Do men understand rape?

[SheilaT]

106. Of course the man accused of rape should be able to defend himself.

But the almost automatic assumption that a claim of rape is false is offensive. And wrong. I just want to reiterate the point that far more women don't go to the authorities about a rape, than those who falsely claim one

And there really are gray areas. situations that involve a "he said, she said", or other ambiguities. I know. The two times I found myself in such circumstances, I did not report anything. Both times there were the kinds of ambiguities that would have made a claim of rape impossible to prove. But the sex was not consensual, trust me on that. So I know that the circumstances that lead to a charge of rape are far less ambiguous than my particular circumstances. And so I understand all too well that the actual claims of rape are far less than the actual rapes out there.

Here's what I want to say. Rape is a terrible, awful crime. But aside from the circumstances that all of us would agree constitute rape, are very many situations in which the sex is less than fully consensual. And I'm guessing that the latter circumstances involve all of those situations that make the men here so anxious, the less than obvious rape conditions.

I do acknowledge that there is a very gray area here. Yes, there are times when a woman consents and then changes her mind afterwards. That's not very nice, to put it mildly. If you really do consent, then changing your mid afterwards isn't very nice, to put it mildly. But I do think those situations, while real, are a very tiny minority of rape claims.

And please believe me, that women can take a very long time to go public with these things. I am, in this post, alluding to things that happened to me more than forty years ago, that I've never spoken to anyone about, and I don't think that's as uncommon as you men want to believe.