@100: For me, it's easier to talk to a group as if you think members of that group might unfortunately be victims than as if you think they might be perpetrators. Not that the latter wouldn't be a useful conversation, just that it's tricky to take on. (And to me, feels a lot more blame-y than the former.) In that vein, however, I second @15's recommendation to watch the youtube video about consent and tea.

@101 - For every victim there is a perp, no? Or are you afraid to trigger the wrath of the MRAs if you place the blame where it belongs?

Sorry - getting a little frustrated now.

@101: There are no groups more likely to be perpetrators than to be victims. Any and every group of humans has far more survivors than perpetrators in it.

People who claim that the way to address rape is to tell the victims not to commit rape are monsters.

@103 - In this particular instance, there is one victim. Try to remember that.

@102: Well, statistics indicate that a large percentage of rapes are committed by serial offenders. So it's more like for every six to ten victims, there's a perp.

However, I wasn't trying to address probabilities. I was just stating that for me, the one conversation is easier to have than the other. That's all.

Actually, it's not quite all--also, I think potential victims are a lot more likely to listen than potential perpetrators.

But I get your frustration! It's a complicate and loaded topic, and if I thought I had anything to say that might deter perps, you can bet I would be saying it! I just don't, apart from agreeing with DarkHorse that better (or existing) sex ed (including a discussion about consent) would be great.

@105: This is a very fraught topic, but the best way to deter perps is to not rape them, and not let sexual assault go unpunished. What little evidence exists (for obvious reasons) indicates that a huge percentage of rapists are survivors of sexual assault. The lesson that "boundaries don't matter?" They all learned that from somewhere.

But I largely agree with you--anyone who's going to listen when told "Don't rape people" already has. The people who can be reached are already not going to become serial rapists (and most rapists are serial).

And according to RAINN - 98% of rapists will never spend a day in jail. So they are out there - everywhere - and I'm sure some of them even read Dan.

Someone up thread countered Lost by comparing advice to women to the struggle to pass gun control laws. I'd say the gun control analogy is more apt for the perpetrators of rape. You say it's fruitless to even try to dissuade them because they won't listen - but isn't that exactly the same sort of defeatism Lost was accused of?

Good point JibeHo @100. Where to even start. How about males stop thinking
of females as things to be used for their own pleasure.

JibeHo, I don't want to be murdered. In light of this, I am going to avoid dangerous neighborhoods at sketchy times of night. Or any other situation that I think carries with it a higher than usual chance of being offed. I am not going to escalate an argument with a big scary man even if I know I am right and he is a dick, especially when it is clear that he has an anger problem. That is my short-term solution. The long-term solution is to try and convince the world that killing people is not a way to solve problems, but you know and I know that that task will never be finished. And in trying to browbeat potential murderers into accepting responsibility for their potential murderousness, using whatever broad brush approach makes you target a certain demographic, I am going to indict a broad swath of people that never intended to murder anyone and understandably resent being lumped in with psychopaths etc.

So in the interests of expedience and a long, healthy life, I take certain reasonable precautions, knowing that nothing is foolproof and that not all eventualities are foreseeable. This does not in any way imply that murder victims are responsible for their own deaths. Inferring such from what I said would be a leap that almost seems like looking for ways to take offense.

The damage occurs a long time before sex ed. It's about cultural attitudes to women begun in the family. Also the lack of cultural expectation on men to put in the work to rear their sons well.
Our culture is failing in rearing males well.

LateB - I live in the same world as you, and I get what you're saying, but... When someone writes in with their story of how they were nearly sexually assaulted, it irritates me that the comments veers so quickly into the "here's how to not be a victim" territory. If people are reading these comments I'm going to assume they are fairly sex-positive, if not sex-savvy. That includes the female readers.

Talking to the female half of the population (painting us with a broad brush as it were) to give us advice on how not to be sexually assaulted - well, that assumes that we're oblivious dolts.

We read Savage Love for crying out loud. We've heard all of the admonishments about not putting ourselves in harms way.

It's patronizing and frustrating. And if you want to give advice - if you really think there are women out there that haven't heard the message - post a link. Don't post an interminably long and incomplete (always incomplete eh Lost Margarita?) list of shouldas in the comments.

@JibeHo, I respectfully suggest you are misunderstanding me. I am not trying to say it's fruitless to try to dissuade rapists. I am saying that I don't know how and that I think they are less likely to listen than potential victims are, and therefore it's not the conversation I was having. If you feel like this is something you know how to do, please do so! I certainly won't try to interfere!

LateBloomer @109: Exactly.

@111 and I crossed in the ether, so one more thing about this:
Talking to the female half of the population (painting us with a broad brush as it were) to give us advice on how not to be sexually assaulted - well, that assumes that we're oblivious dolts.

