That said, I was looking for some numbers, and I was actually surprised by what the 2008 CVUS survey reported. Per Table 38, the gender breakdown for attackers of single-offender rape and sexual assault (including threats) is 78.1% male to 18.5% female (with 3.5% unavailable, and apparently a little bit of rounding), which is actually very close to the base rate for violent crimes of 77.6% to 19%. By these numbers, robbery stands out much more as gender-biased crime. Not what I was expecting. Apparently their sample size wasn't very big, so this may be a coincidence, but it is provocative.
This actually is the most convincing bit - and in light of that, I'm totally willing to admit my prior assumptions were off-base. I had been under the impression that rape was different in the % breakdown gender-wise, and it seems it in fact is not. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but taking the report at face value seems to indicate that rape doesn't happen significantly more or less the other violent crimes period, regardless of the gender of the people involved. That would indicate that reducing all violent crime would reduce rape too, by roughly the same amount, in theory. It does still beg the question of why most violent crimes are committed by men, though that is probably a topic for another thread.
As far as the ah, very aggressive comments directed my way... if you somehow felt I was ignoring you in some way, I apologize, as that was not the intent. There were frequently multiple posts that appeared to be directed at me, and while I did try to address most of the content in each one, But I am getting the distinct impression that simply continuing to disagree with ideas after the person who presented them believes they've "proven" it is something that merits hostility. I'm totally ok with you guys disagreeing with me, and I'm totally ok with the idea of potentially being wrong/mistaken/whatever. But I am not ok with the idea that I'm somehow being unreasonable or awful person just because I don't buy whatever arguments someone else (on the internet, no less!) happens to present. Now, methinks it would thus be best for me to bow out of this discussion for now, because I get the distinct impression that further comments will not be productive nor viewed in good faith by those currently here.
As I mentioned in the post, I acknowledge that the original study was disputed. At this point I must note that several times I have had questions directed at me that I already answered or addressed in previous posts, and had to refer the ask-er back to them. I also said I was totally open to hearing other conflicting studies/stats, hence I'm extremely confused as to the hostile and accusatory tone in Crashing's last paragraph. There's really not much point in engaging in a debate if you're not willing to accept the possibility of being wrong. Given how I and others have engaged the debate here, I strongly suspect I am not the one most likely to have a problem on this front.
As far as the actual report stats: its possible they aren't measuring quite the same things. A more careful reading reveals that the "1 in 4" stat, is the fraction of women in college that had been raped, or had someone attempt to rape them *at any point in their lifetime*. So it's entirely possible that a large chunk of that stat is actually from rapes against pre-college women, and thus not necessarily in conflict with the report you presented. This also seems in-line with the wiki article's claim that girls 16-19 are much more likely to be raped then others in the general population. Still is a very bad thing, IMO.
Also, the question you are referencing, Highroller, seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. I could've sworn I addressed everything that was talked about, but you keep claiming I didn't, so clearly something has been missed. Mind refreshing my memory?
To give a summary of how I feel on the topic, in case parts of it got lost in the shuffle:
The vast majority of rapes consist of a male raping a (usually young) female. That would tend to indicate that the things that lead someone to do this are gendered to some degree. It thus makes sense to examine how guys are different then girls in various areas. There have been some research attempting to show that men are inherently rapey, but since we obviously cannot control stuff that's "inherent", this stuff isn't very useful for trying to reduce the amount of rape that occurs. The next thing that seems reasonable to examine is the differences in how we "nurture" boys vs girls, particular with respect to sex, since we are talking about a sex crime.
However, it tends to be universally agreed that the sex education in our country is limited at best, ignorant or outright unhealthy at worst. Hence most of what a developing child learns about sex is going to be from their parents, peers, and media. Parents may give their child useful information; on the other hand, a ton of parents were also raised in a time when racism/sexism were still ok and birth control wasn't yet a thing, and there's a non-trivial chunk of them that haven't gotten with the times. A teenager's peers are just as limited as they themselves are, ergo its highly unlikely a person's going to get useful information from whomever they happen to hang out with in high school. Finally, media obviously isn't supposed to reflect reality (something some teenagers apparently don't understand *sigh*), and as such, isn't a good source of information either. Any or all of the above can have sexist views about sex that will get passed on, and thus can create a noticeable difference in how men and women are taught about sex.
