I was astonished to hear John Hope Franklin say something similar on NPR this morning. The report was on the Duke incident. Franklin said something about the accuser being a stripper and "what do you expect" (or words to that effect). Newsweek's cover story quotes Rush Limbaugh, 'the lacrosse team supposedly, you know, raped some, uh, hos.' "Limbaugh later apologized for a 'terrible slip of the tongue'."

This is sick. If you're a stripper you desrved to be raped? What are Franklin and Limbaugh thinking?

Tom

Whatever it is they're thinking about, its certainly not personal responsibility.

If I read my history books correctly, there were strippers before feminism. "She's a stripper; what did she expect?" and "It's feminism's fault" are mutually exclusive arguments.

Conservative thought on rape and feminism is a hopeless tangle of contradictions. Feminism is to blame because it encourages women to love sex; feminism is to blame because it encourages women to hate sex. Feminism is to blame because it tells women to expect men to behave decently, when men are by nature beasts; feminism is to blame because it tells women men are by nature beasts, and cannot behave decently. Basically, conservatives are incapable of understanding or stating what it is that they think, except that white boys should not be punished and black girls should.

Happy talk is not the way to gain the confidence of the people. - Zalmay Khalilzad, US Ambassador to Iraq

Their thinking shows that the right wing in America have more in common with the muslim world than they'd care to admit.

The article is indeed poorly constructed and seems to be the product of delusional thinking. While true that women should perhaps recognize their surroundings and acknowledge what behavior is appropriate and when, this article is a bit too blunt in its message. Even if a woman is scantily clad or intoxicated to the point where she is more vulnerable to predatorial men, that belies the fact that those who commit the crime are still the guilty ones. This basic assumption was seemingly ignored in the op/ed piece.

A badly written article at best. What people tend to ignore, especially the coddled liberal intelligensia is that stripping is a dangerous business. Its not uncommon to see more saavy strippers hire armed bodyguards to protect them from their clientele. After all when you mix alcohol, drugs, oversexed 20 something males and a pretty stripper things can go bad real fast.

Thats nature of this line of work.

Sexual violence is such a difficult subject to talk about. Part of the difficulty stems from that sex + violence seems a crazy equation to most people. The idea of sex with someone who hates you isn't sexy: Well, duh!

Jennifer Pozner's analysis truly does "put a stake in Riley's argument" pointing out what a depressing view of humanity Riley presents. To present problem of sexual violence resulting from men being ordinarily disposed to act that way distorts issue. Boys and men aren't like that for the most part.

Left/right, women/men, rich/pauper, it's ordinary for people to care about the feelings of others. Arguments which ignore this are inhuman and don't ring true. Arguing that rape and other forms of sexual violence are aberrant and abhorrant is a better fit.

I'm left of center in my political views, and yeah, niave and probably not too bright. Still demonizing feminism on the right can't be a winning tactic because doing so contradicts the broadly shared ideas of decency--what it means to be human.

Create something good!

So the conservative position would be to support the rapists, then. Okay. Me, I support the girl who got raped. Being as how stripping is legal, while raping people is a crime. But to each his own.

It's this sort of disgusting blame-the-victim mentality that's leading to the erosion of values in America. It used to be that if you rode the NYC subway at night and got mugged, the police would blame you for being stupid enough to ride the subway at night. Then, starting in the '90s, they started going after the muggers. Guess what? The NYC subway is safe again. Fortunately, the cops in North Carolina are going after the rapists, rather than blaming the victim; maybe that'll make North Carolina a somewhat safer place. Though if conservatives have their way, it'll be a magnet state for rapists.

Happy talk is not the way to gain the confidence of the people. - Zalmay Khalilzad, US Ambassador to Iraq

Kind of makes you want to run a hoax news article - white exotic dancer raped by UMD basketball team - just to see the conservative response do a u-turn.

I guess it's personal responsibility unless you are a privileged white male lacrosse player. In that case, the women deserve whatever they get, or so it would appear. Personal responsibility ends at the frat-house or locker-room door.

It is this sort of radical flight from personal responsibility by rapists and their enablers that justifies the radicalization of the rest of us on this issue.

Even if the complainant submitted herself to a rape kit for a rape that did not occur, these fellows are morally reprehensible. I take no shame in being old-fashioned on this issue - what the hell is morally skewed with these fellows that this is their idea of proper entertainment? What about the assault charges for an alleged homophobic incident in DC that are still pending against one player? Where the hell does language in one player's email about tearing or ripping off another stripper's skin come from?

These fellows are making easy to be a radical feminist - radical in this case meaning standing up for extreme left-wing ideas like opposing rape and standing up for personal legal and moral responsibility.

