<p>You’re right in that not all men would, but quite a few.</p>
<p>Put in certain circumstances, such as lack of law enforcement, lack of interaction between the opposite sex, and low quality of life, and (other than being threatened with one’s own life) a handful would be in a vulnerable position to do so. </p>
<p>The point I was trying to make there is rape is largely circumstantial.</p>
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<p>Someone said earlier in this thread about how people will say something about a group of people in order to make themselves feel “safe”, which I believe is what you’re doing here.</p>
<p>Not all men who rape are sick human beings that need to be put into a mental institution. You are implying that all people are perfect law abiding citizens who always act on the behalf of society when in reality most people act for themselves.</p>
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<p>You’re comment right here is extremely subjective. I could just as easily say that most people in America don’t care at all about other people and only care about themselves.</p>
<p>I don’t think some men rape women because they hate women, I think they rape women because, like a lot of people have said, they want some control. But who is really to blame in a world like this when everyone is struggling to find their very own existence?</p>
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<p>Judging from your posts, it looks like your mental health has been damaged enough.</p>
<p>Wow, Prothero. You’re trying to look like an enlightened and open-minded philosopher, but all that you’re doing is slapping victims of sexual assault in the face. If you can look all the victims in this thread and say that there are no objective morals and that the men who committed (in my opinion) the most mentally and physically damaging crime are not “evil,” then you are a psychopath. Otherwise, you are just what I expected: an amateur philosopher (probably undergrad) who thinks he stumbled upon some unique and esoteric argument that he knows is complete BS, but hell, at least it’s an original argument! Well, news flash, it’s not. You are playing devil’s advocate. OK, I get it, you want to look smart. Really what you are doing is playing with people’s emotions. Stop. You’re not cool. You haven’t made even one coherent and tenable contention. Get a life.</p>
<p>Actually, yes, we can judge rapists. Just like we judge thieves and murderers. If a person does not want to have sex with you, than what the hell in your mind justifies the use of force just to get off physically for 5 minutes and emotionally traumatize a person for life.</p>
<p>Your argument that “anyone would do it” provided “certain circumstances” - which I guess in this case means that you would rape someone provided that you were certain you wouldn’t get caught and that people would never find out about it - shows how mentally disturbed you are.</p>
<p>Step back and consider that either one, people in general aren’t as sociopathic as you are, or two, that you are merely extremely immature and think that anyone can commit a rape under correct conditions, because you fail to realize that real life is nothing like an anonymous interaction online on this message board or the online video games you play that are filled with unfiltered hate and venom and 10-26 year olds yelling profanities non-stop.</p>
<p>Women flirt, and men flirt too meaninglessly - it doesn’t mean you can stick your d!ck into someone because they made you feel bad or led you on because you don’t understand women.</p>
<p>Your evolutionary biology/ psychology argument is ridiculous as well. It’s called the naturalistic fallacy - just because something is natural doesn’t make it right. We’re also living in a society here with a government where you can’t murder and steal or even rape at will.</p>
<p>Take your terrible arguments and philosophizing elsewhere to defend rapists.</p>
<p>In facts, lets stick you in a prison (where more men are raped than women are in the free world) - and then we can see where you stand on the issue. That is, if you can still stand after said time.</p>
<p>“The 25% stat is questionable and I personally don’t believe its that high either unless it’s a world statistic, but with the statistic above it’s certainly possible that rape victims have sex with their rapists repeatedly because many/most rapes occur with friends or even lovers/husbands. I mean, we even know someone on this board who did that a few times, not all rapes are as simple as your house being broken into and being raped at knifepoint. And again, gender roles probably have something to do with it too; most women just aren’t taught to be aggressive about turning down sex, nor do they believe that anything except the “some stranger dragged me kicking and screaming” rape can be rape.”</p>
<p>No, a rapist is not a ‘lover’ or a ‘friend.’ He may once have been, but no woman who feels she has been taken advantage of in the most egregious fashion possible will remain in contact with a rapist unless she is being threatened. Certainly that happens, but nowhere nearly in 42% of cases. </p>
<p>“Points like these make her “facts” (which otherwise mostly consist of a few amusing anecdotes that she seems to generalize into the whole female college population) seem less believable. Just because it comes from a book doesn’t make it sound more true: explain it. Otherwise she might as well be accusing women of a mass conspiracy to falsely charge men with rape with those numbers.”</p>