It thus should not be surprising that tons of people of both gender, but particularly young people, have *****ty and inaccurate ideas about sex. And, lo and behold, we've all run into examples, be it the entitled guys I've talked to, or the gold-digger women you guys have encountered. It seems plausible to me that acting on *****ty and inaccurate views about sex can result in bad, even criminal, sexual behavior; after all that's part of why we label it "*****ty and inaccurate". It thus follows that if we can reduce the amount of people with *****ty and inaccurate views about sex, we can thus reduce the amount of people attempting to rape (which yes, happens to be mostly men). Since we can't stop parents/peers/media from expressing whatever they want, then we have to go at it from the other end, and provide better sex education that can oppose the bad information that will inevitably be picked up from those sources.
Apparently the first of the studies has come under some dispute since I last checked the page. However, there is still a CDC study that places the rate of rape victims among college students in the 20% range. Multiple other studies came up with a 5% per academic year figure; unless the group overlaps heavily from year-to-year, this will typically add up to the 20% figure of the CDC report. The article mentions that pretty much all these studies are disputed to some degree, but only discusses concrete criticisms of the first one, and there's no mention of any studies that conflict with or directly contradict these findings. I have not personally encountered credible instances of any studies that disprove these numbers, but if you do, please do speak up and provide links
@Fluffy_Bunny: I'm thinking better sex ed in our schools. Unfortunately this won't happen so long as there are millions of people who believe "sex is evil" is part of their religion. Though, to me, such attitudes are part of the problem...
@Highroller: I just don't make assumptions about individual people based on what group they belong in. What I am talking about is more of a numbers problem. To have some concrete ones, take the (much replicated and accepted) figure that roughly 1 in 4 college women have had someone attempt to rape them. Most report that the attempted rapist was male. This indicates that we either have a small group of college-age men who are complete sociopaths raping TONS of women and getting away with it; or, some large % of college-age men have attempted to rape a woman at some point. Now, even if my sample is limited, its still rather freaking bad for a huge chunk of men in a particular age range to act in such a way. Such a large % indicates that there's some kind of systemic problem going on. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to assume that every guy I meet is a rapist that's out to get me; but I have to accept there's a non-trivial chance he will be. To go with your black people analogy, if you talked to a black guy at the street corner in south LA at night, you shouldn't assume he's a gang-banger, but you wouldn't be shocked out of your mind if it turned out he was.
You seem to have a double standard in your evidence: deluded women are just outliers, but deluded men are indicative of a systematic problem.
I think I've repeatedly stated that I don't mind taking measures to reduce the amount of delusional women; a few posts up I specifically mentioned that I'm 100% on board with telling young girls that the Gold-Digger life plan is an awful terribad idea. There are totally delusional women in the world and in our society. But what I am arguing is that women and men tend to get different delusions due to the sexist messaging in our media, and that each one tends to lead to different problems. And no, I don't think we need to "censor" our media just for stupid people. I do think we should get better sex education systems in place to help counteract the effects media has on stupid people as it relates to sex.
To answer the question about age range: 20-25 ish. Because I myself am in that age range, most of the people I run into also are. The only older people I interact with are other Magic players, and sadly that group isn't known for it's spectacular maturity level. As I discussed in an earlier post, I am very much open to the idea that observing these messed up ideas from men around me are simply a result of my skewed data sample, and that the average straight white 20-25 year old happens to be an entitled delusional douchebag. That's still something we as a society should be at least moderately concerned about. Though, incidentally, a correlation between "being a 20-25 year old guy" and "having inaccurate delusions and feelings of entitlement regarding sex" could also explain why rape is such a big thing at college campuses in particular...
What? No. That's just patently false. Without even getting into actual conversations between actual human beings, the immature guy with unrealistic sexual expectations is, like, the whole point of teen sex comedy movies.
Then why have I met multiple real-life guys that seem to think sex-as-depicted-in-porn is an accurate reflection of real life? I mean I know that by virtue of watching one and snap thinking "good god I'd never act remotely like this woman, and I'd never consent to even half of those sex acts". Yet for some reason that is totally unbeknownst to me, some men seem to think all women secretly want to do all that stuff... Incidentally, when you ask guys what the "moral" or thematic message of such stories is, they'll often give you something completely different then what you pointed. It's probably like all the people who think Fight Club is trying to promote and celebrate old-style masculinity (protip its not). That stuff just goes right over the heads of people who need to hear it most, precisely because they don't want to hear it...