Crablaw Weekly

Today, kids commonly and casually use the term "gay" to mean "stupid" or "dumb" or "lame."

Increasing the criminal penalties normally imposed for a simple assault by charging a hate-crime under those circumstances seems unfair to me.

Today, kids commonly and casually use the term "gay" to mean "stupid" or "dumb" or "lame."Increasing the criminal penalties normally imposed for a simple assault by charging a hate-crime under those circumstances seems unfair to me.

I was not suggesting that there should be a penalty and certainly not a criminal penalty. My point was that as a DEFENSE this does not sound good in terms of his character...in short, he was still engaging in using a derogatory term to demean someone, which would lead me as a juror to think that he was a really mean character.

Then you have to look at as well, that if he is convicted in that case, they will be able to introduce the evidence, at the rape trial to establish a pattern of behavior.

they also advance a concept of male sexuality that should be offensive to men: Men are animals. They can't control themselves. Put a short skirt or bare breast in front of a straight man and he can't be held responsible for what might happen.

Unfortunately, many men are not capable of discerning that provocative attire and scantily clad females are not an invitation for them to pursue the woman. These are societal non-verbal cues which men have traditionally responsed to.  Nothing new here.  How much control a male has is not something women should be relying on. 

 Men tell women all the time that they cannot control their penises, especially when they stray. Additionally, this is all compounded by the conflicting verbal cues that women give to men during sexual encounters. i.e. saying no, when they mean yes.  Males learn to ignore no, but they do so at their own peril.  It is a double edged sword, in terms of them being 'out of control'.  Realistically, is the female 'out of control' when she is saying no, while leaning her  boobs suggestively in his face or crossing her legs or licking her lips to make them wet?

One of the other true facts of rape is that 75% of them are done by boyfriends, lovers, husbands and/or when the female is drunk. 

It is seldom a black and white issue....lots of murky grey area.

Even Clinton, when asked recently why he did what he did said, "because I could"

Ochevidno, I was satirizing the conservative mentality.

I made the very narrow claim that the victim could probably be more cautious (which is a slip), and it is hard to see how it relates to the intelectual contributions from the left. But they are always blamed even so.

Similarly, how are feminists responsible for the fact that to the chagrin of us all Ann Coulter did not choose the satisfaction of domestic bliss and child rearing but rather the life style of a single carrier woman.

Hard cases make bad law; however, it might be said of the Brooklyn case that in New York aggravated battery, alone, can bring a sentence of up to 20 years.

While only a jury can decide the meaning of the word "gay" as used by the Duke student in Washington, D.C., it did seem to me that inasmuch as the victim is not gay, the prosecutor, by bringing the hate-crime charge with its inflated penalties, was simply insuring that the defendant would (could?) apply for diversion rather than proceed to trial, a saving of prosecutorial assets.

I hope this is a pathetic attempt at humour, because to think that someone actually believes this could be true, is almost too much to contemplate.

Hard cases make bad law; however, it might be said of the Brooklyn case that in New York aggravated battery, alone, can bring a sentence of up to 20 years.

Yes. This is pretty much where I stand on this issue. Otherwise to me, shouldn't rape be a 'hate'  crime also? How about when men assualt women and call them 'bitches, whores or cunts' are those not "hate" crime terms, too which would necessitate an additional 20 year sentence?  Keep all these female haters off the street, heck.

 Whereas, I was only trying to convey, with my remarks, that using the term 'gay' as a put down, does not create the impression that you have great character, even if it does not rise to the level of a hate crime. Which is what the defense is concerned about.

I do think guys in sports are more hypersensitive about the same gender sex, issue...but that is somewhat reasonable, given the nature of showering and changing and physical bonding that males engage in as members of a sports team. More than likely quite a bit of the physical interaction could be perceived as gay, when they are expressing elation.

When I read stories about males becoming incensed about other males making passes at them, I wonder how things might be different if women had had the physical ability to assault and physically damage males who made passes at them. lol...the world might be entirely different...snicker

While only a jury can decide the meaning of the word "gay" as used by the Duke student in Washington, D.C., it did seem to me that inasmuch as the victim is not gay, the prosecutor, by bringing the hate-crime charge with its inflated penalties, was simply insuring that the defendant would (could?) apply for diversion rather than proceed to trial, a saving of prosecutorial assets

OOOOh, so it was a legal tactic in that case, I see. The big problem I have with cases like this is the fact that the victim can plausibly deny being gay. There was a case, like this in Atlanta about 3 years ago, where the victim denied being a homosexual after his assailant, who was an entire foot shorter then him, left the shower went to his room, retrieved a bat, went back to the shower and beat the other 6ft2in guy so bad he was hospitalized. At trial, he denied being gay, despite having pulled the shower curtain back will the accused was showering.