<p>No, she isn’t, but you don’t seem literate. She simply says a lot of false reports happen. She is writing a piece that has to be limited in size, otherwise nobody will read it. Thus, she cannot summarize all the source data she uses. She does tell you what she bases her argument off of–she doesn’t point you to anything obscure, but to a well-cited, popular, well-known book by well-respected academics, whose citations you can find on the internet. If you’re skeptical, do your own research, after all “we’re in college now.”</p>
<p>SAT? Not the measure of intellect–literacy is one, however. And her point is valid. If kids want to drink and have sex as much as they do, there will be misunderstandings. Girls initiate sex all the time–women making sexual advances is a result of the sexual revolution. Girls often initiate sex with guys who are as drunk or drunker than them. They may reconsider those decisions the next morning, decide they wouldn’t have done it sober, but that doesn’t make it rape, and courts won’t recognize it as such most of the time. Plenty of girls get drunk, like guys, to loosen sexual inhibitions and make it easier to approach the opposite sex for sex. But if you define all drunken sex as rape, you’ll have horrifying statistics like OMG 25% of women have been raped. When you hear things as patently false as that, it becomes more difficult for police and society and ordinary people to take rape accusations as seriously. Which is tragic, because real sexual assault takes place all too often, if not anywhere near the level claimed by feminist groups.</p>
<p>Bartleby, — in the case of the 25% statistic and critical piece you’re talking about, the feminist researchers (who are brainless dolts and frauds) made up the data and definitions and statistics - not the women they interviewed.</p>
<p>Oh, you own this entire thread? Am I not allowed to challenge beliefs (because that would make me trying to appear smart???).</p>
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<p>In fact, I could probably make the same argument for murderers and thieves. Like I said earlier, it all depends on what perspective you are looking from when you say “justify”. If you are looking from society’s view, of course rape is a bad thing and it’s looked way down upon.</p>
<p>From an individual point of view, there really isn’t anything we can hold against rapists, or thieves or muderers, for that matter.</p>
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<p>Without going into how mentally disturbed <em>I</em> am, why don’t we try to break down the reasons someone would rape. I can think of control over life in general, sexual frustration/desire, and perhaps a lack of intimacy/affection (including friends, family, etc.). Now you can see all of these have to do with circumstances , which is basically my entire argument.</p>
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<p>Again, a very subjective matter that has been discussed throughout this thread, which I personally do not wish to get into.</p>
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<p>You’re saying it’s ridiculous because you don’t understand it most likely (but you understand how to seduce women well enough, am I right?).</p>
<p>In regards to what is right, what is wrong, we can never really know can we. That’s mainly because there is no such thing as right or wrong, only desire and strength. Why does society get to decide whether rape is right or wrong? Because it is stronger as a whole. Why were the Germans wrong when they went to war? Because we won!</p>
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<p>I don’t believe this is your forum.</p>
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<p>Now I feel like Martin Luther, only I don’t believe in the idea that I’m standing up for.</p>
<p>And by the way Peterparker, talking with girls might be your thing, but arguing is definitely not for you.</p>
<p>“Bartleby, — in the case of the 25% statistic and critical piece you’re talking about, the feminist researchers (who are brainless dolts and frauds) made up the data and definitions and statistics - not the women they interviewed.”</p>
<p>Well, that’s right, certainly.</p>
<p>But the article’s author was talking about a different issue when she mentioned the issue of false reports. She was saying that because the radicals who believe rape is happening all the time have a tough time getting actual people to claim they were raped, when women do claim they were raped, their claims are believed without any question. This can have clearly negative effects–see the injustice committed against the Duke lacrosse players. </p>
<p>This is not to say women shouldn’t be believed. Rather, it’s that the desire to manufacture a crisis that simply doesn’t exist hurts the criminal justice system. Women with real allegations are treated with more skepticism than they should be because people can then point to cases where politics and ideology dictated witchhunts, and thus make a false equivalence.</p>
<p>Yeah the whole 1 in 5 thing seems like a dubious statistic. No doubt that whoever decides the criteria for rape is inclined to make is as loose and general as possible. </p>