And yes, it does suck worse to be the victim. Which is why people feeling worse for the perpetrator is such a huge load of cognitive dissonance.
What, you don't think boys get told point blank to respect women and their wishes? Of course we do. That's not even an issue.
But we don't confront the underlying fantasy that drives it; we don't explicitly identify "tons of awesome free sex" as a fantasy. But we do say "tons of free money for no work" is.
You seem to be a proponent of education and rehabilitation for rapists. Shouldn't you also feel bad that their lives were ruined? Shouldn't they be taught not to rape instead of being locked up for long periods of time?
I will agree that it sucks to be those guys. But it sucks just as bad, if not worse, to be the girl they violated. Focusing on the suffering of the former while simultaneously not talking about the suffering of the latter, tends to communicate that you have more empathy for those guys then you do for that girl. This doesn't make a lot of sense given that the guy's actions were far more criminal/egregious. Thus why our views on rape seem ****ed up: our society identifies and empathizes more with rapists then with rape victims.
Sidenote on your conversation about deterrence: rape is one of the serious crimes that's easiest to "get away with" for a variety of reasons (that might not be fixable). As such rape can have a much lower "deterrence factor", and it is VERY likely this plays into why it happens at a higher rate then some other crimes.
@Synalon: no, it doesn't have to be gendered. In my case I suspect being told that was a sort of tactical play by my parents; they shot down the lies they believed I'd be more likely to develop. But I'd be totally ok with telling guys the same things we tell girls, and vice versa, provided that it was done in the same way, and with the same intent.
Well, in time, I might find such a thing, if it exists. However, I will be the first to point out that plenty of women with the gold-digger fantasy do in fact exist. Lucky for me I was explicitly told that this fantasy was unrealistic. I can think of multiple adults in my younger years who point blank said "don't count on finding prince charming to save you from having to get an education/job". I think it's ABSOLUTELY acceptable to tell young women this; I'm certainly better off for it. So why not do the same thing for the "male infinite sex" fantasy?
You are correct that a lot of these fantasies are pre-existing. I seem to recall a couple of friends studying psych that the notion that you're not the center of the world isn't something we're born with. Children tend to innately act like self-centered little *****s, until their brain develops the capacity for empathy. Even then, humans usually require some additional "training" on top of this to stop being egocentric. With that in mind, yeah, every person left to their own devices will tend to believe they totally deserve to rule the world, get infinite free sex, infinite free stuff, and pretty much have everyone else do whatever they want.
However, the world obviously doesn't work this way. Interacting with other individuals and with society at large quickly teaches us that most of these things we aren't going to get in real life. It doesn't take a lot of time to figure out that violent video games, for instance, aren't representative of day-to-day life. But this gets much, much murkier when it comes to sex... *because we don't want to talk about it*. We don't explicitly give young people any concept of what good sex is "supposed" to look like, or how healthy relationships are "supposed" to work, so there's no basis for comparison via which to recognize fantasies. For a more graphic example, consider pornography. The couple of young men I have talked to on the topic genuinely believed porno to be an accurate depiction of sex. But it's not (and I REALLY hope I don't have to explain why).
As for the thing about Hollywood being sexist, I found that blog post - here. Granted, this is only the view of one particular person, but it's also a person who apparently had some inside communication and knowledge of the industry. I took the liberty of perusing some of the other posts, and she does explain some of the reasons why it works this way in TV Shows; apparently, straight white men command higher ad fees. As another sidenote, I seem to recall Cate Blanchett feeling the need to point out that films that centered on women totally can be successful during the reception of her Oscar award. I could probably dig up more, if necessary, but the general gist I've seen from every source I've encountered is that Hollywood is pretty fanatical about catering to straight white men, even when there's evidence to indicate they could make more money doing something else. A lot of this is probably because big companies are risk-averse, and would prefer to stick with what worked in the past...even if the present is completely different.
As far as the education thing...see Steubenville case. A room full of 30+ teenagers witnessed something that any law-enforcement or legal professional would snap recognize as rape without a second thought. Yet the vast majority of said teenagers claimed they didn't think it was rape because "she wasn't fighting back", "she didn't say no", and a whole laundry list of other excuses. On top of that, there were loads of people, both male and female, who claimed she was "being a ****" and "deserved" it, and how they felt so bad for the poor boys going to jail because their lives and future were ruined. This alone should illustrate that a non-trivial segment of our society has some pretty ****ed up ideas about what is and isn't rape.
