"Rape...is not caused by rapists" WTF!?!

[Unacceptable]

If you aren't aware of the rapist Brock Turner and the campaigners who think he's getting a hard time, have a read of this guardian link.

AIBU to think that the statement from Leslie Rassmussen decrying political correctness that harms poor boys like Brock is the dumbest piece of shit I've ever read?

Even in their drunkest, most ridiculous states my Husband, Brothers and adult sons would not rape a woman because, and I'm sure Leslie wouldn't want to entertain this notion, they wouldn't rape somebody because they aren't rapists!!!!

Brock clearly is.
Having sex without consent is rape.
Forcing yourself upon an unconscious person is rape.

You don't have to be a stranger in a dark alley to do that, just your normal, average, everyday twat.

I know it is hard to accept the wrongdoings of a loved one.
I know we'd all fight to protect those we care about but you can still fucking accept the mistakes that people make...even if you can't get your head around it, don't bury your head in the sand and pretend it's less of an abuse because 'he's a nice guy'.
When will people wake the fuck up?

Link: gu.com/p/4kk46/stw

I should add that part of the point of Cameron's book is to use an evidence based approach, looking at studies in social sciences and psychology.

Broadly, people subscribe to one of two viewpoints. There is the "all of us are human beings, and people of both sexes communicate in broadly similar ways" viewpoint. Then there's the "men and women are fundamentally so different they communicate in different ways and men, poor things, cannot understand indirect forms of speech, analogy, metaphor etc." - what you might call the Mars and Venus viewpoint. What Deborah Cameron does is to show that when you actually study this systematically - say, recording men and women in social situations and actually counting the number of words they use, the ratio of direct refusals "no not interested" to round-about refusals "In other circumstances I'd love to, but..." you find that there is no difference at all in the way men and women communicate.

It's a great book, with extensive references to peer reviewed studies. (And equally funny attempts to track down references to some of the dottier statistics that pop up in Mars and Venus type books - such as the famous "women talk 30% more than men" claim, which turns out to have its origins in an unreferenced footnote in a self help book!)

As for this thread being 'rape apologist' I think it is a real problem, on a thread where people have shared experiences of having been raped, for posters to say things like 'well, you can never really know whether there was consent or not, it's very complicated' - that does tend to sound rape apologist because it's the opposite of believing the person who says they have been raped. It's like saying 'we need to know more, to unravel this complex situation'. And then, in fact, saying that we can never have enough information because there are too many variables. So in sum, saying that we will never know whether they were raped or not.

Joe Biden touched on that in his letter supporting this victim: "We will speak out against those who seek to engage in plausible deniability. Those who know that this is happening, but don’t want to get involved. Who believe that this ugly crime is “complicated.”

He is right. It is not complicated - most men accomplish it very easily. It's not like most men go out and about every day trying very hard not to rape anybody, applying all their intellectual power to try and figure out whether they will really succeed in not raping someone because of how complicated it all is.

Vestal - absolutely spot on. Most rapes - the vast majority of them - do not have anything to do with misunderstood consent. That is something that rapists use after the fact to try to escape the consequences of having raped someone. I'm going to repeat my post from upthread, because it's really important to remember that most rapists commit rape knowing what they are doing is rape.

It's worth asking what the culture of rape apologism does. The work of American sociologist David Lisak is relevant here. He's done a lot of work on campus date rape. Much of his methodology centres round questionnaires which ask men about behaviours - behaviours which meet the legal definition of rape, but where the description doesn't use the word "rape". 6% of men in his sample admit to the behaviours - that is, they have carried out assaults on women which meet the legal definition of rape. Now for the scarily interesting bit - if he repeats the surveys actually using the word rape, the percentage of men in his sample admitting to rape falls to... 5%. That's right. Educating men would make only a small impact, because most rapists know they are rapists, understand consent perfectly well, just don't care about their victim. The only thing they care about is not getting caught. (Incidentally, they are also repeat offenders - Lisak finds that on average they have perpetrated 6 rapes each - which, allowing for women who are unlucky enough to be raped twice, pretty much gives you the 1 in 4 women are victims stat!)