Again, this is my impression, and clearly you are interpreting this differently! So I don't mean to imply *you* shouldn't feel insulted if someone is saying this to *you*, but I thought it was a more general discussion--and for me, at least, the obvious audience is high school or college age women (which is why we talk about frat parties, for instance), who are at high risk, and many of whom, if you'll excuse me, are dolts. (As are their male counterparts.) It's part of being young. Should we not recommend things we think might truly help someone because we're afraid of insulting them?

I suppose you feel that we're just preaching to the choir, as anyone here knows all this already. Maybe that's true for the commenters, but there are lots of people who read without commenting, and I suspect plenty are college kids.

The common denominator, mostly, in rape and stranger murder, is they are males. Is there some inherent problem in
some men, that they have this flaw in their humanity? That murder, rape, sexual @ violent assault are somehow in some men's DNA?
Of course not. Therefore the problem lies elsewhere. In the messages males get and how they are reared in the
family.

@113, ciods. By your reasoning then, it's inevitable that males will sexually attack females, being dolts and all. And the dolt females have to memorise lists to avoid the dolt males assaulting and raping them?
Boys will be boys etc. Those are the sorts of messages I'm referring to.

@106

"anyone who's going to listen when told "Don't rape people" already has."

I disagree. According to that oft-quoted 2014 survey (http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.…), plenty of college-age men are hazy on what is and isn't consensual sex. Nearly a third of respondents have admitted to coercing or forcing a partner to have sex, but didn't seem to associate this behaviour with rape or sexual assault, nor think of themselves as rapists. A simple anti-rape message will not reach those guys.

This article - http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/01/… - has links to a few other similar studies.

"[The researchers] found that the men who were comfortable admitting their “intentions to rape” displayed a wide range of outwardly hostile attitudes toward women. The men who rejected the “rape” language, but said they would still use force against a woman, didn’t display that level of outward hostility. But they were still linked with what the researchers defined as “callous sexual attitudes”: a set of cultural stereotypes about women as objects and men as aggressors that feeds into hyper-masculinity".

From what little information we have, the LW's former friend may well fall into the latter category. Just a regular guy who grew up with a fucked-up, but depressingly common notion that boys were expected to "try it on", and if a girl didn't say yes right away, she was probably just being coy and playing hard to get. And hey, the LW didn't pull away when he gave her those very long touchy-feely hugs, and agreed to share a sleeping bag with him, right? That's a sure sign she was up for it, yes?

^^In case it's not clear, the above paragraph is not intended to justify the guy's actions or shift the blame. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there's more to consent education than simply saying "don't rape people, mmkay?".

I completely agree with JibeHo - a "general conversation" focused on what men can do to ensure they don't commit sexual assault is long overdue (though I would add that plenty of women are also hazy on consent and boundaries). Sadly, internet discussions about sexual assault always go one way. Plenty of concerned citizens chime in with well-meaning advice to women and young girls, ranging from sensible wardrobe choices to safe alcohol consumption to appropriate social conduct to proper sleeping bag etiquette. Often (though not always) those concerned citizens are grown men, who are not expecting to ever have to take their own advice. Many seem to think that its perfectly reasonable and common sense to expect women and teenage girls to treat *every* night out as a covert SWAT operation complete with code words and safe calls, and grow eyes in the back of their heads. Any advice for young boys, perhaps those heading off to American colleges, which I hear are so dangerous for women?

Heh, my comment didn't post properly. That last sentence was meant to read :

Any advice for young boys, perhaps those heading off to American colleges, which I hear are so dangerous for women? < tumbleweeds >

Lost Margarita.. As these females, like LW, like JibeHo, can't even trust their best friends aren't going to sexually assault them.. The take away for me is to just tell every girl that every boy is a potential rapist. Best be safe than sorry. And if the attitude is some males can't control themselves under certain conditions, they being like the animals in the zoos , totally subject to their primitive drives and all, how can a girl know who to trust and who not to trust?

@LavaGirl, I can't quite tell if you're being ironic in your last comment (I think you are, but it can be difficult to read someone's tone in writing), so for the record I'd say that I'm not a fan of the Schroedinger's Rapist. It's both harmful and unworkable.

There is also another side to this "men always want sex and can't control themselves" construct. When men say no to sexual contact, their attackers (both female and male) often refuse to hear it. Some do it deliberately, others have simply internalised a load of cultural bullshit about how men can't be raped and uninvited touching is no big deal. When men are painted as oversexed animals, always ready to have sex anywhere and with anyone, a man's "no" is meaningless. There is a higher incidence of denial and repression among male rape victims, as they, too, struggle to recognise their experience as rape (https://www.odh.ohio.gov/~/media/ODH/ASS…). Support and refuge for male rape and abuse victims is grossly inadequate, because... well, probably because of the same culture that thinks men can't be raped.

This should probably be a separate discussion topic altogether. But I wanted to get away from the male perp/ female victim dichotomy, which can sometimes come about in these discussions. Rape IS a gendered issue, but it's more complex than what internet forums can make it seem.

