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Originally Posted by RightOfCenter  I'm really interested in your opinion on this 10. |
I think that women- especially young ones, especially pretty ones- are
constantly placed in situations by society at large where they must stand up for themselves or else accept sexual overtures, including uncouth physical ones like groping, including even sex itself, because there are certainly men in the world who will simply go ahead and have sex with a woman- even a total stranger- as long as she sits there passively giggling and doesn't tell him to stop, and technically he is within his legal rights to do so.
It is up to each person- male and female- to draw the line as far as where their physical boundaries are. And then if another person crosses them, that's a criminal matter.
But one can't cross boundaries when there aren't any boundaries set, and we also can't expect the law to set personal, physical and sexual boundaries
for us, because that would be terribly oppressive and intrusive.
The law is there to
back us up once we've set our boundaries and others refuse to acknowledge or respect them.
If one refuses to or is unable to set boundaries, however, one is pretty much fair game.
For some reason, I'm thinking of the Glen Ridge rape case, back in the late 80s.
A group of high school football players allegedly raped a mildly mentally retarded classmate, a seventeen-year-old girl.
The girl had an IQ in the high 60s. She was borderline retarded.
Her parents made the decision to "mainstream" her, to allow her to live as normal a life as possible, rather than isolating her from her peers of normal intelligence and quarantining her with other mentally handicapped youths for her own protection.
When this girl got into her teens, she began to have a lot of problems. She would walk up to male classmates and put her hands on their crotches. She would lift her shirt for the amusement of peers in the lunchroom. She was easily persuaded to sneak away for sexual rendezvous in the tool shed behind the school, with anyone who showed her any attention whatsoever.
And one day, she was persuaded by football players to join them in a basement rec room, where she performed oral sex on them, after which they amused themselves by penetrating her with a broomstick and a fungo bat.
Four boys who actively took part were ultimately convicted of rape; the half-dozen bystanders were not charged.
Their convictions were later overturned, however, before they actually served any time.
The thing is, she didn't resist in any way.
Maybe in retrospect, it would've been better if her parents hadn't mainstreamed her, had kept her in a more sheltered environment, given her limitations.
But then, who knows what other, positive experiences she would've missed out on?
Social relations between people are always and have always been difficult, tricky and fraught with the potential for miscommunication.
This is true of socio-sexual relations in particular, because that's historically been a unique situation where women have most of the power, and men vie for their attention. Up until recently, that was a very singular situation in society, because there
was no other situation in which women held the bulk of the power and had to be catered to.
Today, women have more power and more equality in society at large, and this has caused men and women to approach socio-sexual relations more like equals. Women can hit on men, pursue men aggressively, just like men can to women. Men must set boundaries, and so must women.
What we
don't need is some patriarchal notion that women are too frail and feeble to defend themselves from the advances of men, even outrageous advances.
Women make their own choices and set their own boundaries.
Most must learn to do this from experience; both socially and sexually, most teenagers and young women have endured unpleasant and uncomfortable situations because they were afraid to say no and hurt someone's feelings, afraid to sound like a bitch, afraid to set boundaries; unsure they had the right to.
And then they learn from experience how to do that.
They come into their own as women and start to feel
empowered to do that, to say no, to set boundaries and demand that those be respected.
They realize that "no one has the right to touch you sexually if you tell them you don't want them to".
What seems to be proposed on this thread, however, is more along the lines of "no one has the right to touch you sexually unless you tell them you
do want them to", and that simply won't work. Socio-sexual relations don't work that way.
Women don't
need that much protection.
They have to become stronger. They will, when they can trust that society has their back, that if they say "no" and the guy keeps doing it, somebody
will come and remove him, and punish him.
Until then, maybe they don't think there's even any
point in saying no.
Who will listen?
Anyway, those are my ideas.
I'm used to being groped; I was a stripper.
I'm used to setting boundaries. That was my job.