So what does rape apologism do? It creates the necessary atmosphere of "reasonable" doubt in the minds of jurors which enable these men to get off a lot of the time even when the woman has found the strength to press charges and the police have managed to build a case. So, rape apologists on this thread, I don't blame you for rape itself, but I sure as hell blame you for propping up the culture which makes it extremely hard to get a conviction, and means that these men (mostly repeat offenders) are allowed to remain at large, raping over and over again.

I mean we insist that men immediately accept our refusal of their offer of a cup of tea.

I don't understand what that means. Is this an example of how complicated this whole thing is? What does it mean to 'accept' somebody's 'refusal' of a cup of tea? No wonder the tea analogy didn't work for you. You seem to have some complex acceptance rituals in mind for how people say no to a cup of tea.

Rest assured, millions of people drink tea every day and brew tea for others and it's fine. It really is.

Thank you for explaining that vestal though I think it's a crying shame that you are put to the task of explaining the difference between a nice old lady offering cakes at a tea party and a rapist. Because of people who say that really, they can't see the difference between the two things, owing to how complicated it all is.

The tea analogy, highlighting enthusiastic consent, we are also told is very problematic because there are many nuances and layers of complexity that are difficult to navigate with the whole intricate culture surrounding the drinking of tea.

How can a jury convict in these conditions? I guess that from the outset there will always be a reasonable doubt - if women are so convoluted and difficult to read that we will never really know whether they consented or not.

Rapists do NOT assume that their brand of "sex" is good for a woman. They know, in fact, that this is not the case. They know it leads to unwanted pregnancy and STDs and that they have to "get" women to have sex with them. They to most assuredly NOT assume that a woman who says no to sex with them is just being polite.

I don't know. I think there are many rapists who, like Brock Turner, feel outraged and repulsed to be defined as such. They don't ever consider themselves rapists. They honestly believe (or strenuously, consistantly claim to believe) that they are the victims of 'misunderstandings' or sexual partners who change their consent after the fact.

Brock Turner claimed, in court, that his victim enjoyed herself. He said that she orgasmed. Nobody knows what he actually, truly believes about the assault what he might silently admit to himself, if anything but he's certainly done an excellent public job of portraying himself as Mr But I'm Not A Rapist, as have his friends and family who gave support.

This is the insiduous awfulness of rape culture: to portray a sexual assault as gratifying to the victim, to state that it WAS good for her, that she wanted it, asked for it directly or otherwise. A woman who says NO isn't being polite she's being provocative, either trying to increase your desire, or to maintain her image as a 'good girl' whilst getting what she really wants. Men have every right it's practically a generous act -- to ignore and push through this false refusal. And this narrative is so ingrained that you can have a loathsome hit song about it: number 1 in 25 countries.

I hate these blurred lines!
I know you want it.
I know you want it.
I know you want it.

But you're a good girl!
The way you grab me
Must wanna get nasty.

Baby it's in your nature
Just let me liberate ya.

I honestly wonder if Brock genuinely believes that he's been misrepresented and victimised; that it's more than just a legal defense, and that he has utterly absorbed this 'blurred lines' aspect of rape culture, and in all honesty, even to himself cannot perceieve what he did as rape or assault. It's chilling.

Valerie - see my post upthread. In questionnaires carried out on young men on American campuses 5% will admit to being rapists even when the word "rape" is explicitly used.

I don't think Brock Turner has managed to paint himself as "Mr But I'm not a rapist", I think he's just managed to paint himself as someone with the absurd delusions of grandeur necessary to lie blatantly in the face of eye-witness testimony to the fact that he was raping an unconscious woman. (Of course, one of the things sociopaths do is believe their own lies, so it is possible he does believe these things...)

