I've read that, too.

I see parts of what so many people are saying.

I have huge personal safety issues. Knowing that men are much more often the perpetrators of violent crimes in this country and almost always the perpetrators against someone who fits my description - well that makes me look differently at men that I don't already know than women I don't already know. I am not happy that it is a reality in my head, but it is.

Rights of women is completely different in my head. I know as many (maybe more) anti-choice women than men. I have heard women arguing against the right to vote ans the right to be in public with uncovered heads. I know educated women who I consider friends who choose to be a part of organizations where they do not get to participate as equals with men who are not even 18, much less the ones who are their peers.

It is all so sticky, and upsetting making, and not in anyway making the men I know and love in anyway anything other than people I trust wholly.

men are raped more often than women

Hmm. If you look at it as the number of times a man is raped? I don't know.

FYI, after long stalling Duke has finally cancelled the lacrosse season and "accepted the resignation of" the coach. Today. The alleged rape occurred March 13, and the administration has known about it since then.

[link]

Years ago I heard that when you take into account prison rape, men are raped more often than women, but I don't remember where I heard that and am not sure that's correct....

I've heard that too.

But even if its true, its a whole different head. Its almost exclusively in prision so if you're a man and you're not in prison its not something you generally need to think about. It doesn't affect how you walk the dog or dress or talk to people in bars.

Or whether you leave your drink somewhere, or answer a stranger's questions...what clothes you wear where...Or sometimes I do activist things in old parts of the city and my ride's late...it's not my purse people are talking about when they say "I wouldn't be downtown after dark."

I have huge personal safety issues. Knowing that men are much more often the perpetrators of violent crimes in this country and almost always the perpetrators against someone who fits my description - well that makes me look differently at men that I don't already know than women I don't already know. I am not happy that it is a reality in my head, but it is.

Exactly. If I'm in the parking garage late at night when I'm alone and another person enters the garage, I react differently if it's man than I do if it's a woman.

Is that fair to the man who is, most likely, a normal, nice guy? Honestly, at that moment, I don't care. I care more about getting to my car and locking the door than being fair to him.

Recently, there's been an initiative in Ireland to warn young men of the dangers of rape alongside women. There's a tendency to go on a drunken beach holiday to Spain when you finish school in Ireland, and apparently the 17 and 18 year old boys who get so drunk they can't stand, but don't have the inbuilt fear/sense of many of the 17 or 18 year old girls to not go wandering about by themselves, are become targeted more and more. So says my cousin who had to sit through a lecture on this as his summer term finished last year. He and his mates were laughing about it, but you'd hope it's made some kind of impact on them.

It's also probably worth noting that the men raped in prison are commonly "made into" women. They're often not being raped as males so much as substitute females.

Women may be second class citizens in those socities to us, and their situations may be untenable to us, but that is their culture, and they have the very same human right to live their culture as I do mine, whether I agree with it or not. I can't impose my own ideals onto their culture, no matter how much I might think it's 'better'.

So are you saying that we should not have objected to apartheid in South Africa because it was part of the local culture, and South Africans had a human right to live their culture as they saw fit? How about segregation and lack of education and lack of voting rights for Black people in the American south? Or segregation and lack of education and lack of voting rights for women in some Arab countries? Ooops, that’s where we started. How do we determine when the trappings of culture are freely chosen and when they are imposed on individuals by force or by enforced ignorance?

I think that stupid, ignorant, and cruel cultural ideas should be just as open to criticism as any other types of stupid, ignorant, and cruel ideas. It may at times be difficult to distinguish what’s wrong from what’s merely different, but we face that same problem within cultures. It’s worth making the effort. It’s the way that we get rid of stupid, ignorant, and cruel ideas.