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

...and if you had your dick hanging out we can only asume that an approaching female would cut the damn thing off.

So a woman behavior is indeed a form of communication

2010-12-31
Why is Rape Different?


NEW YORK – As Swedish prosecutors’ sex-crime allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange play out in the international media, one convention of the coverage merits serious scrutiny. We know Assange by name. But his accusers – the two Swedish women who have brought the complaints against him – are consistently identified only as “Miss A” and “Miss W,” and their images are blurred.

News organizations argue that the policy is motivated by respect for the alleged victims. But the same organizations would never report charges of, say, fraud – or, indeed, non-sexual assault – against a suspect who has been named on the basis on anonymous accusations. In fact, despite its good intentions, providing anonymity in sex-crime cases is extremely harmful to women.

The convention of not naming rape accusers is a relic of the Victorian period, when rape and other sex crimes were being codified and reported in ways that prefigure our own era. Rape was seen as “the fate worse than death,” rendering women – who were supposed to be virgins until marriage – “damaged goods.”

Virginia Woolf called the ideal of womanhood in this period “The Angel in the House”: a retiring, fragile creature who could not withstand the rigors of the public arena. Of course, this ideal was a double-edged sword: their ostensible fragility – and their assigned role as icons of sexual purity and ignorance – was used to exclude women from influencing outcomes that affected their own destinies. For example, women could not fully participate under their own names in legal proceedings.

Indeed, one of the rights for which suffragists fought was the right to be convicted of one’s own crimes. Nonetheless, even after women gained legal rights – and even as other assumptions about women have gone the way of smelling salts and whalebone stays – the condescending Victorian convention of not identifying women who make sex-crime charges remains with us.

That convention not only is an insult to women, but also makes rape prosecutions far more difficult. Overwhelmingly, anonymity serves institutions that do not want to prosecute rapists or sexual harassers.

The United States military, for instance, hides rape accusers’ identities, and the prevalence of rape in the US armed forces today is off the charts. Maintaining anonymous charges enables the military authorities to avoid keeping comprehensive records, which in turn allows officials to evade responsibility for transparent reporting of assaults and of prosecutions – and thus not to prosecute sex crime in any serious, systematic way.

The same is true with universities. My alma mater, Yale, used anonymity in reporting of sex harassment and rape to sweep sex-crime incidents and repeat offenders’ records under the rug for two decades, thereby protecting its own interest in preventing systematic investigation. Because of the prevalence of universities’ anonymity policy, at least two alleged serial rapists – whose assaults were reported to their employers separately by more than one victim – are teaching at new universities, with no charges ever brought against them.

The lesson is clear: when charges are made anonymously, no one takes them as seriously as charges brought in public, resulting in institutionalized impunity for sexual predators.

Indeed, only when victims have stood up and stated their names – granted, a difficult and often painful thing to do – have institutional change and successful prosecutions been possible. Anita Hill’s decision in 1991 not to make anonymous accusations against Clarence Thomas, now a US Supreme Court justice, spurred a wave of enforcement of equal-employment-opportunity law. Hill knew that her motives would be questioned. But, as a lawyer, she understood how unethical anonymous allegations are – and how unlikely they are to bring about real consequences.

In fact, the convention of anonymity merely allows rape myths to flourish. When victims are not kept hidden, it becomes much clearer that rape can happen to anyone – grandmothers and students, homemakers and prostitutes. Instead, we have stereotypes about how “real” rape victims must look and act in order to be taken seriously. And we have the myth of higher false reporting of rape relative to other crimes (in the US, the rate is no different: 2-4%).

Feminists have long argued that rape must be treated like any other crime. But in no other crime are accusers kept behind a wall of anonymity. Treating rape so differently serves only to maintain its mischaracterization as a “different” kind of crime, loaded with cultural baggage and projections.

Finally, there is a profound moral issue at stake. Though children’s identities should, of course, be shielded in sex-crime allegations, women are not children. If one makes a serious criminal accusation, one must wish to be treated – and one must treat oneself – as a moral adult.

That is why justice systems – at least in democracies – typically demand that the accused be able to face his or her accuser. Why, for example, in a case that is so dependent on public opinion – and on which so much depends – must Assange face allegations that may have grave consequences for him, while his accusers remain hidden?

