Women carry mace to ward off against many things, not just rape. So to imply that carrying mace is all about being afraid of rape makes no sense.
I know women in LA and Miami who carry mace because of mugging and carjacking. They are something like a 100X more likely to be mugged and carjacked than raped, and they know it.
awc: I am not going to go back and look up the post number, but somewhere you wrote women you know, know how to protect themselves. You told us a bunch of ways these women protect themselves. Two ways I remember were not drinking and carrying guns. This was not in response to a discussion of risk of mugging and carjacking.
What question did you ask me that I didn’t answer? I didn’t write about mace.
Of course I think men can change their behavior. The change in the way women are treated from the 1950s to now is huge, even though we have a ways to go to true equality.
I also think that most men would not and do not treat women badly. I just think it is harder for the ones that do to change if the women around them are not supporting the men that act appropriately. If the top of the social ladder is occupied by men that treat women poorly and expect to be serviced by them, not as rapists but just as what is expected of the “cool” girls, then I don’t see how lower status men that treat women well will be able to change the others.
Education is important, but so is support for the good guys. If the good guys become the ones that the women flock to and want to be with, instead of the cool guys that treat them badly, that will certainly help make change happen and cut down on sexual assault.
How do you propose we get the men to change? Do you have any concrete suggestions?
“In short, Emma has publicly delegitimatized what advocates have been trying to legitimize, the tribunals. If the tribunal process is that unfair, even to a bona fide rape victim such as Emma, then what is the point of having them?”
Four years into it, Emma thinks the OCR/title ix/college tribunal system is a disaster. So do her parents. So does Paul. So do Paul’s parents. So does Columbia. So do the victim advocates. So do the mens advocates. So do the Harvard law school profs. So do the Yale law school profs. So do I.
OCR thinks they are doing a great job. So do the plaintiffs’ lawyers who are making bank getting settlements (for aggreived accusers and aggreived accused).
Our tax dollars at work.
Alh: I certainly hope you don’t think that those of us not on your list have sons that might do something as horrific as what you say in your post, just because we may have different views on some aspects of this issue.
Education is huge. Look how attitudes about everything from cigarette smoking to drunk driving and even gay marriage have changed over the years due in large measure to education. Bullying is now getting a lot of attention and education which seems to have helped a bit.
Education, laws and college regulations have been much less successful in curbing underage drinking and binge drinking and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of agreement as to the most effective way to do that. I wish someone had the answer, as that would certainly help reduce the times when kids forget the lessons they have learned due to too much alcohol.
I mentioned the mace so I will respond to the mace thing. It’s definitely not specific to rape. And, I also have a weapony thing on my keychain that was given to me by a cop after a carjacking from which I escaped with my car intact somehow and the guy was not planning to rape me I don’t think although everyone agreed that I was selected because I was a blond in a pink jacket driving a new truck out alone late at night. After that I dressed differently in those circumstances so as not to be a target. As others have mentioned, most guys are not rapists so while education about not raping sounds wonderful I don’t remember any classes on not robbing banks, or stabbing people in bars, or stealing pick up trucks but I believe my son knows none of this behavior is acceptable.
A college class on respectful sex if fine but is unlikely to contain any bombshell, culture changing information. Men and women are different and the risks are different. Is it more dangerous for a young women than a young man to wander through a city alone at night? Well, sure. It probably is but I don’t see that as a cultural rape problem that is going to be changed with education. And, the campus rape problem has very little if anything to do with stranger rape, anyway. For pages and pages people are blow-by-blow trying to figure out if a rape happened in most of these case. That question is clear in a stranger rape and generally the victim does not give a flip about an apology. It’s apples and oranges, completely.
mom2and: I am referencing them because they are the ones I remember writing the most posts about educating boys and men. I certainly wasn’t implying they are the only ones on the thread raising non-rapists. I hope we all are!! It seems to me I am in general agreement with most of your posts, though we may be approaching it from different points of view. ymmv
Dstark has repeatedly suggested if drinking is the problem, the young men should quit drinking. Dstark belonged to a company that fired guys they thought took advantage of women. Dstark is a really good role model.
Best post northwesty although I can’t go as far as to support that Emma is a rape victim, she’s an alleged rape victim but other than that minor detail, great post.
Mom2and, There are very bright people with more experience in this field and I would listen to them before I would listen to me.
