A really close friend was attacked last winter on a date set up through a dating site. She still cannot go to the store where it happened after dark. She got lucky in that she got out of the car before she was penetrated so she didn't have the whole AIDS thing to worry about but she was agressively fondled
and held against her will for a short(thankfully) period. Now
as she still is trying to deal with the situation made harder by the fact that the cops haven't found the guy, her mom asks when is she going to just get over it. I didn't think I heard right at first because if ever there was a feminist it is this woman. I heard her right though and I have to ask myself,
how can a society stop something that it doesn't want to hear about. What is the grieving period when you "Almost" get raped.

The fact here is very simple: men who joke about rape are assholes and/or criminals.

Rape is about power and control and not sex. This country has become very much about power and control and has reduced sex to object rather than integrated with relationships. In my view this is the result of both men and women. Some how along the way males and females have become more adversarial and competetive rather than understanding and cooperative. Also there are few men who consider the act anything but repulsive and barbaric but it seems at times women focus all their resentment, anger and rejection of men on these singular acts. Men who commit rape are cowards and criminals, don't treat them as if they are anything else. Men who joke about the issue are merely weak and insecure. Look to those men who are not, they are all around.

There may be more male on male rapes than male on female rapes. In fact, I sat next to a retarded man on the bus a couple of weeks ago who told me he had been raped.

But I have never heard a man joke about a woman being raped. But the mainstream media is full of jokes, innuendoes, and threats about male prison rape. There is your story. Why is it that the mass media institutions, owned by the biggest and most powerful entities in America, constantly approve and condone jokes about male rape? Maybe because that is an effective way to control men?

But this article here is bogus. Your stats are bogus (one in three women abused before 18? Yeah, right!).
This article is the perfect example of extremist interest-group-oriented liberalism. This sort of fake liberalism is the worst possible thing about liberalism in America today. The article uses made-up bogus stats from some nonpartisan feminist ideologue foundation (Ms. Foundation for Women), which is accountable to no one, and cooks up these wild eyed bogus stories so that they can use these articles to apply for more grants and donations. This is what makes American liberalism useless to the vast majority of Americans. No wonder they vote for Bush and the GOP. THe Democrats are associated with this sort of interest-group, single-issue, gender-spoils liberalism that offers very little to the average American. This article represents the shreds of American liberalism.

but I didn't see it that way. I saw a confused, hurt husband deal with his pain in an impulsive manner. They were married, after all. And they both ended up enjoying it, to their surprise. I didn't see it as advocating rape in retaliation for her speaking out. Besides, Tommy is always doing stupid, impulsive, crazy things. That's who he is. He gets in fights, he riskily jumps out of windows saving people, he almost runs people over in his truck; he does crazy things all the time. I don't think the show is advocating all of those crazy things. Give Rescue Me a break!

The real "liberal" here is sheeplepeeples. Allowing rape to exist and be condoned by people such as you, only advances the cause of violence in this world. Your attitude is so off base it is almost silly. I suggest you crawl back under the rock from which you slithered.

before you shoot your mouth off. That one of three may be low. From the women I've spoken with - and the trust that implies is a considerable compliment - I'd put it at more like three out of five or MORE. Most of those are pre-puberty, too, the first time, anyway.

Why do you have such a hard time believing it?

It is a crime of violence, not sex. Domination? I don't know - it isn't something I understand at all. I've heard and read from several books and shrinks that suposedly "Every male has rape fantasies - it's perfectly normal"". Well then I'm not - I can't imagine anything resembling sex with a woman who is less than enthusiastic about it. Rape is - nauseating, angering - I can't find a single word for it.

The one character I stopped before he quite could, however, chose to resist sticking around and had to be carried to the ambulance before he could be arrested. I was a witness, and turned my "citizen's arrest" prisoner to S.O. willingly.

I had never met the girl before.

Women DON'T enjoy rape. A LOT of women get raped, maybe most at one time or another if you include spousal rape. And personally, I'd be happy to hold the guy while the lady took a good , well wound-up kick - or loan her a Buck knife if that's what she wants - before turning him in and tell 'em he fell.

Ian

... on the Internet. It reassured me that the decision to abandon television fifteen years ago was still one of the best decisions of my life. It also made my stomach turn. Shame on whomever wrote that piece of garbage, the actors for agreeing to film it, and the producers for airing it. It was disgusting and, unfortunately, some young men and women will normalize it.

