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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (35301)	4/18/1999 11:41:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

There must be another misunderstanding caused by me. I think I see how I did it, and hope I can clear it up with an explanation. What you said is that any man who raped was 'insane.' I was taking exception to that blanket characterization, and gave one example, that of a date rapist who never subsequently showed evidence of mental illness. (Of insanity.) But I shouldn't have said only that I wouldn't call him, if he never showed subsequent insanity, insane, i would call him 'a shit.' That clearly implied to you that that was all I would call him, and it isn't. I would also call him a criminal, possibly a psychopath and/or sociopath, and other things. 'Insane' seemed facile and hard to justify, in the case I described. 'A shit' seems facile and hard to justify if that was the whole rap. But I agree with everything you say here: In the one camp, you've got your "girls-say-yes-when-they-mean-no" guys (like Nihil, although to be fair to Nihil, he didn't say just that). In the other camp, you've got your "all-sex-is-violence" gals. And then the rest of us sort of wander back and forth, in between. There is a bright line. It's easy for me to draw. Without consent, sex is rape. If a woman doesn't consent, and she communicates that clearly, so-called "date rape" is rape. If a man forces sex on an unwilling woman, that's rape. Society may cut the man a break for social reasons, but that's after the fact. Someone who mugs a little old lady just once doesn't get a break. Someone who only murders one person doesn't get a break. What they do is, they say, well, how do we know she wasn't asking for it? Why was she alone with him, anyway? She was just leading him on, she was a cock-teaser, why should his life be ruined because of a little cock-teasing bitch? Stuff like that. No wonder women don't bother to report rape under circumstances like that. No wonder they blame themselves. And I couldn't be more distressed to have given you, and maybe others, the impression that because i think that 'insanity' is not a reasonable diagnosis for a single-incident rapist who had never before and decades later has not again shown evidence of mental illness, I take his crime lightly. I don't know what 'continuum time is,' i've never heard of it. But it apparently implies that i have done 'bait and switch' while i 'keep talking about' my 'poor sister.' And you feel i have somewhere given a 'definition' of date rape, and that it is monstrous. You speak eloquently and bitterly for four paragraphs against rapists, as though i were their champion and as though I disagreed with a single thing you wrote in those paragraphs. (You didn't repeat your contention that all rapists are to be stipulated 'insane,' so I could agree without exception.) This is all shocking to me. Please take seriously this defense of myself. I ask you to accept that while i continue to disagree with you that a one time date rapist who never again shows signs of mental illness should be diagnosed 'insane,' and to think it sounds uncomfortably close to an excuse, (and you didn't answer my question about whether that should be permitted as a legal defense for this rapist,) I 'define' date rape as i do any other kind of rape, a violent crime that should be punished to the full extent of the law. Do you believe me? Edit: P.S. I think now I shouldn't have mentioned my sister. This place is confusing sometimes, one says things here one shouldn't in public, I think. It's just that I was with her within ten minutes of the departure of the rapist. I was there for everything but her original terror. We were best friends. I know everything that happened; every second, of that experience of hers is etched in my mind, as was her reaction to it. But I shouldn't have mentioned it, and I'm sorry if it was inappropriate or seemed as though I was tastelessly dwelling on my 'poor sister,' and if it was offensive.