Lava @115: When I said 'dolts,' I did not mean rapists. I meant people who may not already be well-informed on this issue.

And Lost @117: About your tumbleweeds, LostLoonie recommended a very good video @15, directed exactly at people (male *or* female) who may be unsure about consent issues. Here is the link, for those who are interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JG…

I know what you meant by dolts, ciods.
Clueless US college kids, who somehow got to be 18+ and haven't leant a thing about how to conduct themselves respectfully towards
others( males), trusting all in their path( females).
And I'm calling those stereotypes as accepted cultural messages that allow males to treat women as objects.

Amend @ 121 to some males and some females. I'm sure many parents teach their sons and daughters to behave respectfully towards others and to be vigilant re dangerous situations.

@119: " Rape IS a gendered issue, but it's more complex than what internet forums can make it seem."

While you're mostly correct: It's gendered in that men and women suffer it at the same rates, and commit it at comparable rates, and women always get away with committing it.

When you say it's "gendered," you're helping rapists get away with committing rape.

Every man you've ever met has been constantly told not to rape anyone. No woman you've ever met has ever been told not to rape anyone. Yes, a "don't rape" conversation needs to happen, and it needs to be targeted toward women. They're the only rapists who've never been told not to rape.

The popular narrative--that this is a gendered crime, that women aren't the perpetrators and men aren't the victims--is a tool to silence half of all rape victims, and to defend half of all rapists. People who push that narrative are accomplices.

Suffer it at the same rates? Not according to the studies I've looked at. And while men are unfortunately more reluctant to report a rape than women, that would have to be a whopping number of unreported rapes to make up the difference.

But the statement that women commit rape at comparable rates is utterly ridiculous. Repeating a fabrication over and over again until you convince the gullible that it is true is certainly an effective strategy - just look at the percentages of Republicans who believe that climate change is a hoax and Obama is a foreigner.

Ditto JibeHo. But then you and I know the record is on repeat re this subject with this poster.

Where women are very culpable is as the mothers of these frat boys, who somehow think the sun shines outta their arses, and what they want is what they get. Who gives these charming little arsewipes messages of such self importance, and butter wouldn't melt in my baby boy's mouth? Their mothers.

Those frat boys who treat girls like things, I'm taking about.
Not all frat boys.

DonnyKlicious @46,

The most likely daterape drug to be found in a drink is alcohol. The advice to never put your drink down in case someone adds another drug to the alcohol in your drink can lead to drinking the alcohol much too fast. You know how we ridicule all those sloppy drunk young women doing shots? They are doing shots because you down them at once without putting them down so nobody can add anything to the drink. Shots are supposed to be safe. They are following your advice. The problem you are ignoring is that shots contain alcohol.

And yeah, I’m in the anti-drunk crowd. I don’t enjoy being drunk myself, so my base assumption is that no sensible person will enjoy being drunk or enjoy hanging out with drunks. Avoiding drunk people is just a basic thing you learn to do on the way to getting the most fun possible out of life.

(Obviously this is a minority position. Just clarifying where I’m coming from.) I do drink, usually something strong-flavoured so I sip it slowly. For me “heavy drinking” would be one drink per week. More usual is one drink per month. Assuming that the clueless young people you're advising are going to be spending lots of time drunk and that this is normal, appropriate and fun is just weird to me. I’m not a parent but if I were I would observe my young teen learning to drink and give them a hard time for becoming loud, offensive and disrespectful of boundaries so that they would understand that when we do things while drunk that we wouldn’t normally do, we wouldn’t normally do them because we don’t want to do them. So we don’t get drunk. And it would be completely gender-neutral.

Anyway. Just me. I just don’t quite understand how the “It’s good and enjoyable to use drugs to lower your inhibitions and impair your judgement, so here are a list of magic rules that are supposed to keep you and your friends safe while you are all too intoxicated to make good decisions, which is something I expect you to do to yourselves regularly and often” approach is supposed to work.

I prefer to teach young people to say no convincingly and to pay attention to their own gut feelings. I note that the LW didn’t just yell, “Dude, what the fuck are you DOING?,” unzip her sleeping bag and move elsewhere. She somehow felt it necessary to act like everything was okay except for the random little detail of dude’s finger placement when everything was not okay at all.

If you know you can get yourself out of an unpleasant situation with someone being a dick by speaking up and going somewhere else you are a lot freer to take risks. The transition to adulthood is difficult because children learn to be cooperative. A young adult who has not yet learned to be impolite when appropriate has been deprived of an essential tool.

My favourite go-to example of someone who doesn’t have impoliteness in her repertoire and is targeted as a victim by a predator because he knows this about her is Ashley Paramore.

http://www.rawstory.com/2013/07/watch-at…

Yes, the guy was preying. But who clipped her wings? Who made it so impossible for her to call him out directly? Southern ladylikeness at its paralyzing worst.