EDIT: Note on Highroller's post. I stated that those were the kinds of fantasies media sells to women. Not that those were the sum total of all the fantasies women have. Women are totally capable of having the same fantasies as men, but Hollywood/Media is very sexist in determining which ones from which gender are worth catering too. This catering tends to validate, encourage, and reinforce the fantasies in question, which becomes problematic when we make no effort to teach what fantasy and reality is with respect to sex.
Is it because we're more driven by the way people look than by the more nebulous quality of how people think?
100 times this. For models/actors/musicians it doesn't take much time for an individual to decide whether or not their work has merit. When it comes to "how they think", it takes much longer, even if you know what to look for. Also, our "objective" metrics for what constitutes a beautiful person, or beautiful music, are reasonably specific, and few in number. Being good-looking these days usually encompasses 1. Don't be overweight 2. Wear well-fitting clothes and 3. Be well groomed. We're also generally willing to accept that personal taste plays a big part in the beauty equation. In contrast, very few people can agree on a "correct way to think", but most people do think there's a right and wrong way. A mind-blowing number of people implicitly define correct/good thinking as "thinking the way I think". Even if someone is willing to concede that other forms of thinking could potentially be preferable, its really hard to point to specific mental skills without some psychological training on what to look for. Thus people tend to fall back on superficial metrics like education level, that don't necessarily imply high intelligence (they do imply high knowledge, but that's not the same...).
I should have refined my statement further - doesn't directly offend or affect you negatively. It then plays into a self-serving bias; its not in some men's interest to wake up, smell the roses, and realize that the world doesn't revolve around them and that they don't necessarily have infinite awesome free sex in their future with the woman/women of their choice. It's much more comforting to live with the fantasy that's being peddled to them. Now don't get me wrong, women have certain fantasies, and media is starting to catch on and sell to those fantasies. However, female fantasies tend not to involve getting tons of sex, but instead having a caretaker that treats them "like a princess" or something like that. Hence why the male version tends to be a bit more significant in conversations about rape. In both cases, having bought into such media-spun fantasies is kind of a sign of immaturity, regardless of who the fantasy is targeted at.
You guys answered your own question, and I think I mentioned it in my original post: these ideas seem sexist because Hollywood is sexist. Big budget films are overwhelmingly more likely to feature a guy as the protagonist/main character. I distinctly remember reading an article by an up and coming film writer who was directly told that they should de-emphasize female characters because clearly no one is interested in watching women interacting with each other (I'll try to dig up the link). This imbalance is getting better, (I think?), but it's going to take some time. In the meantime, I live in a society where a lot of men around me grew up consuming this stuff, and it shows, from my point of view. But even when you toss gendered implications aside, the idea of sex as some kind of earned reward is still problematic.
Now, given that apparently multiple people here have claimed not to have observed anything of this nature, I can offer the following disclaimers/explanations. First, there's the obvious one that you're potentially not as aware of this attitude/behavior, because its not projected at you, and it doesn't directly affect you. But I'm assuming you've thought of that one already. Secondly, I will note that I am white, relatively well-off, and currently fall in the 20-25 year old age range, and consequently, a lot of the men I've met fall in there too. And a lot of them have very obvious entitlement issues, and yes, those issues often extend to their perceptions of how sex "should" work. It's possible that most men legitimately grow out of this, and those that don't you guys simply don't hang around, and for good reason - this entitlement is a form of immaturity, and why would you want to be around someone so blatantly immature? So it may be less about sex in particular, and more about younger people feeling like they're owed stuff for little or flimsy reasons.
How so? I think we're normally pretty clear that that sort of thing is not okay: the guy who beds falling-down-drunk girls is always portrayed as a sleazeball, and the guy who pressures subordinates for sex as a creep.
Well the "screwing an intoxicated woman is wrong" idea clearly missed the mark, since there were several people over in the feminism thread who were arguing just that... Also, as far as sex with subordinates, I actually don't see a clear media message one way or the other. There's plenty of stories about workplace romances, which would tend to indicate they're ok, when the reality is something like 50%+ of people just aren't mature enough to handle it.
