Thank you Mirri, that’s precisely what I meant.
I know not all men are rapists. I just meant that having this idea that there are few obvious demented sexual predators on one hand and all the rest of the men are trustworthy fellows who’d never do such a thing, is dangerous and naive.
Another pp said this which is exactly right:
He was a ‘lovely’ person, kind, funny, ran marathons for cancer charity’s. Not all rapists look like monsters. Some of them are good looking, now accountants.
You don’t know which men are rapists and which men aren’t. Perpetuating the idea of the obvious sexual predator is so dangerous - this is why, when someone is accused, people say “he couldn’t possibly be a rapist - he is so nice, handsome, successful etc”. Any man who commits date or acquaintance rape has to come across as trustworthy to their victims. These men may not even think of themselves as rapists (eg “she didn’t actually say no, so it must have been fine”, “she wasn’t keen at first but then she got into it” etc). DH had this realisation when all the me too stuff happened - he realised that so many of the sex stories that men have recounted to him over the years were probably actually rapes, which is so disturbing.
If you ever saw the infamous Reddit “ask a rapist” thread, there were a few posts from men who obviously went out intending to drug and rape women, or intending to have sex without a woman’s consent. The rest were men who either only realised later that they had actually raped someone, or who were stunned when they were accused of rape despite the fact that their own account makes it clear they didn’t have consent. There was a study done a few years ago where men were asked if they’d ever raped someone and the majority said no. They were also asked if they’d ever engaged in sexual activity without the other person’s consent and a far greater number said yes.
This is the reality of the majority of rape and sexual offences, and the men guilty of these crimes (which is what they are) are seemingly normal guys with wide circles of friends who just didn’t happen to care much about the other person’s bodily autonomy on one or more occasions.
Now of course, those men are unlikely to have been imprisoned for nearly a decade for those incidents. But I am sure that most women have at least one man in her social or family circle who has sexually assaulted or raped a woman. That is not the same as saying that all men are rapists or all men are bad. The difficulty is telling the difference.