Hey, Can A Woman "Ask To Get Raped"?

"Rape feminists" have nothing at all to do with this news story. D.A.'s prosecute cases

The rape feminist drive all of sex law, so they are totally on the hook for the change in the relationship between the DA's and victims. It was until recently the standard practice to not prosecute cases where the victim could not be convinced to be cooperative towards the society agenda to punish rapists in the legal arena.

Can you imagine what it might be like to be cross-examined by the person who raped and murdered your child

. You advertise yourselves as compassionate and the savior of victims, but in reality victims come a distant second to your dream of doing away with what until now has been the normal male/female intimate relationship dynamic.

Alleged rapist's rights vs. accuser's rights debated after suicide attempt
by TONYA MOSLEY / KING 5 News
November 5, 2010

SEATTLE – Rather than face the man she says raped her as a child, a woman nearly took her own life Thursday as she threatened to jump off the roof of the King County Courthouse in Seattle.

The accused, Salvadore Aleman Cruz, was acting as his own attorney. He was set to cross-examine the woman until she ran to the roof of the courthouse.

The case is firing up an old debate within the judicial system.

"It highlights why the rights to represent yourself pro se can be so controversial," said University of Washington law professor Mary Fan. She has been watching this case closely.

"A great strategy would be to appoint standby counsel and it can just be standby council for the point of cross examination," said Fan. She says closed circuit television can also be used to cross-examine.

Defense attorney Jeff Cohen says, however, it's up to a judge to decide what measures to take and emotions cannot get in the way of the law.

"The reality is that everybody is presumed innocent, so we start with that premise and there are constitutional rights that are associated with the states effort to convict someone," said Cohen.

That includes the defendant's constitutional right to confront their accusers.

The woman in this case was safely brought down, but the battle is not over. Testimony will resume Monday. A decision on whether the case should be declared a mistrial may come then. A delicate balance says Fan, considering rights of both the accused and accuser.

"This incident may be a wake-up call in future cases with young victims particularly in sexual assault cases where judges may want to consider standby council," said Fan.

A bill that would have prevented defendants from directly questioning victims of sexual abuse failed in the legislature this year.
http://www.king5.com/news/local/Defendants-Pro-Se-Rights-vs-The-Accuser-106798139.html#

These situations may be rare, but they do occur.

And victims deserve some additional consideration, or additional legal protection, in such instances, if the unique ordeal of being confronted and cross-examined by the defendant is too overwhelming for them to endure.

That you do not regard rape as abnormal, let alone criminal, speaks for itself.

While it may well be that having a rapist question a victim constitutes "terrorizing this woman," the defendant was hardly thumbing his nose at the process. As unseemly as it may be to the prosecutrix, the defendant has both the right to confront witnesses against him and the right to represent himself. That is the process.

While it's difficult not to feel for the witness, forced to take questions that impugn her credibility, dignity and sexual conduct, assuming that she was in fact raped at knife point by Skanda, this ugly and painful scene is precisely what's demanded of a trial. Indeed, as long as they prosecution seeks to convict, and the defendant is deemed psychologically convictable, it would appear that the limitations placed by the judge on the pro se defendant are unjustifiable. He's entitled to defend himself, and if he, as a person with actual knowledge, says it's so, then he has a good faith basis to pursue a defense that involves attacking the purported victim based upon his rather bizarre claims.

Does it all sound too ridiculous and outrageous? Perhaps, but that's the price of having a trial. Due process isn't limited to situations where everybody feels happy and comfortable.

You can not like this fact all you want, but you can not call sexual aggression abnormal.

Well, for someone like yourself, who is involved with BDSM, it probably does seem normal. But, for most people, sexual aggression/sexual assault is not the norm.

All men are not sexually aggressive

Men's pleasure, women's pain: A dangerous sexual ethic is woven into cultural fabric
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, September 1, 2002
by Robert Jensen

It is not surprising that we want to separate ourselves from those who commit hideous crimes, to believe that the abominable things some people do are the result of something evil inside of them.

