On Rape and Empowerment, Cont'd

It’s important to note that when individual woman chooses to dress differently, drink less, etc. it may reduce the likelihood of her personally being raped, but there is no evidence that it reduces the overall rate of rape. So if a woman chooses to wear nail polish that helps her detect date-rape drugs, I’m not going to object to her trying to avoid rape. But if as a society that’s our strategy for preventing rape, it’s fundamentally wrongheaded because it doesn’t do anything to change the culture and may not even prevent rape, but only redirect it.

A few of the responses in this conversation bring up the distinction between offenders who deliberately sexually assault people and those who “do not realize what they did is rape,” and how we shouldn't lump them together “as if their crimes are equally heinous.” But does anyone really not realize they’re committing rape?

Does the person using verbal pressure, manipulation, and coercion to make a partner have sex with them really not think that what they're doing is wrong? Does the person who has to prop their partner up during sex because that person is too intoxicated to fully support their own weight really think there’s mutual consent and enjoyment going on?

There certainly are blurry situations when both parties are intoxicated and make reckless decisions that one or both of them later regret, and it’s difficult to say where these situations fall. But assuming that someone does see another person’s intoxication or personal insecurities as an opportunity to acquire sex from them, I’m not going to say their crime is less heinous simply because there was no physical force involved.

An important aspect of the rape discussion I don’t think you’ve covered: what about situations that the culture defines as rape but the participants don’t?

I knew a young man who’d been convicted of rape when he was 18 years old, as a result of the following situation. He’d just turned 18, with no sexual experience at all, literally a choir boy, when he met a girl online. She was sexually active and invited him over to her place one afternoon, when her mother was at work. She was a month shy of her 16th birthday. (I don’t know if he knew this at the time.)

Her mother came home and caught them in bed together. She called the police and his life came apart at the seams. He wasn’t sentenced to time in prison, but rather five years of probation, which required him to attend weekly group therapy sessions with men who had raped children, pulled women into vans, and so on.

Every session began with each man having to admit out loud that he’d “forced his penis into a woman or girl who didn’t want it,” which wasn’t true at all in his case. In addition, he had to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. He died shortly after I met him, of a heart attack, at 31. If the girl had been a month older, or he’d been a few months younger, none of this would have happened. Was he a rapist?

In my own case, I was initiated into sex by my baby-sitter when I was a pre-teen boy. I think she was 16 or 17. I wasn’t hurt or traumatized in any way I can recognize. I felt honored that she had any interest in someone so much younger. Was I raped? If so, it’s still one of my most treasured memories from those years.