Lumping Spirit's question with Highroller's since they seem to overlap...
Is the narrative that men who are good get women as a prize for being good, or is it that women will choose a man who fulfills the ideal of being good over a man who doesn't?
Pre-feminist movement, it's unquestionably the former. Now, suppose we restrict ourselves only to modern media, since its not fair to judge based on literature of a century ago, right? Problem is, we use the same old stories and tropes, and it just hasn't occurred to anyone to do differently. Winner always gets the girl, and thereby sex, 100% of the time (or so darn close to it that it might as well be). There's no mention of "well what if she finds him ugly?" or "what if he's bad in bed?". No, she always just falls head over heels for whomever the designated protagonist is. Part of the issue is also the fact that the "designated protagonist" is male so darn often. If representation in film/TV were closer to 50/50, then we wouldn't have this "Woman=prize" perception as much, because half the time it would instead depict "Man=prize", thus taking the gendered crap out of it. But instead the default is a male protagonist, and "the girl" pretty much always defaulting to being his love interest, and they inevitably get together at the end after he "wins" in some way.
The thing of it is, if you claim a person will do (or not do) something 100% of the time, you're effectively claiming they lack agency in the matter. This doesn't end up being problematic when it does in fact describe most people's behavior - for instance, claiming that no one jumps off a cliff out of the blue. But it gets very problematic when such a claim doesn't match how people behave in real life. "Women always choose the winner" is kind of like that. It is true that women tend to be more attracted to successful men, but it's far from a 100% tautological equivalence. The way things work out in your average TV show or movie is so wildly inaccurate to the point it's laughable. But we pick up the idea that it's true 100% of the time, hence why you get a ton of men that spout BS ideas like "20% of men get 80% of women" and "Only rich and conventionally attractive guys get laid" (both are obviously false).
This leads into Blinking_Spirit's earlier idea that men want to fool themselves into thinking women want them, even when it's just not true. In this case, guys will tend to use logic like "well I'm a winner/rich/conventionally attractive, clearly she does in fact want me!". The same thing might be what goes on in the whole "pressure subordinate for sex" deal - guys just selectively ignore evidence that the woman in question probably isn't actually interested in him. They'll hit on the secretary, and when she reciprocates, it won't occur to them that she might be doing it out of fear of losing her job. Alternatively, guys who are in positions of wealth/fame will tend to assume such a status makes all women want them, and again, ignore all signals (or even direct words!) that conflict. To make matters worse, I've heard a TON of stories of men losing their ***** when a woman dares to infringe on this fantasy by giving them an unambiguous no.
The long story short of it is, our media gives men (and not women) lots of reason to believe that they've "earned" or "deserve" sex, and that is just. not. true.
To Blinking Spirit's question: you actually answered it for me.
The real problem area is where men find ways to make women "want" them and decide this is acceptable - from coercing them through social inequality in a harem to plying them with alcohol in a bar.
We do tend to indicate that kind of thing is ok. There's also the wide-scale objectification of women in media; this pretty much always carries the subtext "Women exist for your pleasure". Women are not depicted as possessing the same desires, humanity, and agency that men do. It shows up in things as basic as fairy tales, in which the princess is the "prize" the prince gets for doing awesome things. There's this overriding narrative that men who are "good" will be rewarded with positive feminine attention and sex. But that's not how the whole consent thing works, sex/consent/attraction isn't something you "earn" or "win", but our media constantly depicts it that way.
Instead of teaching men not to rape, we need to stop teaching people to rape.
I think this really gets at the crux of the issue. We say out loud "Rape is wrong", but then constantly broadcast subtext saying that it really isn't. This is the "Rape Culture" that gets spoken of sometimes - culture that implies personal boundaries aren't really that important, or that women secretly want to be treated a certain way (regardless of what they tell you), and so on. Bad sex ed is half the equation, the other half is this media crap that ends up filling in the gaps we purposely refuse to educate our young people on.
This actually is the most convincing bit - and in light of that, I'm totally willing to admit my prior assumptions were off-base. I had been under the impression that rape was different in the % breakdown gender-wise, and it seems it in fact is not. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but taking the report at face value seems to indicate that rape doesn't happen significantly more or less the other violent crimes period, regardless of the gender of the people involved. That would indicate that reducing all violent crime would reduce rape too, by roughly the same amount, in theory. It does still beg the question of why most violent crimes are committed by men, though that is probably a topic for another thread.
