Stop Telling Women How to Not Get Raped

[MrModerate]

157. You're right. I don't like your response -- for one reason.

Describing why someone does something is not synonymous with absolving guilt, any more than describing tactics to avoid having bad things happen to you assigns guilt if those things happen anyway. Hence your criticism of me is unfair.

Rape is rape. Knowing that it can arise from foolishness, inexperience, drunkenness, or inability to hear the word “no.” doesn’t make it any less a crime. But trying to understand a behavior is not the same thing as being an apologist for it.

At the same time, understanding what might cause a man to rape is very helpful in developing strategies and tactics to avoid it happening to you.

With regard to the changing status of women when I was a young man, that’s a subject for a library of books. Suffice it to say, that there were pressures on young women to “snag” a boyfriend or face social opprobrium. That often placed them in the situation of acceding to intimacies that they didn’t welcome so as to not lose those boyfriends. Many of them literally did not know they had the right to say no even when they desperately wanted to.

I’m sure this is no revelation to you.

Today we call such forced intimacies acquaintance rape. 40 years ago it wasn’t so clear.

With regard to alcohol, if a young man (shall we say) gets loaded and drives his car head-on into a minivan of kindergartners, we both understand why it has happened, and that it’s unacceptable. But just because we can assign blame doesn’t make alcohol any less dangerous. And alcohol is closely correlated with acquaintance rape, especially among young people. And it is an inescapable fact that when you’re intoxicated, you behave and think differently — that’s the objective of getting intoxicated, after all — and being “flirty” is not nearly as meaningful as “taking risks.”

And I still maintain that discussing prudent behavior – risk avoidance, if you will – shouldn’t be taken as setting up a victim of a crime for blame. And frankly, in my experience most people (on the whole, and outside of courtrooms) just don’t do that.

I’ve had several women friends who have confided sexual abuse to me (and no doubt many others who never did), and while they related a variety of responses to the crimes committed against them — including self-guilt — none of them complained that their family and friends blamed them, even in those cases when the friends pointed out that they could have/should have acted differently.

Hence the distinction I make between prudence and blame.

Perhaps you don’t see a difference. If so, then we’re just talking definitions and this conversation has never been over substantive issues.