So-called “rape shield” laws should be used to protect alleged victims. It is no one’s business whom a victim has slept with previously, or what she was wearing when she was attacked. But preventing an accuser’s sexual history from entering into an investigation or prosecution is not the same as providing anonymity.

Nor should it be. After all, motive and context are legitimate questions in any serious criminal allegation. Hill, for example, knew that she would have to explain why she waited years to accuse Thomas, her former employer. Likewise, adult accusers of Church-protected sex criminals knew that they would have to answer fundamental questions (notably, many of them have identified themselves, which has helped get real prosecutions).

It is wrong – and sexist – to treat female sex-crime accusers as if they were children, and it is wrong to try anyone, male or female, in the court of public opinion on the basis of anonymous accusations. Anonymity for rape accusers is long overdue for retirement.

Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

I wonder if we had created such a safe society for women that a large percents of them now had feel free to turn into drama queens.

The highly educated young women who join SlutWalks are among the safest and most secure in the world. But you’d never know it from the fevered rhetoric. According to one widely cited scare statistic cooked up by the American Association of University Women, no fewer than 62 per cent of female students say they’ve been sexually harassed at university – a figure that is credible only if you include every incident of being groped by some 20-year-old drunk. The student activists at York continuously insist that their own campus is a hotbed of violence and sexual assault, for which the university administration is to blame. The only remedy is mandatory anti-oppression training for all. (In fact, Toronto’s crime rate, and also York’s, is among the lowest in the country.)
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There’s no shortage of other causes for feminists to take up. There’s the juggernaut of ultra-hard-core online porn, which has coarsened the attitudes of millions of young men and made relations between the sexes far more problematic for many young women. Or how about the sickening slut-ification of preadolescent girls? Maybe we should get more outraged about that. Anything would be a big improvement over the narcissistic self-indulgence of the SlutWalkers. I guess they mean well. But really, they’re so … privileged

(CNN) -- Eman al-Obeidy, the woman who caught the world's attention when she accused members of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's forces of gang-raping her, arrived Monday at a refugee facility in Romania.
Al-Obeidy had fled Libya and was awaiting resettlement as a refugee in Qatar when she was deported Thursday and sent back to Benghazi in Libya.
On Sunday, a high-level U.S. State Department source told CNN that al-Obeidy was on her way to Malta with her father, and would head to a processing center in Europe before leaving for a final destination. It may take weeks before she gets to that destination.
Another U.S. State Department source said Sunday the United States was deeply concerned about her well-being, and worked closely with officials in Europe and Libya to get her safely out of the country. The same source said the U.S. is "prepared to provide whatever help and support Eman may need.

In the last few years, we have seen the evaporation of every style restriction, guideline, or taboo. You, the ordinary woman in the street, have been liberated from the girdles of convention, especially when it comes to office attire. There are no longer any standards for work-wear. Gals with sleazy biker tattoos trade derivatives. Human resource directors sport Snooki bumps whilst jacked up on seven-inch porno-pumps. We are living in a wear-pasties-if-you-feel-like-it arcadia.


However, based on the number of fraught emails I get from women who are horrified and disoriented by the fleshy excesses and toe cleavages of their colleagues, I suspect there is trouble in paradise. Here's an example from a lady in Washington, D.C.:

I know I sound like a jealous old crone (which I am), but whenever I'm in the office I'm astounded by the bouncing, bra-less tank tops, the slopping midriffs, the barely covered rear ends. Yesterday I saw one young woman in a tiny romper dress (half her bra visible); it looked almost exactly like something my daughter wore when she was sandbox age.

These why-am-I-looking-at-so-many-wobbly-bits-in-the-workplace exhortations are deluging my inbox. While fashion sociologists like myself observe this phenomenon with amused detachment, my correspondents all seem fit to explode with indignation. Unfortunately there is no solution to this particular problem. Any attempt to constrain office boob-flaunting or minimize butt cracks will result in some kind of gruesome law suit. Your only hope is for the offending flesh-exposers to all die of pneumonia.

Photo that made them famous.