LIBERAL? Someone who condone rape is a liberal? No, he's a violent pervert. If you equate the two, you've been listening to Coulter or Malkin too much. I'm mostly a Liberal. Honest, there is no "America hating liberal conspiracy"; I'm sure someone would have told me.

Why in Hell do people have to demonize huge swaths of people with whom they disagree, anyway? Civil discourse has died a sad death in this country. I fully expect the country to follow.

And don't think a woman can't harm a man - I've trained enough of them, and had a couple try. Ladies: if you try to hit a guy, you are a) a fool, b) no gentleman (see R.A. Heinlein), and c) giving up your right not to get hurt. It STILL doesn't entitle the guy to rape.

I've not seen this movie or whatever it is, so I've only been commenting on the idea of rape, and what women have told me about it.

Ian
And it was such a nice place, too.

And just FYI, I am veteran, 6'2" tall, now disabled, of a family of generations of other wartime veterans, s lifelong martial artist, a woodsman, and I would not lay violent hands on a woman who wasn't really trying to physically harm me, and then no more than necessary to stay intact myself.

that there are so many men out there who just don't understand the nature of rape.

Rape is VIOLENCE!

Rape is about CONTROL.

Period.

Nor did the link to the story frmo Africa tell the joke that was offensive (I'd have like to have seen what the guy said).

But, that said, it seems to me there are several ways to read the episode and and the scene.

For instance, might it be a case of "make-up sex" that so many couples find pretty good? I know I have been in relationships where we fought and ended up having sex afterwards and both of us thought it was pretty darned good.

It could be read as a man acting out violence to his wife, yes.

Or it could be read as a man and wife fighting and also acting out a BDSM fantasy in a less-than-healthy way.

Sometimes I think that analyses like the above leave no room for nuance. And if there's one thing where nuance is important, it's in human sexual relationships.

For example, I would never argue that women 'enjoy' rape. But there are women and men who have bondage fantasies and act them out -- where do they fit into this? (I realize that the difference is that the bondage/S&M crowd is engaged in consensual behavior).

What about the scene in 'A Clockwork Orange'? It's pretty chilling in a way, but does it fetishize rape? How do we evaluate that?

There is a difference, a vast one, between 'I had sex with him becuase I felt pressure to do so/used poor judgement/wasn't comfortable with it at the time' and 'I told him no and he did it anyway.' The latter is rape. he former--maybe not. But this often gets lost in debates like this.

I'm not offering too many answers here. Just thinking that maybe we shouldn't all jump to conclusions immediately.

This offensive incident on TV is terrible, and it would be horrific if it became 'normalized.'

However, putting this on Alternet's front page is a same old Alternet, ignoring the elephant and flyswatting the fleas.

In this case the elephant is the far far larger impact of the dehumanization and abuse of women on MTV, now primarily in wildly popular hip-hop videos. An excellent radio interview is at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
story.php?storyId=5437124&ft=1&f=1015

I think we need to cover these three topics: date rape, statutory rape, and rape in the Old Testament.
I once attended a lecture on the Old Testament on one of the prophets where the professor explained the symbolic language of rape in the Old Testament. This is my religion he was teaching about. Uh-huh. Ok. How do you stomach that one?
With all this talk about religion these days, I think we need to dig a little deeper on Alternet. The subject of rape is as all old as the hills, and we need to get to the root of it.

...male rape? Female rape is considered a heinous crime, and rightly so, but male rape is considered a punchline. I wonder how the unreported female rape stats measure up again the equivalent male stats, considering the victim is liable to end up part of a Jay Leno monolgue about dropping soap and prison showers?

I also wonder about Third World rape statistics, where I'm told there's a belief among some cultures that the cure for HIV is to have sex with a virgin child.

please see my response to the doubting sheeplepeople above (shoulda posted it as a stand-alone comment.)

i agree that male-on-male rape is also often joked about in a dismissive way and that is BAD and WRONG. but male-on-female rape is rarely joked about, or even discussed at all in polite company. at most a simplistic "rape is wrong" scenario occasionally appears in the popular media which doesn't speak truthfully to the issue at all.

anyway, let's all take a deep breath and quite name-calling and work together to help minimize rape (i'd say "eradicate" but i am not THAT idealistic anymore...)

