The rape threads point to a larger need...revolutionary change in what it is to be "a man".

[KitSileya]

83. Actually, you're missing the point.

I think anyone who's been raped can testify that rape is evil, but the great heartbreak is that it isn't just "evil men" who rape. Many, many women, and men know that. It's your brother's best friend. It's your father, brother, uncle, cousin. It's your boss, your co-worker. It's your husband, boyfriend, date. All these have friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances who'd testify that these guys are great, that these guys helped them in a tight spot, that these guys are good fathers, that they can't believe these guys would do something like that.

The majority of rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows. The majority are not perpetrated behind bushes/in a dark parking lot/alley/park. It's perpetrated in beds and on couches, either the victim's or perpetrator's own, or the one she is put into at a party when she's drunk....and so on.

Most of these guys who rape (and it's 98% guys) do it because they see the chance, because they feel entitled to it, because they want it.

The majority of men? They don't rape. The majority of men never hold a woman down and force her. The majority of men would stop a rapist in a parking lot in a second, even at the risk of their own safety. What many of them would do if their best friend joked that he wouldn't mind "tapping that", or "she needs to be taught a lesson" or "she just hasn't been with a proper man yet, that's why she's a 'dyke'" - that's what these past few days on DU has been all about.

When you claim that rapists are just plain evil, you make them 'other', not proper men, but the sad fact is, most rapists are ordinary men, living ordinary lives, who cannot be spotted because of the horns on their foreheads and goat feet. We know they are rapists when they rape, not before.