Ugh, so sick of this, "we need to teach our daughters to be more cautious" mentality. No, we don't.

Women have ALL been told at some point in our lives that we can't go out in that outfit because it's too provocative (or slutty). We've spent our entire adult lives being told it's too dangerous to walk home alone. We've all got friends who have been raped, if we haven't been raped ourselves--hell, by the time I was 25, I had a friend who'd been raped and murdered. Turn on the TV, and you'll see dozens of crime procedurals showing women beaten, raped, and murdered.

Women have gotten the message, okay? We know we’re a target. Everyone knows we’re a target. Our ignorance of our status as “targets” isn’t the problem.

Can we be a little realistic here? I weigh 125 pounds, and have the upper body strength of a sickly newt. I take reasonable precautions, but, sorry, you can’t demand circumspection from me as your primary crime prevention strategy. Because, hello, I got into an elevator alone with a man this morning, and if he’d had a mind to rape me the outcome is as much a foregone conclusion as a heavyweight vs. a flyweight.

The poster above had it exactly right. Stop blaming people for riding the subways at midnight, and start going after the muggers! A few months ago, a woman took a cellphone picture of a man openly masturbating while staring at her in the NYC subway in midtown in the middle of the afternoon. The story was splashed all over the tabloids, the guy made public statements showing a total lack of remorse, the guy had a record of this kind of behavior and what did he get? Probation. (Ironically, the woman who posted his picture got all kinds of harsh words for her “vigilantism,” along with the appropriate “go, girl!”)

How am I supposed to deal with that? Am I supposed to not ride the subways in midtown at midday? I’d very much like to get to work, so you can see where that would be a problem. Seriously, I am so sick and tired of well-intentioned people offering me advice on how to deal with gender-based violence, and I’m so sick and tired of this advice being almost universally, “participate less fully in society.”

This whole "all men are beasts" and "all women are rape-accusing slut liars" nonsense is entirely beside the point. Neither gender is composed of angels or devils. That’s idiocy, and it's a distraction from the issue we face.

The fundamental problem here is that women are not equally protected from specific kinds of violence under the existing social contract, and the solution to that is self-evidently not to make women more aware that they are less protected under the social contract.

Call me crazy, but I thought the social contract applied equally to me--that there is widespread agreement that whatever the reality is, I should be as safe walking down the street as a man, and that society has an affirmative obligation to enforce that contract. I thought we all agreed that at least in the abstract, I am entitled to go to a bar and have a few drinks (or even a few too many drinks) without first lining up a posse to protect me.

At this point, I feel like women have really gone above and beyond what should be expected of private citizens in terms of fulfilling our end of the social contract. In the face of violence against us, we have not exacerbated the problem by responding with pre-emptive violence of our own, but have instead attempted to avoid situations in which violence might occur against us. This strikes me as a sacrifice we don't get nearly enough credit for.

As private citizens who are almost universally smaller than the people coming after us, I am at a loss for what more behavior modification we should be doing in order to contain the violence directed against us. It’s long past time for the powers that be—from the police to the judiciary to our fellow citizens—to stop telling women to “recognize the reality.” WE GET IT.

It’s time for everyone else to recognize that crimes still matter even when they’re directed towards women, and to do something about it. These crimes are not teaching moments for women. They are teaching moments for EVERYONE ELSE, so we all feel pressure to change the way our society allows and even encourages men to behave towards women.

Here endeth the rant.

See above.
This is repulsive like an autopsy. I do not say it is fact, but some serious researchers seriously want to know why we behave as we do. Should this question not be considered?
As I said above, pointing out an explanation is not condoning the behavior. People murder each other for reasons, too, but it is a crime nonetheless. Don't we explore the sources of violence? I am aware that some people are uncomfortable in exploring human nature, but thought that was to be found mostly in other political circles.

Well, it is offensive. There is no biological or evolutionary reason for rape. Rape is not a function of a need for species reproduction, in fact it's the opposite. Your egregious "example" of rape in war is a case in point - men rape in war for the same reason they burn towns and destroy crops - a need to destroy other peoples' property and "ruin it" forever for their enemies' use. Historically, it rates right up there with salting the earth, in other words, women who have been raped are damaged goods. Rape is a societal artifice, one that assumes that everything and everyone belongs to men. Rape like other violently inflicted harm is about power, not sexual reproduction, and our species has survived in spite of violence, not because of violence. Our species has evolved because we're interdependent, we care for the sick and weak, because of their innate value to the "family" or tribe. You don't see this behavior in hunting and gathering groups because there is no "ownership" in those kinds of groups. It's in settled groups that you see that kind of aggressive behavior, because in settled groups ownership is more important than the group itself.

