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.

its a whole different head

It can all boil down to making power plays with sex organs against the weakest you can find. If that turns out to be men in prison, boys in boarding school or women out in the free world, it does affect some interpretations of it. It doesn't make me as a woman safer going home late at night to know it's not so much about my gender so much as it's about my ability to defend myself (in life, or with my fists), but the crime plays from at least two vantage points.

I don't think it can be divorced from gender, and I don't think it's a completely gender related issue, either.

Where there is oppression, generally the big oppress the small; the rich oppress the poor; the powerful oppress the weak. We look at history, we look at our own society(ies)and we know this to be true.

Generally speaking, women are smaller than men. Generally speaking, women are poorer than men. Generally speaking, women are weaker than men.

I think oppression has a lot more to do with nasty examples of humanity (and the ability and opportunity to oppress) than I think it has to do with gender or sex, though.

It can all boil down to making power plays with sex organs against the weakest you can find. If that turns out to be men in prison, boys in boarding school or women out in the free world, it does affect some interpretations of it.

But frat boys (or whatever) don't go after the pizza guy in equal numbers that they go after the stripper. He's weak, he's alone, he's right there and powerplay ready.

I really think its more along the lines of if you can't get a woman to rape you sub in a weak guy and call him your bitch or your wife or whatever.

He's weak, he's alone, he's right there and powerplay ready.

He's nowhere near as weak. And nowhere near as different.

And nowhere near as different.

Hmmmm....do you mean that because he's too much like the frat boys just by being a boy that the frats wouldn't want to oppress someone that they could, conceivably, identify with?