Christina Sommers on the election

[PinkIsRad]

www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/12/05/how-to-make-feminism-great-again/?utm_term=.ac20de6aba9d

The trouble is that this implies that the 1 in 20 men who are rapists are spectacularly successful at getting women into bed unless they are "stranger rapists" ?

This seems to show a spectacular misunderstanding of the nature of date rape. Men who commit date rape don't come with the mark of Cain stamped on their forehead - they come across as perfectly nice ordinary guys - until they get you alone (not "into bed", simply alone). You think you've gone for a cup of coffee in their student digs (because actually most of us, even rad feminists, have male friends we like and trust and are happy to have cups of coffee with, alone, on the expectation that it really is just a cup of coffee) - and then they rape you. Or a hundred and one variations on the cup of coffee scenario.

Yes, that's right. I was raped by a man who had invited me in for a chat, and by a man when I was asleep in his lodgings because I couldn't sleep at mine. His mate had got off with my mate and they were in my shared room. The indecent assault was when someone I thought I could trust was driving me home.

Both the rapes happened when I was travelling, which tends to make you vulnerable. I couldn't face dealing with police in a foreign country.

I had a memorable rape escape that still fills me with satisfaction. I was talking to a new arrival in my home town at a party where I knew everyone. Turned out we lived in the same direction, quite a long walk. I made sure during our chat and stroll that he knew I was in a committed relationship so not available. We got to his, he suggested a coffee, I reminded him I wasn't single, he acknowledged. Opened door for me, and as soon as he was inside he calmly locked the door, saying "You can have this the easy way or the hard way."

I took a deep breath and said "Everyone saw you leave with me, and if you do anything to me i will walk into the pub tomorrow and tell everyone about it. I've slept with a lot of men in this town. I'm friends with all of them and they know I wouldn't invent anything. They will be very angry ." I was cold as ice and totally collected.

We stared at each other and then he slowly unlocked the door and stood aside. Next day I went to the pubs I used and told everyone what had happened. Also pointed out he must have succeeded with his routine in the past to get it so slick. I heard he was told he wasn't welcome anywhere. He actually had to leave town. He'd moved there very recently. Makes you wonder of his previous place had got too hot for him.

It was great and it confirmed my faith in my old lovers. Kinda gave me my power back after the other stuff. I had quite a number of friends with benefits growing up. They knew I was very open about my sexuality and had zero interest in lying about such matters.

This seems to show a spectacular misunderstanding of the nature of date rape.

Perhaps, but none the less the logical conclusion of this is that out of 2000 people, 500 women were raped by the same 80 men. That suggests a very high level of general inter mingling. Or to put it another way if you live in a town with 10,000 people, there will be 2 and half thousand women who have been raped, the rapists number just 400 - they require a pretty broad reach to sustain that. The other conclusion is that in order for the 1 in 4 figure to be correct then you need far more than just 1 in 20 men who rape.

Scallops
I don't think I am doing anyone a disservice, it's equally not true to say men were forced to capitulate into jailing each other for raping women.

Town of 2000 people (half men, half women) - so the one in four figure for women gives you 250 women.

Let's take Lisak's figure down to 5% i.e. one in 20, so 50 rapists. 6 rapes each - that's 300 rapes, closer to 1 woman in 3 (hence my comment about some women being unfortunate enough to be raped twice). Yes, the figures do work, once one realises that it is women, i.e. half the population, to whom the 1 in 4 figure applies. My point is that the figures look ball-park the same whether you arrive at them by counting up what women say about their experiences, or what men are prepared to disclose about their actions - so you have two independent research methodologies giving broadly the same answer as to the prevalence of rape in the population.

NPR article on campus rape

He [Lisak] found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?"

Or: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn't cooperate?"

About 1 in 16 men answered "yes" to these or similar questions.

Profile Of A Rapist

It might seem like it would be hard for a researcher to get these men to admit to something that fits the definition of rape. But Lisak says it's not. "They are very forthcoming," he says. "In fact, they are eager to talk about their experiences. They're quite narcissistic as a group — the offenders — and they view this as an opportunity, essentially, to brag."

Men are only jailed for rape because rape was once a crime against property (in the U.K.) and stealing was a hanging offence. Technically, when a man raped a woman he was either "stealing" her virginity and therefore her marriagability from her father or her virtue from her husband.

Sorry,*men were only jailed. i.e. Rape was a crime because women were property.

(Am trying to write the world's dullest report and my brain has gone to sleep)

Mostly

I am sure you are aware that the NPR survey is not the only one and other studies have produced figures that suggest something like 1 in 50. Ms Sommers herself has written debunking these findings herself I see.

I don't understand - either there is a rape culture or there is a small minority of serial offenders. I thought that latter view was not popular in feminist circles ?