Are humans animals? No one said we weren't, but other species don't consciously "rape" to avenge, destroy or inflict violence upon other members of their species. You're not "explaining a process", you're rationalizing and justifying it as a function of human sexuality and there is no evidence whatsoever to support that claim.

As to your claim that "violence always serves a purpose", I'm flabbergasted that anyone would think that, unless you think that violence is itself a purpose. Violence is a breakdown in human group dynamics, it is not a human dynamic. It allows societies to avoid solutions and purposes as a group, and is as individual as the person perpetrating the violence (yes, even if the violence is created by the group) and is so singularly selfish as to be a detriment to evolution, not a mechanism to propel evolution.

The rapist has to be accountable. If the rapist's mother was watching couldn't he stop himself?

If you want to continue to hold the victim responsible how is it that a seminarian was raped because of attire or being in the wrong place: 

[Rev. James Moran] in 1970 was a 25-year-old seminarian. It was then, he says, that an older priest climbed on him one night in an attic bedroom, held his hands down and performed a sex act on him.

[Moran]  was doing an internship at a small parish outside Boston, preparing to be ordained

The priest, in this WashPa article, goes beyond the rape to discuss the long term inpact on his life and the reaction of the Church at various points.

The article is well worth reading  on its own. I believe we should expand our debate beyond male on female.

Don't get me started on music (my gig) I can tackle that explanation too. But the best way to write tunes is not to explain them, it's to feel them.
Similarly, evolutionary explanations about sex don't help me get a date. Thinking about what women want does.
But the semi-facetious question was "What causes rape?" That opens the subject.
If the question was "What should we do about rape" that gets a different answer, hopefully informed by the deepest possible understanding of human nature of the benefits of social contacts like law.
For example, simply calling alcoholism a crime doesn't get far in limiting its occurrence. Similar issues arise with pedophiles, but with different mechanisms, in that (almost) no one is born alcoholic, but that seems to be a possibility with pedophilia.

I didn't say you condoned it, I said you rationalized and justified it. As for the rest of your argument, you're making it up as you go along. There is no evidence whatsoever, that the crime of rape is passed on genetically. That's just silly.

Of course there is a "range of behavior" who said there wasn't? However, violence isn't a normative behavior, it's an aberration, just as it is in chimps. It is a breakdown in societal dynamics, as I already pointed out. You're claiming that violence is a mechanism that advances the species, and I'm telling you that it isn't. Our species evolved through co-operation and interdependence and violence is the opposite of that. Yes, there are a range of behaviors in humans, but just because humans are capable of a certain behavior it doesn't make it "normal" or mean that it's a result of evolution. It's not nature or nurture, it's nature AND nurture.

evolutionary explanations about sex don't help me get a date. Thinking about what women want does

What do you think they want?

It is ironic that I argue everywhere else that we can do better at quelling our violent tendencies and do without war, and here I'm defending violence as natural. When I say that, I mean in the sense of "expected" or "adapted for". Fire is natural, too, but no fun for the animals and trees killed. The problem is that what I call a possible explanation you call justifying. If we say that disease pathogens are a natural and expected phenomenon we are not justifying them as needed. To say that men fighting isnatural and expected is not to say it is necessary. It does say don't expect universal saintly behavior. Thus police.
It is wishful thinking to say we evolved through co-operation and interdependence while ignoring internal and external competition. At the very least, co-operation is absent when choosing a mate. "All's fair in Love..."
That said, I feel that the cooperative aspect of human society gets no respect from many conservatives who think they achieved their success alone and need no help for anything.
Life has been a constant tension between competition and cooperation from the very beginning.

Absolutely. We have learned how to learn. Let's keep doing it.

Submission offered. Thanks for the exchange.
One more little evolutionary hope (my view) ia that as women increase earning power and opportunities they are less dependent on successful men. This will reduce the selection effect on men and their descendants may be less aggressive.

 ia that as women increase earning power and opportunities they are less dependent on successful men. This will reduce the selection effect on men and their descendants may be less aggressive.

Interestingly, there was a survey done and despite women's earnings power increasing, they still want men with greater earning power than theirs.  I think it is that I call the chiahuahua phenomenon..they like having a big lab or pitt bull to make up for all their constant barking who can back it up with a bite.

The majority of women simply do not enjoy earning more at the expense of having a warm nurturing relationship, they want to be important to someone, not just be important cause of their financial prowess.

I am just glad that I have a spouse, and have been happy for 25 plus years.