Let me explain – yesterday I got pulled into a blog discussion by someone’s comment that some girls who were beaten, molested, or raped by predators met through MySpace deserved what they got because “they must be dirty sluts who were asking for it.” The girls were ages 13-15.

I just can’t let the “dirty slut” comments by, even in places where I know the audience doesn’t care. What suprised me is that I was one of only a few people who argued that victims don’t “deserve what they get.” More disturbing to me than that comment was how many people agreed with it, or who said “they should have known better.” I was vastly outnumbered and this is a blog I consider representative of mainstream, young America.

I was feeling very much alone.

So my thanks to Feministe (and also Pandagon as that’s where I came from) for providing a forum where I can read the comments of so many people who do understand, and who are working against serious resistance to the idea that people don’t deserve to be victimized, that bad judgment does not equal culpability, that women aren’t dirty sluts who ask for it.

I have another comment about the deceptive cover-story aspect of the Times article. There is a lot of attention paid to date rape as “miscommunication.” But whenever I read what survivors actually say happened, I almost always find myself thinking, “my God, how could anyone think there is any miscommunication here”? I think that somehow our cultural discourse has gotten into a fog — with a lot of causes — in which we think that “consent” is a more rocket-science issue than it really is in most real-life cases. If LongHaired Weirdo’s account of it became more widely dispersed, I think a lot of the suspicion of feminism, which the essayist Ashley would like to sow, would fall on much stonier ground.

So cutting down the number of rapists is easier than it would sound from looking at the number of rape victims. Take out just *one* of these guys before his rape career starts and you may have saved 5-40 women from being raped.

I hope you have little trouble in getting whatever help you need promptly, neither from the systems without nor within. I know what it’s like to try and fail, both giving and receiving, but I’ve noticed a substantial amount of progress, after I got the right services lined up, and there’s some great new approaches coming out I’m starting to try. I have found it’s better to be alert when facing the demons; in other words, avoid self-medication: train for the event.

Shit, forgive me; I’m getting avuncular, and I just wanna help, ya know?

And that’s what bugs me so much about that NYT column; here’s a guy who recognizes that he doesn’t have healthy views about sex and respect and relationships, and he’s going to go slowly and tentatively until he really understands how it’s supposed to work. And here’s this woman accusing him of being “emasculated” because he’s not “aggressive” enough.

Well, I don’t think it’s so much that he’s going slowly and tentatively; I think there’s a good chance that he came to an understanding of what he did, and was sick with himself.

(I kind of hope that’s the case. It’d be an appropriate reaction.)

Since she can’t come to grips with the idea that he did something terribly wrong, she couldn’t understand what he was going through enough to deal with it. If she’d accepted that, yes, there should be a huge load of guilt and shame he was working through, and it’s appropriate for him to be trying to feel out the limits once again, they probably could have worked things out.

But since the only thing she couldn’t accept what he did, there wasn’t much hope.

“That’s an awesome car. Don’t suppose it’s for sale?” “Actually, I spent a lot of time restoring it, and I want to hang on to it.” “Don’t be coy. You know you want to sell it to me.” Cut to grand theft auto.

But when it’s about sex, and when it’s a woman involved, it’s perfectly okay for the Aggressive Male has to keep pushing until she consents grudgingly – or doesn’t consent at all. And because Aggressive Male is supposed to be a good thing, guys don’t make the connection between (and not to trivialize rape here) the violent rapist who shoves the burger down your throat and the acquaintance rapist who just won’t acknowledge that you’re not hungry.

And that’s what bugs me so much about that NYT column; here’s a guy who recognizes that he doesn’t have healthy views about sex and respect and relationships, and he’s going to go slowly and tentatively until he really understands how it’s supposed to work. And here’s this woman accusing him of being “emasculated” because he’s not “aggressive” enough.