I do however agree that there is this horribly pervasive idea that "no means maybe, or more seduction please..." which is an engrained part of culture and is used to prop up and socially sanction rape. That's why we have to keep challenging rape apologism, so that we can whittle away at these entrenched social attitudes a little bit at a time, until the message gets through to everyone - jurors being everyday people like us - that if a woman says that she said "no" you should take that statement at face value, and assume that a reasonable man would also take that statement at face value, and that therefore the various variations on "well maybe she secretly meant yes" used by defence barristers/lawyers shouldn't be raising "reasonable doubt" in your mind.

I remember a few years back reading a terribly sad account in a newspaper by a woman whose attacker had been acquitted, because the defence were able to persuade the jury that it was possible that she might have voluntarily gone down a dark alley with a man she'd only just met in a bar, for the purposes of rough sex which had left her with a black eye and bruises round her throat, despite her protestations that she had never got off on rough sex in her life... We need to shift the burden of proof, or standards of what ordinary people think of as reasonable behaviour, so that she is believed rather than him.

Absolutely Lurcio. As my DDs grow up, I am more worried about entitled young men than I am about strangers jumping out of bushes. Both are horrific, but the former are much more likely than the latter.

Gone, no... not really.
My partner had watched craploads of porn as a young lad and when he met me I was not very sexually healthy in terms of how I expressed myself with men, I had gone through the degrading phase and was basically just very tense and lying there and found it very hard to connect emotionally with the act.. and you know what? He never once, not once (and we are together nearly 18 years now) behaved towards me in a way that suggested that I was a blow up doll. Not once. And we have been all sorts of ourselves in the intervening years.

You see this is even why the Blurred Lines thing doesn't really hit to the heart of it.. because a person with normal social awareness and attachment ability - not perfect, we're all broken in our own ways, but who has the ability to connect emotionally, physically and sexually to some extent could say all those things in play with a consenting partner with absolute respect for their sexual agency and sovereignty with NO intent to coerce. We do a HUGE amount of the dance of communication in how we are physically and in our eye contact... before, during, after.. and yes people move towards and away, like the tango... but rape is different. Because it's about ceasing to treat the other person as a human being with sovereign agency over their own body. It's about saying, your body is nothing to me but an object to release myself into, to dominate, to control - you, the person behind the eyes, is irrelevant here, I don't give a flying fuck how you feel about this and I actively want to cause harm.

The funny thing is this has given me some compassion for my rapist that I didn't have before because it is an assault to all of our humanity when anyone treats another person like this.. it creates negative ripples in the world and he has to live with that and the consequences of his actions which are not entirely his own fault (given what his father taught him about being a "man"). But as they say - it may not have been his fault (he was conditioned in his learning history to treat women like this), but it is absolutely his responsibility and he will live with his actions for the rest of his life.

I love the cup of tea analogy, but whenever it's brought up the argument goes around in the same circles. Ah, but it's too simple because human relationships are more complex than mere tea. But however you try to drag up complicated scenarios, the basic principle is absolutely sound and holds up in all cases: it is the drinker's right not to have tea imposed upon them. If they said no but actually if you kept on at them a bit, Mrs Doyle style, they might admit that they wouldn't mind, or might even like it - so what? What's the big deal about not having a cup of tea that there's a small chance they could have enjoyed?

Be honest, you're not going on about it because you are worried they will miss out. All you would have to do is say "ok, but if you change your mind later I'll be happy to put the kettle on at any time". The downside of this is, of course, that if they don't change their mind then you get to miss out. Not that they will. That is the whole point and it's most disturbing how many people don't see it from that perspective. But but but, I want them to drink my tea. It makes me happy. What do you mean, it doesn't make them happy? What has that to do with anything? Erm... everything?

Argh, that's too flippant for the serious turn the thread has taken. I'm making the same point as the last few posters, I hope, but in a rather silly way. Apologies for that.