Education is very important. We teach boys at a very young age not to hit. Not to steal. We can teach boys and men to respect women. Respect women’s minds and their bodies.
There are guys who think it is cool to take advantage of women. When a 25 year old employee tells me a story about going to a bar, looking for a woman so drunk she can’t protect herself, then picking her up, taking her away, helping her go upstairs because she can’t walk up the stairs and then having his way with her for several hours while during this encounter the woman is out of it, and he is proud of this, I thnk we need to change this behavior. Men should not be proud of this behavior.
This guy was not a lower status guy. Men should treat women with respect and that should not be dependent on social or economic status.
Those that are handling cases should learn a little bit more about how the brain works. Victims who appear to be acting irrationally and or are having memory issues are acting and thinking normally after an assault.
I am all for supporting the good guys. I have a son. I am a guy. 
Don’t blame women for a bad guy’s behavior. Blame the bad guy. You don’t think guys can be responsible for their own behavior? That is a little insulting. We do have heads above our shoulders. There are good guys and bad women. Some of us good guys are good guys regardless whether a women is good or bad.
I don’t have all the answers. I wish I did but I don’t.
But is it realistic to think that men are going to stop drinking? Or even cut back if women don’t support them in that? That is all I am saying. We are all in this together and we ALL, men and women, have to work to change things.
I (with my husband) have educated my sons, ad nauseam in their opinion, on issues of respect and anti-bullying and language use. We have even tried to educate some of their friends when younger on how using certain words that they think have no meaning, are really hurtful to some (the R word for example). I think it has gotten through to my kids, but not sure about the others.
Additionally, I am currently watching a review of Fifty Shades of Grey where they are talking about women liking pain and dominance and subjugation so if two drunk college kids view this film on a date night and run into some confusion about boundaries later in the evening it would not be all that surprising.
Simply put, my solution is to take away the alcohol from the boys and the girls and I’m pretty sure most of these confused college kid cases would vanish very quickly. Some of them don’t even have a bad guy, really.
I agree that it is easier to teach people to act in their own interest and I think it would be silly for parents of girls to avoid teaching them about preventative behavior because we feel that it is wrong that it has to be done. Having said that, I don’t agree with the statement that “decent guys don’t commit rape” and I think that’s where a lot of the problem lies. Teenagers do all sorts of stupid, impulsive, regrettable things. It’s a time in their lives, and in their brain development, when decision-making can be very poor. When you combine that with fraternities, peer pressure, and alcohol, decent guys can end up making some very dangerous choices. I’m not talking about grabbing some woman on a dark corner with a knife, but a good kid might get carried away and not not let his drunken date say no or give in to his buddy’s leering suggestions, etc.
What makes this even more dangerous today is what I see as a parenting culture that is so absorbed on protecting and nurturing our children that we are raising a lot of children with an elevated feeling of entitlement (not to things necessarily) and self-worth and a sense that mom or dad will always be there to make their problems go away. The parents of the Vanderbilt rapists, even with videotape footage, probably still think their sons are being unfairly and harshly judged.
I believe @momof3boys said something about how she would react if she received a call from her son that he was being charged with sexual assault from a drunken he said/ she said encounter and she talked about calling an attorney, seeking a counselor, etc., and the assumption seemed to be that her son in that scenario would obviously be a victim of a false accusation. If I received that call, of course I would want to do whatever was in my power to help my son and I would want to believe that my son was incapable of pushing a drunken encounter too far, but the thought that maybe my son had made a horrible decision and hurt someone else would be my immediate concern. And no, this is not because I believe my son is a bad person or devalues women. I think in fact that my son is very outspoken and would likely be the one to step in and stop somebody else. However, I’ve never seen my son drunk. He’s never been drunk. We simply can’t anticipate every action someone might take in ever conceivable setting and circumstance.
As parents, if we assume that our children are incapable of ever doing wrong, I think we do them and society a huge disservice because we are raising them with a sense of self-righteousness and entitlement that will make them more likely, not less, to make those very same wrong choices that we think that they are incapable of.
I am sorry that my posts suggest that I don’t think men are responsible for their own behavior. Of course I do and have never said otherwise.
But so far there seem to be a small minority that are not willing to do so. How do we get the bad guys to change? How do we get those that don’t to respect women? Just keep telling them to change when the messages they get from their status on campus suggests they should just keep doing what they are doing? Why do you think that women play no role at all in getting men to change? Women should SUPPORT men that are respectful. That doesn’t mean men don’t have to change.
