It makes you uncomfortable.
I get it. She said he raped her, but you like the guy, you don’t want to believe it. In your head, you create all kind of scenarios where it wasn’t rape, just a misunderstanding. Drunkenness. Buyers remorse.
Because, you know, you’ve been there. You were drunk, she was drunk. No wasn’t really no. She moaned after she said “I don’t want to”… Or was that a groan? Things are fuzzy. Fuck. Did I? No, it was’t rape. We were both drunk.
Seriously, I don’t have the answer. I don’t know the cut and dried, black and white, this or that about what happened. I wasn’t fucking there.
But YOU WERE.
What I know is that we live in a society where men, the ones with penises, cocks, dicks, those people, have ignored and abused and taken from the others. The ones with vaginas, the mothers, the lovers, the wives, the “weaker sex”, for eons, and pretended that it was all ok, no matter what.
We invented whole fucking religions around the idea that women were owned by men, that women are property. And it seeped into even secular ideology.
I am not perfect. I have woken up the next morning and questioned what happened, and if it was ok. It scares the living shit out of me to think I might have violated a women, because I could lose my freedom, but also because I harmed her. I don’t know which scares me more, the loose of my freedom or the thought that I harmed another person.
(I feel like shit knowing my own freedom feels as valuable as the harm I might have done. Seriously, that more than anything make me realize what a terrible person I am. It’s probably the only reason I let this go out publicly.)
To be honest, I can’t say that I can look back on every sexual encounter and say, without a shadow of a doubt, she consented. I also can’t say I consented to every encounter, either. Alcohol and drugs to that, which is ironic. If you consider that at least a quarter of the times I’ve had sex, I was too drunk to legally consent, and my partner was too, it becomes really gray-area stuff.
(No, a hard cock isn’t consent. Any women who’s ever gotten wet, then had things go sideways knows what I mean.)
And I’m not proud to admit that as a much younger man I definitely pressured young women into saying, “Yes.” That is consent, technically, but its not right, and I fucking knew it. I felt it was wrong, I felt guilty, but I also felt pressure to get laid, not just my aching balls, but pressure from other men, to prove I was a man, to be cool. I’m not proud to say I gave into that kind of pressure and possibly harmed a woman to feel better about myself.
I can say I have never held a woman down against her will, nor have I every even considered having sex with an unconscious woman. And I have more than once turned down a woman who was intoxicated for that very reason. Because the fact is I’m not an all together horrible person. But I’m not an all together perfect one either.
In the end, women don’t cry rape easily. In fact, they are far, far, far less likely to cry rape after being raped, than a man whose been simply groped is to speak up.
Women tend to keep their mouth shut. We men have conditioned them to do that. Not “taught”, conditioned — through violence, through intimidation, through the media, through shaming, through lying and abuse of power. The same way an ignorant owner conditions a dog to cower when he raises his hand.
If you claim to believe science, you have to give more weight to a woman saying she was violated than a woman saying nothing. She has more to lose by telling the truth and saying nothing. (And if you truly want to educate yourself about the statistics, which will blow your mind, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape)
If you have a conscience, carefully consider your sexual history. With drink and drugs and the society we live in, as a man, can you honestly say you never once — not once — pressured a women for sex? Nothing more than that.
The older you are, the more you likely have to answer for.
Many have done far worse. And you don’t want your life ruined. I get it. I don’t want mine destroyed either. But lets be honest, you have not always, in every moment, been perfect.
So are the accusations of any woman so hard to accept? Or do they really call into question your own actions? Do they hit too close to home? Do they make you uncomfortable because of things you’ve done?
The question is rhetorical, because I don’t expect you to answer it on the internet. What I do expect you to do is ask yourself is this: If it was your son, how would you advise him?
And then….
If it was your daughter, how would you feel?