Jesus H. Christ with a pogo stick up his arse ... is all you have to prop up your premise for this article some twat from the University of Nairobi and a TV show???

If you think this is somehow helpful to women devestated by rape, you're living in a bourgeois bubble honey.

It's a drama!!! Note, a great drama that depicts people well, instead of just presenting misogynistic sexbots to objectify, brainless house whores, or skinny teenage sluts ... because all teen girls are sluts just looking for it right? Well, that's what all the "entertainment media" presents women as all fucking day... Rescue Me does better and it's a huge mistake to judge it as the usual American propoganda and not a sincere work of drama.

Note... lots of women have rape fantasies, just like other sorts of odd secret sexual desires. Women are human beings, sexual beings, Rescue Me is honest about that (the characters in question do know and love each other).

You're making this whole issue up. It's crap.

Did you bother to mention the Harvard University Dean who said women aren't good at science and math? A little more serious and has real affects in, you may not be aware of, reality. Better than digging around for a quote by some jerk from a far, far, more sexist culture half a world away.

Terrible article. Stop drinking. It will help.

I'd like to know who started this bullshit myth. I don't believe women have rape fantasies. It plays into that 'no means yes she wanted it really' crap. There's no such thing as a female rape fantasy, because it seems to me that by its very definition, if it's a fantasy, it's not rape. It's a submissive sex fantasy. There's a difference.

In turn, guys might have domination fantasies, but not rape. I would hope anyway. I don't think I'd like to know any guy who had serious rape fantasies.

It seems like part of the traditional hunter-prey attitude, where sex is something men chase and women give up. That needs to go.

Most--but by no means all--civilized men who've been well educated and informed by their own maturation can understand and condemn forceable rape, the kind perpetrated in the 1988 film "The Accused" (a movie eminently worth seeing again just to ponder these issues). We realize it's a barbaric and criminal act of power and brutalization, even as many younger men immersed in the hunt for the next "score" are not at all clear where the lines should be drawn in their so-called "normal" sexual relationships with "modern", excessively seductive, "emancipated" women.

On "The Sopranos", Dr. Melphi's sexual assault in a parking garage stairwell was depicted with a verisimilitude that's consistent with violent rape as it's come to be recognized, however begrudingly, by our "male-dominated" society, our creative media and our courts. In the French film "Irreversible", probably unknown to most Americans, there's perhaps the most realistic, vicious, prolonged rape scene in the history of cinema. I'd like to believe that most men, straight or gay, would be shocked and repulsed by the intense violence of this scene, despite it's dark appeal to common male fantasies of enforced domination and sexual subjugation. Yes, rape is rape, even more unequivocally when accompanied by anti-erotic coercion and violence. There are soild arguments, social, cultural and legal, to validate it's prohibition from civilized society.

Having affirmed this rule of law and civility, I would argue that for younger men living in the "Age of Porn"--the immersion of mainstream American culture in the joys and horrors of omnipresent porn, readily accessible in 1000 flavors by the click of a mouse, much of it free, the core of most visual advertising, visible 24/7 in the grossly seductive, whorish apparel of most teenage and even pre-pubescent girls in and out of school--the ability to clearly and quickly discern the limits of consensual or "rough" sex, relative to obvious forceable rape, or to righteously condemn mildly pressed but non-violent sex as still "rape" because the girl may later have second thoughts, may be impaired by the erotically saturated atmosphere we're all breathing, and the torrent of mixed signals young hormone-driven men receive about the "rules" of sexual behavior, and the relative threshhold of "enjoyment" for women.

When it comes to sexual standards, America is still the schizoid it's been for 400 years, ever since the Puritans drove all their sane, well-adjusted neighbors out of Massachusetts. We bathe in cultural and media sex, swim in it on the Web, but in private we still often repress and inhibit its discussion, natural expression or exploration. In the paradoxical era of extreme Christian fundamentalism that has erupted in tandem with, or in reaction to our porn-charged culture, attitudes among the young toward sexual contact have shifted dramatically from the days when getting to "first base" meant kissing on the lips after the third date, and "Where The Boys Are" was the climax of sexual conquest movies.