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I definitely agree with this. In my opinion, you have just described the “bad” fraternities.
Again, this goes back to modeling. imho.
I am a very very lucky woman. I was raised in a family environment where no male ever disrespected a female. The first time one of my sons disrespected me, I was absolutely shocked speechless. (I know - sort of unbelievable) My husband paused a minute to see how/if I was going to respond and then really lit into him verbally and told him he was never ever to speak to his mother like that. Later when the two of us discussed it, my husband said we absolutely cannot let him speak to you that way and I said, “I know. It was just so very unexpected.” Basically, I had no model as to how to respond because it had never happened in my presence in a family setting. This son was a preschooler. It never happened again or with any other son. This doesn’t mean they weren’t challenging rules, they definitely were. They just challenged them respectfully. They were expected to say “please” and “thank you” and show appreciation when someone did something for them: like fix meals, give rides, chaperone trips, etc. They lived up to those expectations.
ETA: sort of responding to pittsburghscribe. If we teach young children to share, that others have feelings just as important as your feelings, that you treat everyone as you want to be treated – I think we can get rid of some of that entitlement. I definitely get what you are saying.
ETA II: My sons are all in their late 20s. I am looking at the situation from that perspective. We are well beyond the difficult years. I am very gray.
alh - I confess that reading this thread has made me think about my own sons. I have zero fear that they would participate in anything as outrageous as what happened at Vanderbilt. But reading estimates that between 5% and 20% of men will engage in non-consensual sex has me determined to talk to my sons again. From what I can tell, I think I can be proud of the way my sons have treated women, but it would be foolish of me to be overconfident.
Let me share one role model story. When it was time to have the “birds and the bees” talk with my oldest son, my wife asked me what I was going to say. I said I’d talk about inserting A into B, pregnancy, STDs, etc. She told me that was fine, but they probably know all that from school and their friends.
She told me that what you really need to talk to them about is this - how to treat women properly, how important it was to respect their wishes and desires, and most importantly to view sex as something that’s part of a relationship where two people care about each other, even if it’s just for a few nights. She told me that that part of our conversation, and the attitudes I expressed towards women and sex during the conversation, will be buried deep in their brains forever and would help shape their marriages and the rest of their lives (Talk about pressure !)
So I think I did a good job in the “birds and the bees” talk. But it was because of my wife, not me.
I did all the birds and bees talks. Sometimes my husband was in the room, sometimes not. It was an ongoing conversation.
A thought I always had in my head was: I am raising the husbands of my future daughter-in-laws, the women who will be the mothers of my grandchildren. I really need to get this right.
I have one daughter-in-law and she calls me every weekend and spends regular holidays at my home. She shares a lot of personal information. I think we are good.
adding: Okay - bragging is unseemly. This belongs in that other thread. I brag a lot about my daughter-in-law.
There are probably not too many parents of college students at elite schools who think they raised rapists.
Mom2and, I never said women should play no role. Women should play a big role. Women should support the victims. Women shouldn’t tolerate poor behavior. Women should protect themselves, but ultimately it is the guys…the guys are doing the assaulting.
Women are carrying mace to protect themselves from men. Women are not carrying mace to protect themselves from women.
I didn’t tell my daughter when she went off to college, you better watch out for the women. When people were up to no good and tried to break into my daughter’s apartment’s by knocking the front door down, the people doing this were men.
Men are not all bad. There are many good men. My daughter’s boyfriend at the time fought the guys off. He hurt his back in the process. The attackers did not know there was a guy in the apartment. The boyfriend was a hero. These women were in huge trouble.
Women are carrying mace to protect themselves from bad guy strangers not people they are sleeping with, though. It’s a completely different situation that is being inappropriately co-mingled in my opinion. Otherwise they should be pulling out their mace when they guy makes an undesired move in the bedroom. They are not doing that, I don’t think.
I would be curious to know what the Vanderbilt guys dad thinks about how his kid turned out.
Which is all I was saying. I think this plays a big role in getting men to change. Colleges should, of course, close down a bad frat. Even if they do, that frat may just move off campus or the members may move to a different house. If women stopped going to that frat and went to the “good frat” parties, it may be a very effective message to the men on the kind of behavior women prefer.
Women do not have to fear rape from other women in most cases, but they certainly have to fear bullying and peer pressure to engage in negative and unhealthy behaviors from other women.