But most of us also struggle with a gnawing feeling that however pathological those brutal criminals are, they are of us -- part of our world, shaped by our culture.

Such is the case of Richard Marc Evonitz, a “sexually sadistic psychopath,” in the words of one expert, who abducted, raped and killed girls in Virginia and elsewhere. What are the characteristics of a sexually sadistic psychopath? According to a former FBI profiler who has studied serial killers: “A psychopath has no ability to feel remorse for their crimes. They tend to justify what they do as being OK for them. They have no appreciation for the humanity of their victims. They treat them like objects, not human beings.”

Such a person is, without question, cruel and inhuman. But aspects of that description fit not only sexually sadistic psychopaths; slightly modified, it also describes much “normal” sex in our culture.

Look at mass-marketed pornography, with estimated sales of $10 billion a year in the United States, consumed primarily by men: It routinely depicts women as sexual objects whose sole function is to sexually satisfy men and whose own welfare is irrelevant as long as men are satisfied.

Consider the $52-billion-a-year worldwide prostitution business: Though illegal in the United States (except Nevada), that industry is grounded in the presumed right of men to gain sexual satisfaction with no concern for the physical and emotional costs to women and children.

Or, simply listen to what heterosexual women so often say about their male sexual partners: He only seems interested in his own pleasure; he isn’t emotionally engaged with me as a person; he treats me like an object.

To point all this out is not to argue that all men are brutish animals or sexually sadistic psychopaths. Instead, these observations alert us to how sexual predators are not mere aberrations in an otherwise healthy sexual culture.

In the contemporary United States, men generally are trained in a variety of ways to view sex as the acquisition of pleasure by the taking of women. Sex is a sphere in which men are trained to see themselves as naturally dominant and women as naturally passive. Women are objectified and women’s sexuality is turned into a commodity that can be bought and sold. Sex becomes sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate.

Again, the argument is not that all men believe this or act this way, but that such ideas are prevalent in the culture, transmitted from adult men to boys through direct instruction and modeling, by peer pressure among boys, and in mass media. They were the lessons I learned growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, and if anything such messages are more common and intense today.

The predictable result of this state of affairs is a culture in which sexualized violence, sexual violence and violence-by-sex is so common that it should be considered normal. Not normal in the sense of healthy or preferred, but an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of those norms. Rape is illegal, but the sexual ethic that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of the culture.

None of these observations excuse or justify sexual abuse. Although some have argued that men are naturally sexually aggressive, feminists have long held that such behaviors are learned, which is why we need to focus not only on the individual pathologies of those who cross the legal line and abuse, rape and kill, but on the entire culture.

Those who find this analysis outrageous should consider the results of a study of sexual assault on U.S. college campuses. Researchers found that 47 percent of the men who had raped said they expected to engage in a similar assault in the future, and 88 percent of men who reported an assault that met the legal definition of rape were adamant that they had not raped. That suggests a culture in which many men cannot see forced sex as rape, and many have no moral qualms about engaging in such sexual activity on a regular basis.

The language men use to describe sex, especially when they are outside the company of women, is revealing. In locker rooms one rarely hears men asking about the quality of their emotional and intimate experiences. Instead, the questions are: “Did you get any last night?” “Did you score?” “Did you f--- her?” Men’s discussions about sex often use the language of power -- control, domination, the taking of pleasure.

When I was a teenager, I remember boys joking that an effective sexual strategy would be to drive a date to a remote area, turn off the car engine, and say, “OK, f--- or fight.” I would not be surprised to hear that boys are still regaling each other with that “joke.”

So, yes, violent sexual predators are monsters, but not monsters from another planet. What we learn from their cases depends on how willing we are to look not only into the face of men such as Evonitz, but also to look into the mirror, honestly, and examine the ways we are not only different but, to some degree, the same.