The cup of tea analogy may help people who want to initiate sex learn to listen to 'No'. I hope so.

I am thinking it may not help girls/boys who get into a position where it is difficult for them to stop what might happen next, even when it is against their real will; or who have already started holding the tea cup, when they then say 'No I don't want it with the sugar you are now trying to put in' or 'No, I don't want it after all'

I wish there were a video about that. Every year so many girls/boys are having years/their life ruined by so called date or acquaintance assault or rape. Most often will never go to court. If it does, their version cannot be proven. Rapists in these situations may conveniently believe they have done nothing wrong/think they had every right to believe they had consent / that no one can prove otherwise/or even that in the heat of the moment it's worth the risk.

It would be good to have those scenarios better explained in a video.

The study Lurcio was mentioning shows there many men expecting or hoping to get what they want sexually regardless of a girl's wishes. They are circumventing no as a possibility one way or another. Imagine the footballers in a US fraternity, a UK boys school rugby team, or soldiers in an army lined up watching the Cup of Tea video. I wonder what they would make of it?

Gonetoseeamanaboutadog
That is interesting about the man you know who had sex against his real inner feelings because he felt it was expected, and who was very upset afterwards.

It is indeed counter-cultural to remember men may not always want sex, even when it seems consensual.

kaw

You misunderstand me. I wasn't suggesting it's complicated at all for a man to immediately say 'ok, no problem' if he has asked someone if they'd like to have sex and received a negative response.

I agree it's difficult to talk about this issue on a thread where people have talked about their own experiences of being raped. But what's the alternative - never mention it at all? Not 'allow' women to speak from personal experience of rape and confine them to threads for survivors only? I wouldn't make that choice personally. These issues are mentioned in a court room so it may as well be mentioned here, among women, when there is no prosecutor trying to twist everything.

It interesting about my friend, isn't it kinddog.

To those of you who think this issue can never have the least shadow of complexity, do you think my male friend was raped, or not? (Post Sat 11-Jun-16 09:46:28). (He doesn't, BTW).

It's about saying, your body is nothing to me but an object to release myself into, to dominate, to control - you, the person behind the eyes, is irrelevant here, I don't give a flying fuck how you feel about this and I actively want to cause harm.

I'm sure you're right, almost all the time fusion. I'm glad you have found an understanding, intuitive partner who could sense when you were shutting down, but not every man is able to do that every time.

I wasn't intending to suggest that men may intentionally treat women as if they were a blow up doll, but that 'connecting' during sex is not always automatic and sex can be a fractured, isolated, isolating act without either partner intending it to be that way or realising there is another way for it to be.

Some posters have disagreed with my POV but have still acknowledged that fuck ups can happen, especially to young people. I agree with that and think we should look at how and why it can happen.

I understand the risk that prosecutors could, and do, abuse the concept that there can be complexity around a shared decision to have sex. I can see that in the majority of cases, where there is a perpetrator and a rape, this would be unhelpful for women, or victims of either gender. It could be twisted to reinforce rape myths that are hard enough to shake off anyway. But it could go the other way as well. My perception is that sometimes younger women have unwanted sex and are vulnerable to feeling pressure to have sex (from internalised cultural pressure and from their assumptions about what men want) as a result of these 'complex' issues and perhaps confident, eloquent feminists don't get that.

Here is an article by someone who has been investigating why rape is so prevalent on college campuses.
It is interesting in light of this Brock Turner case, but I do not think it has been posted in this thread yet.
www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/what-makes-a-campus-rape-prone/402065/

Interesting that he mentions he also mentions he has 11 grandchildren, and wants his granddaughters to grow up in a society that has zero tolerance to this kind of criminal conduct.

Amen to that.