As far as the ah, very aggressive comments directed my way... if you somehow felt I was ignoring you in some way, I apologize, as that was not the intent. There were frequently multiple posts that appeared to be directed at me, and while I did try to address most of the content in each one, But I am getting the distinct impression that simply continuing to disagree with ideas after the person who presented them believes they've "proven" it is something that merits hostility. I'm totally ok with you guys disagreeing with me, and I'm totally ok with the idea of potentially being wrong/mistaken/whatever. But I am not ok with the idea that I'm somehow being unreasonable or awful person just because I don't buy whatever arguments someone else (on the internet, no less!) happens to present. Now, methinks it would thus be best for me to bow out of this discussion for now, because I get the distinct impression that further comments will not be productive nor viewed in good faith by those currently here.
As far as the actual report stats: its possible they aren't measuring quite the same things. A more careful reading reveals that the "1 in 4" stat, is the fraction of women in college that had been raped, or had someone attempt to rape them *at any point in their lifetime*. So it's entirely possible that a large chunk of that stat is actually from rapes against pre-college women, and thus not necessarily in conflict with the report you presented. This also seems in-line with the wiki article's claim that girls 16-19 are much more likely to be raped then others in the general population. Still is a very bad thing, IMO.
Also, the question you are referencing, Highroller, seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. I could've sworn I addressed everything that was talked about, but you keep claiming I didn't, so clearly something has been missed. Mind refreshing my memory?
To give a summary of how I feel on the topic, in case parts of it got lost in the shuffle:
The vast majority of rapes consist of a male raping a (usually young) female. That would tend to indicate that the things that lead someone to do this are gendered to some degree. It thus makes sense to examine how guys are different then girls in various areas. There have been some research attempting to show that men are inherently rapey, but since we obviously cannot control stuff that's "inherent", this stuff isn't very useful for trying to reduce the amount of rape that occurs. The next thing that seems reasonable to examine is the differences in how we "nurture" boys vs girls, particular with respect to sex, since we are talking about a sex crime.
However, it tends to be universally agreed that the sex education in our country is limited at best, ignorant or outright unhealthy at worst. Hence most of what a developing child learns about sex is going to be from their parents, peers, and media. Parents may give their child useful information; on the other hand, a ton of parents were also raised in a time when racism/sexism were still ok and birth control wasn't yet a thing, and there's a non-trivial chunk of them that haven't gotten with the times. A teenager's peers are just as limited as they themselves are, ergo its highly unlikely a person's going to get useful information from whomever they happen to hang out with in high school. Finally, media obviously isn't supposed to reflect reality (something some teenagers apparently don't understand *sigh*), and as such, isn't a good source of information either. Any or all of the above can have sexist views about sex that will get passed on, and thus can create a noticeable difference in how men and women are taught about sex.
It thus should not be surprising that tons of people of both gender, but particularly young people, have *****ty and inaccurate ideas about sex. And, lo and behold, we've all run into examples, be it the entitled guys I've talked to, or the gold-digger women you guys have encountered. It seems plausible to me that acting on *****ty and inaccurate views about sex can result in bad, even criminal, sexual behavior; after all that's part of why we label it "*****ty and inaccurate". It thus follows that if we can reduce the amount of people with *****ty and inaccurate views about sex, we can thus reduce the amount of people attempting to rape (which yes, happens to be mostly men). Since we can't stop parents/peers/media from expressing whatever they want, then we have to go at it from the other end, and provide better sex education that can oppose the bad information that will inevitably be picked up from those sources.
