On rape and flirting

This post is a collaborative effort of All Things Beautiful's Alexandra and Redneck Peril's Kenny. If you want the full impact of the Rubens, then you have to go look at it under Alexandra's prize-nominated site layout, here.

For the curious: Alexandra noticed the poll, and I had stashed away in a corner of my hard drive a ten-year-old, thirty-page essay on the topic of whether a rape victim can ever be considered partly responsible for her rape (as part of an essay on the philosophical topic of causality, bizarrely enough). I tweaked the thirty pages a bit to refer to the story, and threw out a bunch of the technical language, and added some thoughts about flirting, and sent it over to Alexandra. Alexandra then went to work literally for hours to turn it into something postable (not even I am willing to put thirty pages of logical theory cum sociopolitical musings into a single blog post). So it's a hybrid style and perhaps at first blush an odd combination of topics -- but it was very interesting to start from the fact that we both had the same reaction, and then try to work out a common expression of that reaction. You'll have to tell us whether you think it worked.



This story caught our attention. It is troubling to both of us that so many modern-day Brits are willing to blame rape victims for their own rapes...and yet, in hindsight, perhaps we should not be surprised. ...continue reading...

When a woman is raped, how much of it is her fault? Our answer is immediate: none.

It seems an easy answer. And we'll also add something else, too. How much of it is the fault of the rapist's sexist-joke-telling, beer-drinking, woman-objectifying buddies? Our answer is just as immediate, and derives from the same logic, and is in fact the same answer: none.

Furthermore, we think flirting is a highly pleasant and innocent pastime, and we would like for our respective daughters to be able to indulge in the harmless varieties, and we think it's a very great pity indeed that modern Western culture produces sizable quantities of young men who think that to flirt is to ante up.

How did we get here? The young men of our father's generation would not have been nearly so likely to say that flirting was a rapable offense as were the young men of our college generation. It is troubling to both of us that so many modern-day Brits are willing to blame rape victims for their own rapes...

So what happened?

Flirty is a word whose meaning gets more elastic the more a society is male-dominated. In Pakistan, for example, just in 2002, more than forty women are known to have had acid thrown in their faces for the express purpose of causing horrific, permanent disfigurement. The acid incidents – quite well-documented – usually follow one of two basic story lines. In one, an extremist Muslim group such as the Taliban tries to terrorize all women who go unveiled, as part of their overall repressive regime. But in the other, a particular woman goes innocently unveiled; a male acquaintance sees her and desires her and attempts to seduce her; she spurns his advances – and he considers himself bitterly wronged and wreaks justice upon her. To such a man, a woman who simply goes without a veil is the equivalent of the girl in our first story. (And, sickeningly often, the punishment handed out to the man by the village elders is obscenely mild, or indeed the victim may face intense social pressure to demand no punishment at all from her attacker.)

The more insistent a culture is that there are no innate differences between men and women (generally speaking, of course), and the less a society explains to men and boys how women and girls think differently about sex than the guys do, the more likely it is that innocent female behavior will be wrongly – but honestly – misinterpreted by males as deliberately sexually provocative behavior, and thus the more likely men are to feel aggrieved and cheated when the girl who has been wishing it declines to follow through. This is, clearly, a mark against extreme American-style 'feminism-as-androgeny.'

But the more insistent a culture is that men have the right to dominate and to be gratified by their women, and that women are responsible to ensure (by restricting their own freedom) that men are never tempted, the more likely it is that innocent female behavior will be treated by men as deliberately sexually provocative behavior that gives male beholders the right to claim the promised gratification. And this is, clearly, a plea for one heckuva lot more feminism in places like Pakistan.

We could sum up our whole point in this post as, “Don't confuse condition with cause, and remember that men and women are different but equal.”

You see, to create by foolishness a condition conducive to rape, is a very different thing than to commit a rape. We would like to see a young lady in college not drinking herself to the point where she loses all common sense, and those of us who have not totally abandoned traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethics would like to see her behave in, to put it bluntly, a considerably more moral fashion than is common at frat parties. We would also like to see the boys being aware of the potential consequences inherent in the atmosphere they are creating, and we would like to see the boys behaving morally just as much as the girls. But a rapist is in a completely different category.

So, let's say the British pollsters ask us, "Is the woman partly or entirely to blame if she fails to say 'no' clearly to the man, wears sexy clothes, drinks too much, has many sexual partners and walks alone in a deserted area?" Our answer – because we know the difference between condition and cause -- will be, "To blame for what? Do you mean, to blame for getting raped? Absolutely not. Do you mean to ask whether her rapist's blame is diminished, and some of that blame is transferred to the woman? To say so would be despicable.”

What these poll results seem to hint at, and what our own experience with collegiate males in particular tells us, is that there are a significant number of men who feel that there's something dishonest about a girl's simply flirting with a guy and then not sleeping with him. Now, since we don't think that most flirts really intend to be sexually provocative, we think there's a fundamental communication problem here. And our personal opinion is that it comes in part from the fact that women and men in the West tend not be educated in the natural difference between the typical male and female experience of sexuality, in one particular respect.

We think many men, especially young men raised after the complete triumph of the sexual revolution, have no idea that it is perfectly possible for a woman to want men to think that she is pretty without wanting them to think she is sexy. There just aren't very many men who want to be handsome but don't want to be sexy, you see. Yet there are a lot of women who want all the men around them to think they are pretty, but who would feel quite threatened if they were suddenly to realize, "My God, all these men want to have sex with me."

Our respective daughters are delightful and playful and more than usually carefree, and each of us devoutly hopes they will all grow up to enjoy many an hour of carefree and casual flirting. It is, after all, one of life's more enjoyable pleasures, and is one hundred percent calorie-free. But each of us is (or will be, depending on the age of the particular daughter) careful to make sure that our respective daughters understand that flirting is, these days, a pleasure to be indulged in circumspectly. It is one of the great advantages of moving in devoutly religious circles that our daughters know an unusually large number of boys who have been carefully trained by their parents to understand that girls such as our daughters are not to be assumed to be interested in casual sex. At church, my daughters can flirt in safety. At the local public high school, well, they need to choose their flirting partners very carefully indeed. And flirting with a complete stranger, in modern America, can turn real ugly, real fast.

It ought not be that way. But that's the way it is. And, one other thing – it could be worse.

For there are parts of the world in which the men are so obsessed with sex, and so utterly incapable of seeing women as capable of any non-sexual relationship, that any interaction with a man at all is considered to be a sexual advance. When merely to go unveiled is thought to be the equivalent of saying, "I am available," then the innocent pleasures of flirting are denied to women to a degree utterly unimaginable in the West. We will not explore in detail these societies – societies in which the fact that women and men are not identical, leads the physically dominant men to conclude with satisfaction that women and men are not equal. We will simply close with this thought:

Those men in England who consider that a flirty woman is asking for it – they might ask themselves whether the difference between themselves and the Pakistani acid-throwers who say that women who go unveiled are asking for it...they might ask themselves, we say, whether that difference is a difference in kind, or only a difference in degree.