Australian Scott Jones and his girlfriend, Alexandra Thomas of Vancouver, British Columbia, told the Canadian network CBC that they were not making out in the street during the Vancouver hockey riot as it appeared in the widely circulated photo by Getty Images photographer Rich Lam.

The two were trying to find a way out of the turbulent downtown area when they were overrun by a phalanx of riot police, they said.

"They started charging at us, and we tried to run away, but Alex couldn't," Jones explained.

"I just tripped up," Thomas interjected. "I'm not sure, but I was starting to get really frightened because I'd never experienced anything like that before. And it's really scary, you know? ... I was upset, and he was there to make sure that I got out OK."

"So I went back for her," Jones said. "They (the police) started beating us with the shields, trying to get us to move. I don't know why; we weren't being aggressive towards them or anything like that. But they eventually they passed over us, and that's when we were on the ground. She was a bit hysterical afterwards, obviously, and I was just trying to calm her down."


The couple said they were shocked by the sudden media attention they'd received and didn't know how to respond, but they decided they couldn't let wild internet rumors about the image go unanswered.

"Some people didn't think it was my girlfriend," Jones said. "You know, I drugged somebody, or there was that thing where she got stabbed or something like that? The rumors got out of hand so quickly. We just wanted to clear it up.

A nurse accused of raping a woman in the toilets of a Brisbane pub is free to return home to Ireland after prosecutors dropped the charges.

Anne-Marie O'Loughlin, 26, was found guilty of two counts of rape and deprivation of liberty in the Brisbane District Court in December last year.

She was sentenced to two-and-a-half years' jail.

The conviction was overturned in the Court of Appeal in Brisbane earlier this month and a retrial ordered.

However prosecutor Chris Minnery told the Brisbane District Court on Tuesday that the crown was dropping the charges.

It's understood the complainant no longer wishes to proceed to trial.

Outside court, Ms O'Loughlin's lawyer Adam Magill said she was "very happy" the matter had been resolved.

During the earlier trial it had been alleged that Ms O'Loughlin had digitally raped a 34-year-old woman in a toilet cubicle at Brisbane's Caxton Street Hotel in late 2008.

Ms O'Loughlin won her appeal on the grounds that the judge misdirected the jury on the issue of intoxication and consent.

Dear Prudence,
A few years ago, I was falsely and maliciously accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend. I spent a day in jail but was never charged. It's something that I've probably told around 20 people in all. I've reached a point where I feel ready to meet women and try dating again. It seems like it would be a right-to-know issue for them. It was a very traumatic experience for me that is a significant part of who I am now. At what point and in what way should I tell someone I want to date or am dating?

—When To Disclose


Dear Disclose,
Although it's tempting to see your letter as a commentary on what did or didn't happen in Suite 2806 of the Sofitel New York, I'm taking your word that you are an innocent man who was falsely accused. You mention that this took place "a few years ago" and that you are only now ready to consider dating again. That speaks to what a trauma it is to be arrested for a crime you didn't commit, especially such a heinous offense as rape. But if you have not been able to approach women for all these years because you feared them, or felt like tainted goods, then you really aren't over this. As hideous as this episode was, the system worked, the falsity of her claims was revealed, and you were never charged. I wish you could see this as justice working swiftly for you. What's worrisome is how deeply this accusation has insinuated itself into your consciousness. What happened was awful, but you need to find a way to make it an "insignificant part" of who you are now, because it sounds as if you've been emotionally derailed. It would surely be helpful to discuss your feelings with a therapist who specializes in trauma. As for when you reveal this, I don't think there's any rule (unless the arrest comes up when someone Googles your name). It's certainly not something you need to broach on a first date. "By the way, I was falsely accused of rape" might unnecessarily mean there's no second date. Sharing information this painful and private is better done when you know someone well enough to feel safe doing so, and you are confident that she knows you well enough to see you're telling the truth.
—Prudie

Nor is there any meanful punsihment for women who falsely cry rape for the most part.

As the harm to a man is such cases is similar to the harm done to a woman who was raped to me the punishment for crying rape falsely should be similar also

we all have to grow up sometime and spending one day in jail is something a MAN should be able to get over.

She would however never never give such a comment to a woman who had been sexaul assaulted no matter how minor now would she Hawkeye to woman up.