Xeno

I don't agree with you that that is the reason we have rape laws. If that were true they would be removed from the statute book now that women are no longer considered mens property.

One in 16 men is not a "small minority". Even 1 in 50 isnt low.

And obviously there are serial offenders. Seems odd to me that a man would rape once then grow a conscience about it. Especially given how low the conviction rate is.

Do you think the estimate for the number of women who have been raped is too high? Or that there are more male rapists out there than research shows?

Believe what you choose, however that is the basis of rape laws in England. It was also a fairly reliable way of forcing a woman to marry you against her will.

In 1828 rape was classed as a felony, punishable by death but still legal within marriage, in 1968 the distinction between misdemeanour and felony was got rid of and it was punishable by imprisonment, but a woman still couldn't be raped by her husband which only became a crime in 1991.

Het "I find it interesting that the only one of my comments re Hoff Sommers' s article that Pink picked up on was the somewhat tongue in cheek comment about women just need to be nicer."

I did say that is the one thing I agree with her on. Which is basically what I was saying in the other thread as well. So in that sense, it's not "interesting" at all.

"I think our misunderstanding arose because I was wondering why Pink hadn't addressed the substantive comments I made about Sommers' article, choosing only to home in on the "women need to be nicer" "

Again, because that's the one I agree with.

girlwithflaxenhair " and it highlights the problem I have with privilege theory, is that now these stats are out there, white men can start saying that in this regard they are under privileged"

You do realize that sounds incredibly harmful towards feminism. "white men obviously aren't disadvantaged so it's bad the stats show they are in this case".

Do you think white men in the US are structurally disadvantaged ?

Xeno

Believe what you choose, however that is the basis of rape laws in England

Same for you, if that's why you think men lock each other up for rape in 2016, because of some victorian law, that's your call.

girl white men is too broad a category. white men of the lower socioeconomic classes are, however, as the stats show ;)

No girl, I think they lock each other up for rape in 2016 because of the sexual offences act 2003 and other laws I plainly posted about.

The women as property idea was pre Victorian btw, hence the 1828 act which changed things.

I do hope that that has cleared it up for you now.

Lass

The 'it' in question was the thread. I referred to the op as "the op".

Xeno

Men are only jailed for rape because rape was once a crime against property

That is what you said (emphasis mine, not were only jailed, are only jailed) You have cleared it up, but you'll surely excuse my confusion.

Pink

I agree with you PinkIsRad that "white men" is too broad a category, but it is a much smaller category that "all women" ?

What you said Miffer was

This isn't even effective trolling

Honestly, I don't even mind feeding it because I actually feel a bit sorry for the op

So whether "it" was the thread or not , the usual FWR approach that anyone who questions the radical feminism party line is either a troll and/or a man.

Flaxen, I agree with you that the concept of privilege is unhelpful, but it tends to derail threads to keep debating it, so I just skim over posts that talk about it.

I thought that research on rapists was that their average number of victims was seven (for rape), and that they were also responsible for a variety of other violent crimes against men, women and children. So four percent of men committing rape would seem plausible to me.

No one commented on my escape story but that man was very definitely a serial rapist, and very practiced at it. He had a routine.

Sorry Prawn - it certainly rang bells for me: I've had a few "near misses" but am always hesitant to talk about them because I'm lucky enough never to have actually been seriously sexually assaulted, and I always feel a bit embarrassed saying "hey, this has happened" because it seems so trivial, compared to what others have been through.

But yes, I remember one time in particular as a student where I got "white-knighted". A bloke offered to walk me round the back way to avoid some yobs who were kicking off in the street (they genuinely did look quite scary). Initially I felt quite uncomfortable with him (was only 19 at the time and totally inexperienced). We bumped into a friend of his, and my levels of discomfort immediately dropped, because the friend came across as fine, so he (first bloke) invited us both back for a coffee. Somehow by the time we got to his room, second bloke had disappeared (oh god, the problems of naivety and not being able, aged 19, to say outright "actually, you know what, I've changed my mind.") He got himself between me and the door and put increasing pressure on me to stay the night, to which I kept saying "no", until eventually I had this strong sense of "it's now or never" and just got up and said very firmly "I am leaving now." I always count myself lucky that he didn't turn violent on me, but let me leave - I think his coercion was always going to be purely verbal, but I wonder how many women he just ground down with this approach (I later discovered he had a massive reputation for being a sex pest in the university debating society, which a friend of mine belonged to). And yes, I think he had a routine, and had tried this a lot.

