You appear not to have read too many of them if you don’t think that women aren’t well aware of the risks they face. What we’d like to discuss is not our role, but the role of the rapists and the culture that support them.

Because, frankly, women can go to rape seminars and carry guns and watch their drinks and stay the fuck home all the time and it won’t do one goddamn thing to stop rape because rape is a social force that’s fed by male entitlement. And it’s up to you men to change that.

It’s not our burden.

I’m sick of this conversation, and will be closing comments soon.

Men willing to engage in this conversation get called rapists or potential rapists all the time for sharing their ideas. It’s happened in this post thread. It wouldn’t offend me if someone said that to me because much worse gets said all the time.

How do you propose engaging in a conversation on this topic? I have already granted that it is clear that long term thought change engineering needsa to be done on male society. When I suggest short term safety precautions in addition you say I am calling you a Feminazi, etc.? How is that dialogue? The men who are willing to read your lines of thought, agree to some, and suggest others in combination are what you call clueless. I don’t understand how you think you’ll make progress on these issues wihtout finding ways to engage the apparent enemy when they’re willing to take a good deal of crap from you to continue the dialogue.

Is there any way that a man can suggest a different approach to dealing with the problem of rape and not be a rapist or a rapist’s valet to you all?

How about, since this is a feminist blog and all……

you listen to what women have to say about a crime that they live in fear of, committed overwhelmingly against them and by men, and suppress the urge to barge in and make the discourse all about you? Men, by a huge majority, make and enforce the laws which deal with rape, and judging by the discrepancy between rapes and convictions, they are making a fucking pig’s ear out of it all so far. So why not shut the fuck up for five minutes and let women have our space and our say about it?

The entitlement shown by the male comments here absolutely takes my breath away: the relentless insistence on their right to have their smug, ill-informed victim blaming acknowledeged, affirmed and welcomed as a jolly sensible solution, their attempts to derail the thread….

Rest in peace, Jennifer. I hope Draymond Coleman gets what’s coming to him.

Is there any way that a man can suggest a different approach to dealing with the problem of rape and not be a rapist or a rapist’s valet to you all?

Yea: realize that we’re the ones taught to be scared of everything, and we’ve probably all been told more times than we can count that we should [do x] to avoid rape, whether x is ‘walk in pairs’ or ‘carry a gun’ or ‘take a self-defense class’ or what have you.

It gets old really fast to see clueless dude after clueless dude saunter up to us and say, “If only you gals would watch your drinks or not go out alone at night, rape would go down.” And they’re always shocked – with their best “I was just trying to help! Why won’t you man-hating feminazis listen to my thoughtful and totally original advice!?” expression – when we don’t fall to our knees and rejoice at the end of sexual violence. Not only does it insult our intelligence (and quite often place blame on the victim), it tends to focus completely on all the ways women could be different, instead of the ways that society enables rapists, both the guy hiding in the bushes and the male relative/friend kind, and the things men could do differently. For instance, we often hear that alcohol is a factor in many rapes, yet only women are told to abstain. What if men were constantly told, “Don’t drink so much – you might end up raping someone”? Would you be offended if someone said that to you? If so, why?

And yet it’s probably the women who are suspicious who would arm themselves. You’ve backed yourself into a nice little catch-22 there, wumhenry.

Cute. But all women should be wary, particularly when encountering strangers in lonely places. The outstanding common character trait of those who carry concealed handguns, I should think, is self-reliance.

If fear of being caught, tried, and convicted of a violent crime isn’t enough to deter a rapist, then I highly doubt “she has a gun” will deter them.

I’m quite certain that the typical perp would much prefer to be arrested and do time that be shot dead on the spot. Anyway, perps pick their times and places and strike when they’re confident they can get away with it. It’s not difficult for them to ascertain that no cops are around but isn’t so easy for them to know whether a woman is carrying a concealed handgun.

rapists will take measures to ensure that she doesn’t have a chance to go for her gun — by making sure she’s incapacitated before the rape attempt. This won’t mean a decrease in the number of rapes, this will mean an increase in the number of rape victims who are beaten to within an inch of their life or murdered before the rape occurs.

A rapist who has reason to fear that an intended victim is armed would not need to incapacitate her to avoid being shot; it would be easier, and less risky, to overpower her, by pinning her arms, and disarm her. In either case, the need to disarm or incapacitate the victim in advance raises the bar for the perp. For a perp to sneak up behind a woman who is alone and more or less in full possession of her faculties without her becoming aware of it till he’s within grabbing distance is no mean feat! If she’s armed and sees the perp approaching she might refrain, for any of a number of possible reasons, from drawing the weapon before it’s too late, but at least she’ll have the option.
BTW, is non-resistance any guarantee against murder? Don’t rapists commonly murder victims, compliant or otherwise, in order to eliminate the witness?

