directly or indirectly. As the mother of daughters, it's one that concerns me enormously. But, it doesn't seem to get the airtime it deserves. Maybe it would be helpful to start a petition to have it discussed in Parliament. I don't think Liz Truss has done much on this issue yet.

What's your plan? Tell men not to perpetrate sexual violence

Well the way we have since time began told women to keep themselves safe has not worked. So actually yeah, let's tell the men off for their violent behaviour.
I do not believe the porn genie can ever go back in the bottle, so that stuff is out there now for eternity. But there must be a mechanism to stop more being made, to prevent underage kids seeing it. To slow down this spread of supposed consent to things that actively hurt women.
And by hurt I dont just mean degrading acts and mental torture, I mean also the very real fallout of physical ailments that often happen even when really consenting adults have rough sex, like prolapsed etc.

I won’t even do online dating which in itself marks one out as weird it seems. My objection has always been I would never have picked all of my best friends out from their online profiles: some of my best mates have different politics; different religions different interests to me. And i could so easily have thought .. I’d never be friends with x she’s a Tory or I’m not a Christian so I won’t have much in common with her .. not the case at all. So I’d been worried about picking out guys for the wrong reasons because we appeared to have things in common .. but with the amount of weird violent guys out there I’d leave well alone. If society only treated single people especially single women better women would have more power against male violence. Financially it’s really tough being lifelong single

Oh I think the commoditisation of sex and pornography is far and away the most important of the three things you've listed in terms of the impact on sexual proclivities. I think reigning that in and condemning violent pornography would in effect contribute to 'telling men not to perpetrate sexual violence' and I think you miss misogyny and the sexual objectification of women out deliberately. Because I don't think violent porn would be as prevalent if the dehumanisation of women wasn't a factor.

What's your plan? Tell men not to perpetrate sexual violence?

I think getting rid of violent porn would be great. I think getting rid of all porn would be great. I'd probably go further with than that then you might, into things like advertising and film that isn't porn.

But the reason we have that increase of pornography, and of violent porn specifically, isn't some random thing. It comes out of three things: the nature of human sexual response; the sexual revolution and naturalistic fallacy about sex, and the commoditisation of sex and especially pornography.

The first of those is not really changeable, that's just what we have to work with. I don't see the others as changing any time soon, and the removal of sexual barriers is in itself part of the second of those.

"Some people don't like women". Who are you talking about Chestnut? We know the stats on violence against women inside out here. Who's carrying it out?

It's also the case that if you want to avoid that, it helps to get to know the person you are going to have sex with, and maybe, you know, talk about their values and believes around things like sex and porn.

Of course people may lie, but if someone is out for casual sexual violence they may well not be bothered with the work of getting to know someone.

Or to put it another way, if you meet some guy at a club and go to his place fo sex, you know pretty much zero about him. There is a big wide open field of things you don't know about that person. (It makes me think of those t-shirts that say "I would never date a Tory". You just wouldn't know.)

But regardless of the change in pornography, casual sex is always a risk, and no, you can't just make that go away. Whether or not it is fair. Some people are bad people. Some people don't like women. Some think other people exist for their pleasure. Lots of things are risks and we may take the risk anyway, but it's foolish to not acknowledge that it exists.

"And actually I think that you should be able to sleep with someone when you want and not expect to be abused and attacked."
Exactly.
Male violence by sick men is never our fault.
I had a few one night stands when I was younger. Anal was never expected. Never even came up in conversation.
I never felt unsafe even if it turned out to be less than fulfilling.
None of those men ever slapped me or said disgusting scary things to me.
The person who violated me had been known to me for 4 years.
We've been on holiday together.
We've got mutual acquaintances.
I didn't know he was sick until he showed me he is.
Im not taking any blame for whatever is wrong with him.
Obviously I will think twice next time because it has scared me and affected me quite badly.
So what do we do?
Never have relationships?
It seems like we can never really be safe, even in long relationships men hurt the women they're supposed to care about.
How do we know which ones are sick and which are decent until its too late?
This awful porn is making larger proportions of men unsafe to be with.
That's not our fault.

Chestnut, you're doing a lot of dancing around the issue of male violence here.

I'm not ignoring what people are saying, either, but what I am saying is that it really doesn't matter if any of us think strangers should be nice to us. Of course they should be.

But there has never, in all of human history, been a society where everyone is nice. And women are always somewhat more vulnerable physically than men, and sexually, and that's not something that can be changed. And sex, maybe more than most human activities, seems to invoke very primitive behaviour in people, a tendency to walk on the edge.

Every society that has been more than just a free-for-all has attempted to control this through social means. That includes normalising some behaviours while censuring others. And also risk-control at the social level.

Our society has tried to let go of both of these in an effort to liberate women's sexuality. First by avoiding censure of more and more activities. That's what is behind a lot of the direction porn has taken, and why it's not seen as a questionable niche interest. And we've also wanted to loosen social controls around risk exposure.

Those may or may not have been desirable things in themselves, but actions and changes always have results, and sometimes unexpected ones. But when you have a normalisation of any more extreme sexual practices, along with a normalisation of sexual encounters where it is easier to objectify people because you really don't know them, and also where they are in a position to make you physically vulnerable - that creates the conditions where you will have a lot more dehumanising sexual encounters and people behaving as if others are sexual objects.

Human beings dehumanise others really easily, all the time, in sex, in economics, in every way. Counteracting that always seems to involve making people see others as human in fact, not just in theory.