Such self-reflection, individually and collectively, does not lead to the conclusion that all men are sexual predators or that nothing can be done about it. Instead, it should lead us to think about how to resist and change the system in which we live. This feminist critique is crucial not only to the liberation of women but for the humanity of men, which is so often deformed by patriarchy.

Solutions lie not in the conservatives’ call for returning to some illusory “golden age” of sexual morality, a system also built on the subordination of women. The task is to incorporate the insights of feminism into a new sexual ethic that does not impose traditional, restrictive sexual norms on people but helps creates a world based on equality not dominance, in which men’s pleasure does not require women’s subordination.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Robert Jensen, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream and co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/rapeisnormal.htm

Still, studies show that women are at least as prone to feeling anger as men and that they fight plenty. Instead of expressing their angry emotions with their fists, women tend to use what in 1995 psychologist Nicki Crick, then at the University of Illinois, termed ‘relational aggression,’ a less overt form characterized by social manipulation, especially of same-sex peers. Popularized by such books as Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, by Rachel Simmons (Harcourt, 2002), relational aggression includes spreading rumors, gossiping, glaring, eye rolling, giving others the ‘silent treatment,’ sending nasty notes or text messages behind rivals’ backs, excluding others from social gatherings, poking fun at the appearance of competitors, and assorted other stealth attacks. The so-called gentler sex may opt for such tactics because they are socialized to not show hostility openly and also because their relative lack of physical strength makes violence seem a less promising strategy.

Girls do not have an exclusive claim to relational aggression, however. A 2008 meta-analysis by psychologist Noel Card of the University of Arizona and his colleagues suggests that it is equally common in girls and boys across both childhood and adolescence. Other research suggests this absence of sex differences persists into adulthood.

More surprisingly, women are also just as likely as men to express hostility—in this case physically—in the context of a romantic relationship. The popular stereotype of a domestic abuser is a man who habitually hurts his female partner. Yet research by Archer and sociologist Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire calls this scenario into question. Surprisingly, their analyses demonstrate that men and women exhibit roughly equal rates of violence within relationships; some studies hint that women’s rates of physical aggression are slightly higher. This apparent equality is not solely a result of women fighting back, because it holds even for altercations that women start. Still, domestic abuse within intimate relationships poses a greater threat to women than to men. Women suffer close to two thirds of the injuries, largely because men are stronger on average than women. In addition, women and men differ in the severity of their actions; women are more likely to scratch or slap their partners, and men more commonly punch or choke their partners.

Biology to Blame?
Until recently, most psychologists thought differences in the degree to which men and women exhibit physical aggression stemmed largely from societal reinforcement of traditional gender roles. Social factors undoubtedly account for a part of the differences. But in a study published in 2007 psychologist Raymond Baillargeon of the University of Montreal and his colleagues reveal that as early as the age of 17 months, 5 percent of boys but only 1 percent of girls engage in frequent physical aggression, such as kicking and biting. What is more, this gap does not widen between 17 and 29 months, as might be expected if environmental influences such as socialization by parents were to blame. These findings suggest that biological factors—such as the effects of testosterone on brain function—contribute to sex differences in violent behavior

"By its very nature, rape displays a 'total contempt for the personal integrity and autonomy' of the victim; '[s]hort of homicide, [it is] the "ultimate violation of self".'
Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584, 597, 603 (1977) [53 L.Ed.2d 982, 996, 97 S.Ct. 2861] (plur. opn. of White, J.; conc. and dis. opn. of Powell, J.).)
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=433&page=584

Quote:

Well, for someone like yourself, who is involved with BDSM, it probably does seem normal. But, for most people, sexual aggression/sexual assault is not the norm.

so what is your position...that humans are not naturally aggressive, or that by some magic this innate aggression does not play out in the erotic?

Either claim will get you laughed out of the room by anyone who knows anything about humans

Quote:

All men are not sexually aggressive

right, only the good ones are...or at least have to potential to rise to the occasion. Most women have no use for men who can not take charge, and rightly so.