Meet the Predators (men need to learn how to recognize and fight rape culture)

[TeamsterDem]

32. Things seen and experienced are also personal events, yeah?

So you're internalizing and personalizing the discussion as well. After all, you say that you've seen and witnessed it. So that being the case, then it must be a universal, or at least broad enough that all of us dumb men need your snide assertions that we live in ivory towers or whatever because we haven't personally engaged in raping or otherwise abusing a woman. It's utter bullshit, and I suspect you know it.

A second point, I'm not sure from where you're drawing this undeserved sense of nobility, but you haven't the right to tell me or anyone else that we should just leave a conversation. I think you know where you can stick your holier-than-thou attitude. You're not any better, any better-informed, or any more knowledgeable than anyone else. You're just like everyone else on this board, someone with an opinion. Unfortunately in your case, it's an opinion which seems to cut against well-accepted societal norms such as not stereotyping others in any case, not just when it doesn't affect you personally.

The things you claim to have seen are indeed awful, yet what you haven't yet and I suspect never will demonstrate is how they have anything to do whatever with the entire male gender. They don't, and I'm quite sure you know that. What they instead show is that some people are animals. But some doesn't equal all or even most. It simply means some. You know, sometimes when you buy a bushel of apples there'll be a rotten one or two in there. What you would do is throw out the whole bushel instead of simply deciding which few are affected and tossing those. It's irrational and, frankly, not altogether sane.

The point here is that you seem content to endorse the author's stereotyping of an entire gender to suit her aims, whereas I say that no aim can or should be legitimized by stereotyping others. It's no more correct to stereotype men as rapists or rapist-supporters than it would be to stereotype any other group based entirely upon something you've seen a few do. My point about my experience was to show you that not ALL men are the same, and either I'm the ONLY GUY ON THE PLANET like this, or - the far more likely - that many of us are like this and your stereotypes are both inaccurate and offensive. That you don't care about offending us simply because YOUR dander is up about some other subject is irrelevant to the point that you seem to endorse stereotypes when and where you think they serve you.

Try as you might, but you simply can't explain your comfort with stereotypes against men because you full-well know stereotypes are offensive and wrong. But I'm sure that won't stop you from responding with some inane tripe about how I'm in an ivory tower or whatever. You know, the straw men of which you seem so fond.