<p>Also, from my limited knowledge about psychology (mainly what I’ve heard Dr. Drew say) is that a lot of rape happens when the girl doesn’t want to do it, but fails to resist because she has some victim mentality. So often the guy doesn’t have any idea that he’s raping (whether that would even fall under the category of rape is also a question.)</p>
<p>I was drugged while I was in college at a Baptist University. I am missing 3 days and I have fuzzy memories of the event that haunt me to this day. That was 27 years ago and the women who did it are now happy successful mothers. The police and the people in the ER laughed at me and made fun of me. One of the woman involved in my rape became pregnant. I was not a willing participant in the event and I have not ever offered any support for the child, which is something that has given me much guilt as the years have passed by. I was ashamed of myself and full of anger for many years.</p>
<p>What about the women who seduce a man and then cry rape because they could not keep him? What about the women who seduce a man and plan on getting pregnant so they can marry the man?</p>
<p>oh and bartleby, I looked up the false rape statistic of 9-50% and from what I gather from the secondary sources at least (can’t find the original they are talking about yet), the authors retracted the statement claiming it was an error. They based the 9% off of another female researcher’s work and comments, but the 50% is a total lie. So at least there’s no data (at least in the article you linked) that justifies the supposed crisis of fake rape allegations either. I am a tad annoyed the author didn’t extend on that statistic in the article in the first place though; apparently statements like
“The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.” are more important to the article than backing up controversial claims like a 50% false rape statistic. Pulitzer Prize winning commentary right there, by the way :/.</p>
<p>and I agree with others Prothero that this is not the place to be debating moral relativism; there are actual victims on here who don’t see rape and murder as an inherent part of human nature, nor should they unless you are trying to scare them into never leaving their homes again.</p>
<p>“If kids want to drink and have sex as much as they do, there will be misunderstandings”. </p>
<p>If she had said only that, I might not take issue with it. But you can’t pretend that there isn’t an underlying preachiness to the article. How else do you interpret this: “Such newly created campus groups as the Love and Fidelity Network and the True Love Revolution advocate an alternative to the rampant regret sex of the hookup scene: wait until marriage. Their message would do more to return a modicum of manners to campus maleand femalebehavior than endless harangues about the rape culture ever could.”, not to mention referencing college students as “sluttish” and that colleges somehow waste their money on sex toys instead of educating (a point that is also seemingly completely unrelated to the rape or false rape crisis)</p>
<p>Well, this book doesn’t sound very scholarly. In general, it’s hard to remain objective when you seem to already have a conclusion before you start your research.</p>
<p>In my opinion, rape as it pertains to condition of intoxication is undoubtedly a debatable issue. Whether or not rape (when it is actually rape) is wrong is NOT a debatable issue unless you actually have something new to say. The current arguments for this type of extreme moral relativism are, at best, weak. </p>
<p>And no, Prothero, I don’t own this thread. The victims who have shared their personal stories own this thread. Not you.</p>
<p>By the way, don’t dare compare yourself to MLK when you are arguing that rapists aren’t necessarily evil and that the Nazis were only wrong because we won.</p>
<p>Prothero, that’s right. You are a victim of chance. You are a product of your environment. Humans don’t have souls. There is no right or wrong. You’re simply brilliant… </p>
<p>Your favorite read is probably The Origin of Species. You love the products of Marx. Hitler is a hero to you. And the holocaust is completely justifiable. </p>
<p>You believe that the UN actually can bring world peace…and that evil isn’t a reality —because there is no good…you think that each man determines his own sense of “good”…well, buddy, you really need to take a good, hard look at your 10th grade history text and discover your fallacy…</p>
<p>SERIOUSLY, if you have any fiber of truth left in your sensationalist mind, you would think twice about your espousal of depravity…Truth and wisdom go together, you know… </p>
<p>I know that you are living upon the whims of rudimentary human nature by trying to bolster your self-centric ego, but to play with the emotions of those who have actually lived through the horrors of rape is just sick…take your malady somewhere else…</p>
<p>“Personally, I don’t like rape at all. All I am doing is providing a perspective <em>other</em> than this narrow one that you hold.”
"Of course I’m not [justifying rape], since clearly a society would never survive (or flourish) without equality and rights between the sexes.</p>
<p>I’m not going anywhere with this. I’m just making a counter-argument, if you will. "</p>
<p>“only I don’t believe in the idea that I’m standing up for.”</p>