The other near miss was when a friend's boyfriend offered to walk me home after a night in the pub. This one totally blindsided me because everyone in our friendship group had him down as a "gentle giant" type. He sat in my kitchen drinking tea, having walked me home, and pretty much admitted to domestic abuse, said he was getting tired of his current girlfriend, and he wanted me to be his next girlfriend. I managed to talk him out the door (was a deliberate ruse on my part to make myself seem as small and mousy and boring as possible, while flattering his ego and saying how men like him needed strong women and he'd be bored with me in no time - I later read somewhere that this is actually one of the tactics suggested to women trying to escape violent relationships: make yourself as invisible as possible so he almost doesn't notice you're gone). I still wonder whether I unfortunately acted as a learning experience for him - "don't play your hand too early", and whether with his next would-be victim he covered up the abuse, played to the "we don't get along any more, and I wish I was with someone more like you" line, and basically fine tuned his technique.

Because these blokes do come across as having a technique they know works for them - e.g. spike her drinks with vodka, make sure she's seen leaning against you as she stumbles out the pub - and there we have it, instant "reasonable doubt" in a court of law if she's stupid enough to go to the police the next day. Or a hundred and one variations on this theme.

Your stories resonate with me, m0stlyhet. It's particularly in those vulnerable years of education and your 20s that this sort of thing happens. Once I was older and settled that sort of scenario just didn't occur. Nowadays I would only be vulnerable to stranger rape, which is far less common.

I'm entirely sure that an alarming number of men consider what they will be able to get away with. The 1 in 16 figure doesn't sound unlikely. However that leaves 15 blokes who wouldn't rape. Men who don't usually hate rape and have the deepest contempt for rapists. I have lots of delightful male relatives and, unsurprisingly, they find rape abhorrent. My DH said he couldn't see the motivation. To him, and to other lovely men, the enthusiasm and joy of their lover is fundamental to their own enjoyment. The friends with benefits I relied on to run the creep out of town didn't let me down. I realise a lot of women have had such bad experiences with men that they see them all as tainted, but I feel that feminists have a lot of male allies. OK, that doesn't change the fact of patriarchy but I've seen men do things that prove they want it dismantled too.

pawn My near miss was with an ex. We'd previously being seening each other but I had ended it. A few months later a group of us ( men and women) were wondering home after a night out. My ex was talking to me and we were having a laugh and sort of got separated from the others. He then cornered me in a memorial gardens we were walking through, and was begging me to go back out with him, I said no I liked him but not as a boyfriend, that's when he grabbed me and we ended up on the floor he was trying to kiss me whilst he had me pinned down, and was saying please, please. I was shouting get off!. I head butted him then kicked him and got out from under him. I called him a fucking rapest and to never come near me again, and then set off to find the rest of our group.

A couple of days later a friend of his called me a bitch, and said I'd really upset ex by calling him a rapest, and how dare I, ex would never have actually raped me.

I've also been raped and sexually assaulted. Plus groomed as a child.
I am amazed, I don't hate men in general.

Sorry sort of off topic.

Blimey, that was horrible, Mystic! Good for you. The fact that he felt able to complain about you calling him a rapist - well, just how entitled can some men be? You wouldn't have called him that if he hadn't tried to rape you, ffs!

I don't think it is off topic. We've been talking about rape and its prevalence. Or if it is off topic there's a bunch of us.

I think me calling him a rapist was more of slap in the face, then my (not so well aimed) headbutt. He did look unbelievable shocked and hurt at me shouting it at him, whilst I marched off. I also gave a mouthful to the friend. I hope that it at least gave them both food for thought about what rape is. As I believe it was ignorant entitlement. Neither of them believed they would ever 'rape' someone(if that makes any sense). The ex just wanted me back....I don't know how far he would have gone with me still struggling but if I'd have stopped struggling it most definitely would had gone straight to sex.

His friend originally seemed to think that what ex had done was OK. Until I spelt it out to him.One.by.one, grabbing someone(even an ex or someone you know), pinning them down, ignoring shouts of 'no' 'get off' 'stop it' 'fucking bastard' and carrying on kissing and touching. is sexually assault and if I hadn’t had physically hurt him and managed to get away, when would he have stopped? How was I to know at what point he would stop? or stop at all? What if I had grown tired of struggling and shouting? What then? In my book that is a rapist, don't want to be called a rapist? don't do those things.

It's bizarre that they just didn't see it.

The ex did stay well away from me after, and I got a half apology of the friend a few weeks later. But he insisted ex didn't mean to do what he did, and he really is a nice guy.

We were all in our late teens early twenties.

Thinking about it some more, it's why hate the films were the hero takes the unwilling feisty woman and kisses her and pushes her about until she melts and coose.

The James bond gold finger one makes me so angry. But I suppose boys who grew up watching their heros getting the girl that way, could normalise it in their heads? The ex really really liked me he really really wanted us to be together. If only he could make me melt and coo.............?