Apparently the first of the studies has come under some dispute since I last checked the page. However, there is still a CDC study that places the rate of rape victims among college students in the 20% range. Multiple other studies came up with a 5% per academic year figure; unless the group overlaps heavily from year-to-year, this will typically add up to the 20% figure of the CDC report. The article mentions that pretty much all these studies are disputed to some degree, but only discusses concrete criticisms of the first one, and there's no mention of any studies that conflict with or directly contradict these findings. I have not personally encountered credible instances of any studies that disprove these numbers, but if you do, please do speak up and provide links
@Highroller: I just don't make assumptions about individual people based on what group they belong in. What I am talking about is more of a numbers problem. To have some concrete ones, take the (much replicated and accepted) figure that roughly 1 in 4 college women have had someone attempt to rape them. Most report that the attempted rapist was male. This indicates that we either have a small group of college-age men who are complete sociopaths raping TONS of women and getting away with it; or, some large % of college-age men have attempted to rape a woman at some point. Now, even if my sample is limited, its still rather freaking bad for a huge chunk of men in a particular age range to act in such a way. Such a large % indicates that there's some kind of systemic problem going on. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to assume that every guy I meet is a rapist that's out to get me; but I have to accept there's a non-trivial chance he will be. To go with your black people analogy, if you talked to a black guy at the street corner in south LA at night, you shouldn't assume he's a gang-banger, but you wouldn't be shocked out of your mind if it turned out he was.
I think I've repeatedly stated that I don't mind taking measures to reduce the amount of delusional women; a few posts up I specifically mentioned that I'm 100% on board with telling young girls that the Gold-Digger life plan is an awful terribad idea. There are totally delusional women in the world and in our society. But what I am arguing is that women and men tend to get different delusions due to the sexist messaging in our media, and that each one tends to lead to different problems. And no, I don't think we need to "censor" our media just for stupid people. I do think we should get better sex education systems in place to help counteract the effects media has on stupid people as it relates to sex.
To answer the question about age range: 20-25 ish. Because I myself am in that age range, most of the people I run into also are. The only older people I interact with are other Magic players, and sadly that group isn't known for it's spectacular maturity level. As I discussed in an earlier post, I am very much open to the idea that observing these messed up ideas from men around me are simply a result of my skewed data sample, and that the average straight white 20-25 year old happens to be an entitled delusional douchebag. That's still something we as a society should be at least moderately concerned about. Though, incidentally, a correlation between "being a 20-25 year old guy" and "having inaccurate delusions and feelings of entitlement regarding sex" could also explain why rape is such a big thing at college campuses in particular...
Then why have I met multiple real-life guys that seem to think sex-as-depicted-in-porn is an accurate reflection of real life? I mean I know that by virtue of watching one and snap thinking "good god I'd never act remotely like this woman, and I'd never consent to even half of those sex acts". Yet for some reason that is totally unbeknownst to me, some men seem to think all women secretly want to do all that stuff... Incidentally, when you ask guys what the "moral" or thematic message of such stories is, they'll often give you something completely different then what you pointed. It's probably like all the people who think Fight Club is trying to promote and celebrate old-style masculinity (protip its not). That stuff just goes right over the heads of people who need to hear it most, precisely because they don't want to hear it...
And yes, it does suck worse to be the victim. Which is why people feeling worse for the perpetrator is such a huge load of cognitive dissonance.
But we don't confront the underlying fantasy that drives it; we don't explicitly identify "tons of awesome free sex" as a fantasy. But we do say "tons of free money for no work" is.
I will agree that it sucks to be those guys. But it sucks just as bad, if not worse, to be the girl they violated. Focusing on the suffering of the former while simultaneously not talking about the suffering of the latter, tends to communicate that you have more empathy for those guys then you do for that girl. This doesn't make a lot of sense given that the guy's actions were far more criminal/egregious. Thus why our views on rape seem ****ed up: our society identifies and empathizes more with rapists then with rape victims.
Sidenote on your conversation about deterrence: rape is one of the serious crimes that's easiest to "get away with" for a variety of reasons (that might not be fixable). As such rape can have a much lower "deterrence factor", and it is VERY likely this plays into why it happens at a higher rate then some other crimes.
@Synalon: no, it doesn't have to be gendered. In my case I suspect being told that was a sort of tactical play by my parents; they shot down the lies they believed I'd be more likely to develop. But I'd be totally ok with telling guys the same things we tell girls, and vice versa, provided that it was done in the same way, and with the same intent.
However, the world obviously doesn't work this way. Interacting with other individuals and with society at large quickly teaches us that most of these things we aren't going to get in real life. It doesn't take a lot of time to figure out that violent video games, for instance, aren't representative of day-to-day life. But this gets much, much murkier when it comes to sex... *because we don't want to talk about it*. We don't explicitly give young people any concept of what good sex is "supposed" to look like, or how healthy relationships are "supposed" to work, so there's no basis for comparison via which to recognize fantasies. For a more graphic example, consider pornography. The couple of young men I have talked to on the topic genuinely believed porno to be an accurate depiction of sex. But it's not (and I REALLY hope I don't have to explain why).