I am thinking it may not help girls/boys who get into a position where it is difficult for them to stop what might happen next, even when it is against their real will; or who have already started holding the tea cup, when they then say 'No I don't want it with the sugar you are now trying to put in' or 'No, I don't want it after all'

This is missing the point completely. The tea analogy is SUPPOSED to be a simple one. It is an every day life experience that most people can relate to, that does NOT come with complexity, confusion and angst. 'Cuppa?' 'no thanks'. Done. Most people do not go into paroxysms of anxiety when offered a tea. 'Oh, what if I took a sip and I didn't like it, what if it's too hot, what if it's too sweet, what if I change my mind' etc. We all get that it's ok to say no, it's ok to put the tea down and leave it if you change your mind, and despite people bringing up tea parties and social expectations no, we don't expect people to hound us to the death because we didn't fancy a cuppa or because we left a half-drunk cup of tea in the kitchen sink.

Has any hostess ever called you to say 'why did you drink only half the tea I made you, I'm so confused, I must follow you and pour it down your throat by force?' No.

So, the point is PRECISELY in the simplicity. Telling girls and boys - it's simple. If the other person doesn't want sex, drop it. If you're not sure, drop it. If you feel like you're getting mixed signals drop it. If she started out fine but now she's passed out or crying or just gone cold, drop it. Just drop it, ok? You don't have to insist on sex with that person. There are no shades of 'but there are several layers of complexity here, she kissed me first, what does this mean, I'm confused, perhaps I better press on and just force her to kiss me anyway' none of that.

I agree with Annie and I think it if people can pretend not to understand simple examples, then they can also pretend not to understand rape. They are having sex with an unconscious girl behind a dumpster and still come to court saying it's very complicated.

So: poor Brock. He must have been so confused. It's very difficult to know whether a girl is consenting. Especially if she's unconscious so she's unable to say 'no, get off!' owing to being unconscious. So she couldn't help him out and give him some guidance. He was left to figure out this complex situation on his own. Unconscious girl - maybe she's gagging for it? Best drag her body behind the dumpster and penetrate her, maybe that will help clear up this really complex situation.

12 jurors called bullshit so he's going to appeal. He will be asking the appellate judge how anybody could know for sure that the girl hadn't agreed. Judging by some of the views on here, he may well get away with it.

I'm sure you're right, almost all the time fusion. I'm glad you have found an understanding, intuitive partner who could sense when you were shutting down, but not every man is able to do that every time.

Now you are beginning to piss me off, Gone. Now you are rape apologising. You are also not reading my posts accurately. You are insisting it is about the form of the behaviour rather than the function. It has fuck all to do with having an "understanding, intuitive partner" and everything to do with having a NORMAL, HUMAN partner who doesn't, you know, rape.

And where you are getting the idea that I am saying that normal sex is about 100% connection by saying that normal sex isn't the same as rape is absolutely beyond me. You keep trying to apologise for men just pushing ahead with sex when the woman is CLEARLY not consenting because you think consent is "complex". It really, really isn't. I'm not talking about a woman thinking about the shopping or something half way through and not being "in the moment". I'm talking about when the man IS DEMONSTRATING no interest or care or concern for his female or male partner by really not giving a flying fuck about them as they have sex. It really isn't that difficult.

As Oscar Wilde said: “Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.” Sex should really stop if one person is feeling that the other person has lost all sight of them as a human being.

AND in any case, this woman was UNCONSCIOUS, he got dirt in her vagina and she was badly injured. Where are your blurred lines, Gone? Where?

Hell, we owe strangers on the street due care and attention, to make sure we don't barge into them or whatever. Surely we owe at least that level of consideration to someone we are having sex with?!

It has been reported that Brock photographed his victims breasts, while she was unconscious, and sent them to a (whatsapp?) group. Police found evidence - in a response to one of his friends "who's tits are they" {sic} but the photo had been deleted.

He knew what he was doing - his reported behaviour at that party beforehand, and on previous occasions, showed him to be sexually predatory.

Rapists want people to believe that consent is complex and a grey area - because that's how they get off rape charges. It really isn't though.