Word: raping
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...components of this situation provide the basis for rape situations as Thompson and Medea describe them. The women is in a place that the man feels makes her open for some sort of attack (the man shouting obscene comments at the woman in the street would not behave the same way, for example, were she a clerk in a store or his family physician). And the women refuses to believe that this behavior is threatening to her, or refuses to make a scene...
...women described either a violence and hostility on the part of their attacker, or a casual matter-of-factness. It is this matter-of-factness toward rape that is most terrifying, and is the same attitude that women who have been raped later encounter in the law process. The offhand comment the rapist makes to one women hitchhiker--"It's all part of the fun of hitchhiking"-- finds its counterpart in the California juror who last week dismissed entirely Inez Garcia's outrage and fear and disgust at her alleged rapist: "He was just trying to show her a good...
...dual sense of a woman's sexual being still exists, and accounts for this casualness, this unwillingness on the part of men even to believe in rape as a crime. On the one hand, a woman's sex (if not her virginity) is something for her to prize and for her men--i.e. her husband and her father--to guard. On the other hand, an unattached woman is something to be taken advantage of, a free fuck, a good lay. A rape is simply another situation where a man can get it without paying for it. Only this time...
...second attitude makes rape possible. The first makes it impossible, almost literally, to be prosecuted. Both reinforce each other. By unconsciously defining the sacrosanct woman, belonging to her husband or father and chaste, men have thrust the majority of modern women into the other mold. A woman in control of her own life cannot be cast readily into the virgin/saint role. So she is cast into the role of whore. And in the mind of the rapist and in the courtroom she is no longer the victim, but the perpetrator: "She was asking for it," comes the matter-of-fact...
...drives, that it is up to us to keep them in check. So any woman who doesn't is asking for it and deserves what she gets. But if we don't see it coming, do not perceive our behavior as provocative in any way, we are liable for rape first and an overwhelming sense of guilt afterwards for somehow having let it happen...