As it is, shooting someone in self-defense is a hard enough defense …. you have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person was going to murder you.

As a practical matter, you simply need to convince a majority of jurors, no matter how the judge formulates the “standard of proof”. A juror who believes that you acted in self-defense will vote for acquittal even if he recognizes a possibility that a reasonable doubt could be entertained. And I don’t believe it’s correct that you have to convince the jury that the person you shot would have murdered you. Rather, I believe that, at least in most states, you would need to convince the jury that you had good reason to fear that he would have inflicted grave bodily injury. Anyway, if you had a gun and ultimately decided that you’d rather let the guy do whatever he had in mind — accepting the risk that it includes witness-suppression murder — than face the risk of prosecution, you could throw the gun away or hand it over. But at least you’d have another option.
Anyway, the chances are good that if you drew the gun and warned the guy that you’d shoot if he took one more step in your direction, he’d flee without you having to fire a shot.

But all of this is willfully ignoring the fact that justice dept statistics have proven time and time again that people who arm themselves without undergoing serious training on gun use and safety just end up as victims.

Are you aware of the study by Gary Kleck that estimates that two million crimes are prevented every year by firearm use by intended victims, which in the vast majority of cases goes no farther than pointing the weapon and threatening to use it? Several years ago, I found a published statistical analysis that showed that of all possible victim responses to assault, the one that resulted in injury to the victim the lowest percent of the time was defensive firearm use. In second place, by a considerable margin, was offering no resistance whatever.

Right, you can’t verify that I haven’t raped anyone. On the other hand, you have absolutely no basis whatever for accusing me of having done it, yet you did accuse me of it, slyly, by telling me to stop doing it. Nice little game you’re playing: baselessly insinuate to somebody that he’s guilty of committing a heinous crime, and when he denies it, slam him for asking you to take something for granted that you can’t verify.

Hey look, I’m playing the world’s tiniest violin over here.

I didn’t insinuate that you were guilty of rape: I said that you and your buddies – or “all men,” for the Englishly-challenged –

If you really need to be told have to behave with ordinary common courtesy,

I’m sorry, I was too busy kvetching and ‘walking the streets’ to remember my manners. What am I thinking, blaming men for rape? How silly of me. Could you recommend any more books so that I might learn how to better myself in the “common courtesy” department?

here’s the skinny: no, you are *not* required to take it for granted, until proven otherwise, that every man you meet is “not that kind of guy”. It’s not rude to harbor suspicion. What common courtesy *does* require is that you refrain from telling somebody you’ve just met that you think he’s a rapist when you have no reasonable basis to conclude so.

So when I said that maybe you and your buddies could stop raping us, did you really think I was accusing you personally of raping me personally? In all seriousness, this remarkable knee-jerk “But I’m not like that! How dare you insinuate that I’m like that!” defensiveness really isn’t helping your “I’m not nor do I share any similarity with a rapist” argument.

And it’s pointless to make such a baseless accusation (unless, of course, you enjoy spiteful little games), because no matter what the guy’s moral character and past history may be, he’s going to respond in the same way, which, of course, as you have noted, tells you nothing.

Perhaps you should take that lesson to heart, and realize that very few women, much less women posting on a thread about a brutal rape and murder on a feminist blog, are going to react nicely to your insinuation that if only we armed ourselves we wouldn’t let ourselves get raped so damn often, and your daughters would be safe from rape victims.

Err on the side of caution.

And that would be…?

I didn’t actually say that. I merely said that I wished more women would pack heat. Not necessarily that every woman should. It’d probably be better from an overall public-interest standpoint for those who are unusually suspicious and anger-prone to stay disarmed.

So you need to be suspicious enough of men to carry a gun around to avoid rape, but not “unusually suspicious”? What? And how can anyone discuss rape and the fact that men rape so damn much that we actually get suggestions to carry guns around to fend off men and not get angry?

And so another man makes a rape thread all about being fair to men.

You may not have ever harmed a woman physically, but you’re helping to perpetuate a climate in which such assaults are possible. That’s called complicity.

You’ve used a $1,000 synonym for “uppity.” I’d be careful of my vocabulary around here if I were you.

Well, that’s not what I meant. The word that conveys the intended meaning is “contumelious”. Please pardon the solecism.