Now, fellatio is dispensed by many "good" young girls at booze-fueled parties with the same insouciance that accompanied tongue-kissing 40 years ago. A BJ is the new "first base", and more often than parents of young females want to contemplate, this is no longer considered extraordinary, but more of a basic expectation (My teenage sons have been eyewitnesses to this reality). A girl who is saying "yes" to the porn-fueled mind and raging hormones of a young male, consensual partner either through words, behavior, dress or a combination of these signals, may have a rocky ride if she suddenly, instantaneously says "no" after the train has left the station. Rape is still rape, but to a new, younger generation of men and teenage boys, in a time when misogynistic porn and rap are as accessible as fast food, it just may not be as repugnant as it should be.

Some of the people who have been hardest on rape victims, in my experience, have been women.
One was my grandmother. She had some rather old-fashioned ideas about women and their roles. If a rape case ever came up on the news, her response was always the same. "she asked for it." She even said that of a case where a six year old girl was abducted, raped and murdered.
I could never look at her quite the same way after that.

...but in all fairness, maybe they did it because they intend to dramatize the aftermath later on down the line. Maybe they WANT to start a debate on the subject. Just a theory.

I don't support gratuitous sex and violence on television, but if we start demanding they turn away from the traumatic, the offensive or the controversial, I think that's dangerous.

I don't miss an episode. Barely watch TV, but this is one show that is unabashed about showing the chaos of adult lives in a crazy world. While frequently over-the-top, its deeply flawed characters are what make the show compelling, though occasionally a scene like the one in question will air, and it's like watching a car crash. In context, you don't question it at all, but it's still very uncomfortable.

Where were all of you for the practical rape of Maria Bello's character by Viggo Mortensen's in "The History of Violence"? Same deal, IMO.

And of course rape is not funny or cool, etc., etc. I'm not condoning it, but this is like the religious right going off on a movie without seeing it, you know?

I won't delve into true criminal rape where someone is grabbed and assaulted. But in the bedroom that has to be one of the number one fantasies for men and women. I have been with 20 women in my life and the majority loved that role play: forceful, choking, slapping etc. You may not want to admit it but it is the same reason women are attracted to rough guys or bad boys, it is the age old animal kingdom male dominance we started with. Most of these women and it's not like they were trash, just average women I thought were attractive, wanted it to be rougher than I was really comfortable with. I don't want to leave marks or choke someone unconscious because of the possible brain damage or get into cutting etc. Most women are right there if you want to experiment and push boundaries, they may never initiate it but they are very receptive. I am just offering a different viewpoint for the reason the court cases are so hard to prove. It's a mess but I don't mind discussing it though I'm sure most of the whackos on here who go ballistic about every little thing will flip, but if you guys ever did anything to change the world instead of bullshitting up alternet to make yourselves feel better, well maybe there would be change. Until then enjoy the world you allow to exist and get off on bashing:)

Only someone whose main experience with men comes from television could delude themselves into thinking that men actually sit around JOKING about rape. Quite the contrary, I think cracking a joke about raping a woman around a bunch of guys is a good way to get your ass kicked. Men react violently to the idea of a woman being raped, and will want to pummel someone who is even accused of it. Raping women is an emotional hair-trigger issue with men. Men are conditioned socially (and most likely genetically) to protect and defend women, to look after them and see to their needs.

On a personal note, my last girlfriend left me for a man that she claimed months before had tried to rape her. I think, if anything, women are more forgiving of rape than men are.

If Leary is going to sanction rape on his "entertainment" show then why not hold him accountable for what he is presenting. Does he have sponsors and can you write a letter or postcard?

It's common for 7-year-old boys to spout "I wanna f--- you" sh-t to 7-year-old girls at the local elementary school. That's not coming from Dennis Leary and some essentially adults-only TV show.

Whattabout the pervasive crap spouting directly out of our MTV, its white and black "women are for sex, and only sexy ones are worth a damn" cult? That's what's really hurting our daughters, and the stereotyping and abuse starts very very young.

Obviously not defending rape, but I should point out that interestingly in some east-African countries (for instance Uganda) women regularly and perhaps more importantly, voluntarily use substances to dry out their vagina for their husband's enjoyment. One of course can always nitpick on what "voluntary" here means, but this is widely practiced.

Any comments on this?

And the fact that they are still stuck in a neanderthal mindset proves it now, doesn't it? It is a shame that people would still get all giddy about the topic, but I think this is because men have never had a serious discussion about it. And they should. It is their probem after all. I have no interest in helping them resolve their ape-like behavior issues. And I think they should remain on the fringes of society until they resolve them.