Day of Blogs

And now that we are officially at the halfway mark, we are getting to the Cara’s Classic Posts portion of our programing.  In addition to the Cara Starts To Get a Little Silly portion.  The Classic Posts are of course of my egotistical choosing, posts about sexual assault that I like a lot, in which I think that I said something pretty smart, and that other people seemed to like, too.

So here’s a start, with a post I frequently reference, Why ask men to stop raping when women can just barricade themselves in their homes? An excerpt:

Chung refers to “responsible life choices.” Of course, she’s talking about women, as though we wake up in the morning and choose to be raped. No one talks about men making the responsible life choice to not rape. When you do, they throw a fit and want to know why we should tell men not to rape because they’re men and they’re not going to rape. But though huge numbers of women are raped, a significant majority are not. And we feel perfectly fine telling them what they should do to avoid the ever-present threat of rape by the men whose feelings we’re afraid to hurt.

Here are the facts. When someone actually bothers to do a responsible study about how alcohol affects rape, they do indeed find that a large number of victims were intoxicated at the time of the assault. They also find that in most cases where alcohol was involved, both parties were drinking. And in cases where only the victim or the perpetrator was drinking, the rapist was more than twice as likely as the victim to be intoxicated (pdf).

But I’ll just keep on holding my breath for that article titled “Alcohol tied to risk of being a rapist.” I’ll wait for the simply rational advice that men shouldn’t drink because there’s a relatively small chance that drinking will cause them to rape someone. Can’t you see it right around the corner? A time when a woman makes a rape allegation and people accusingly ask the man well were you drinking?

You can read the full post here.