Comments Elsewhere

Aegis:

I don’t know if I buy the claim that society as a whole pretty much condones rape of the vulnerable. Please explain.

Well, there’s lots of data collected on rape-myth acceptance over the past three decades. For example, here are some results published in 1995. Among high school students in the Midwest:

The Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance tests identified significant differences between females’ and males’ responses for five of nine knowledge items. … Likewise, females (45%) were significantly more likely than males (31%) to agree that the guy is totally at fault if a gift dresses very sexy and gets raped on a date (item 7). Finally, significantly more females (81%) than males (62%) disagreed that you have no right to change your mind and keep your partner from having sex with you after you both get “turned on” (item 9).

— Telljohann, Price, Summers, Everett, and Casler, “High school students’ perceptions on nonconsensual sexual activity.” Journal of School Health (March 1, 1995)

Among American eighth graders:

Significant differences between females and males were seen in a number of specific rape myth statements (Table 1). Adolescent males were twice as likely as adolescent females (56.8% and 27.5%) to believe “A woman who goes to the home or apartment of a man on their first date implies that she is willing to have sex” (Item 1, Table 1). Males were twice as likely as females (45.1% and 22.9%) to accept the rape myth “A woman who is stuck-up and thinks she is too good to talk to guys on the street deserves to be taught a lesson” (Item 9, Table 1). Males were more likely than females to agree with the statements, “If a girl is making out and she lets things get out of hand, it is her own fault if her partner forces sex on her” and “In the majority of rapes, the victim is loose or has a bad reputation” (Items 6 and 7, Table 1).

—Boxley, Lawrance, and Gruchow, “A preliminary study of eighth grade students’ attitudes toward rape myths and women’s roles.” Journal of School Health (March 1, 1995).

That’s a lot of people, and a lot of young men specifically, who buy into the idea that forced sex is OK under certain conditions. They learn these things from somewhere, and there’s plenty of research on where they get the idea from, too. The answer tends to be: from male peers, from older men, from popular culture, and from pornography. (It’s worth noting that radical feminists and pro-feminist men identified these realities and wrote a lot of books and articles about them a good 10-20 years before professionalized social science caught on. The best work on what is sometimes called “rape culture” remains the work done by authors such as Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, Timothy Beneke, and others.)

Young males are expected to play a very difficult role: that of the initiator,

Expected by whom?

which requires confidence, social skills, and assertiveness. Yet men are given no practical training on how to initiate things (let alone in a way that women are actually comfortable with!), but rather expected to figure out how to do it “naturally.” But not all men are confident, socially skilled, or assertive (especially not during youth), so not all men can play their role “naturally.”

Hence, we have an obvious recipe for disaster. During highschool, males have a high desire for sex, but only a limited ability to interact with girls.

I hear that during high school, females have a high desire for sex, too, but may have only a limited ability to get what they want from young men. Yet the rate of young women raping young men in high school is very low.

Generally speaking, people desire lots of things. A lot of males, for example, desire political power, but only a limited ability to interact with voters and lobby officials. Yet the rate of men forming gangs to enact violent coups d’etat is pretty low. What do you suppose makes the difference?