As for the thing about Hollywood being sexist, I found that blog post - here. Granted, this is only the view of one particular person, but it's also a person who apparently had some inside communication and knowledge of the industry. I took the liberty of perusing some of the other posts, and she does explain some of the reasons why it works this way in TV Shows; apparently, straight white men command higher ad fees. As another sidenote, I seem to recall Cate Blanchett feeling the need to point out that films that centered on women totally can be successful during the reception of her Oscar award. I could probably dig up more, if necessary, but the general gist I've seen from every source I've encountered is that Hollywood is pretty fanatical about catering to straight white men, even when there's evidence to indicate they could make more money doing something else. A lot of this is probably because big companies are risk-averse, and would prefer to stick with what worked in the past...even if the present is completely different.
As far as the education thing...see Steubenville case. A room full of 30+ teenagers witnessed something that any law-enforcement or legal professional would snap recognize as rape without a second thought. Yet the vast majority of said teenagers claimed they didn't think it was rape because "she wasn't fighting back", "she didn't say no", and a whole laundry list of other excuses. On top of that, there were loads of people, both male and female, who claimed she was "being a ****" and "deserved" it, and how they felt so bad for the poor boys going to jail because their lives and future were ruined. This alone should illustrate that a non-trivial segment of our society has some pretty ****ed up ideas about what is and isn't rape.
EDIT: Note on Highroller's post. I stated that those were the kinds of fantasies media sells to women. Not that those were the sum total of all the fantasies women have. Women are totally capable of having the same fantasies as men, but Hollywood/Media is very sexist in determining which ones from which gender are worth catering too. This catering tends to validate, encourage, and reinforce the fantasies in question, which becomes problematic when we make no effort to teach what fantasy and reality is with respect to sex.
100 times this. For models/actors/musicians it doesn't take much time for an individual to decide whether or not their work has merit. When it comes to "how they think", it takes much longer, even if you know what to look for. Also, our "objective" metrics for what constitutes a beautiful person, or beautiful music, are reasonably specific, and few in number. Being good-looking these days usually encompasses 1. Don't be overweight 2. Wear well-fitting clothes and 3. Be well groomed. We're also generally willing to accept that personal taste plays a big part in the beauty equation. In contrast, very few people can agree on a "correct way to think", but most people do think there's a right and wrong way. A mind-blowing number of people implicitly define correct/good thinking as "thinking the way I think". Even if someone is willing to concede that other forms of thinking could potentially be preferable, its really hard to point to specific mental skills without some psychological training on what to look for. Thus people tend to fall back on superficial metrics like education level, that don't necessarily imply high intelligence (they do imply high knowledge, but that's not the same...).
Now, given that apparently multiple people here have claimed not to have observed anything of this nature, I can offer the following disclaimers/explanations. First, there's the obvious one that you're potentially not as aware of this attitude/behavior, because its not projected at you, and it doesn't directly affect you. But I'm assuming you've thought of that one already. Secondly, I will note that I am white, relatively well-off, and currently fall in the 20-25 year old age range, and consequently, a lot of the men I've met fall in there too. And a lot of them have very obvious entitlement issues, and yes, those issues often extend to their perceptions of how sex "should" work. It's possible that most men legitimately grow out of this, and those that don't you guys simply don't hang around, and for good reason - this entitlement is a form of immaturity, and why would you want to be around someone so blatantly immature? So it may be less about sex in particular, and more about younger people feeling like they're owed stuff for little or flimsy reasons.
Well the "screwing an intoxicated woman is wrong" idea clearly missed the mark, since there were several people over in the feminism thread who were arguing just that... Also, as far as sex with subordinates, I actually don't see a clear media message one way or the other. There's plenty of stories about workplace romances, which would tend to indicate they're ok, when the reality is something like 50%+ of people just aren't mature enough to handle it.
Lumping Spirit's question with Highroller's since they seem to overlap...
Pre-feminist movement, it's unquestionably the former. Now, suppose we restrict ourselves only to modern media, since its not fair to judge based on literature of a century ago, right? Problem is, we use the same old stories and tropes, and it just hasn't occurred to anyone to do differently. Winner always gets the girl, and thereby sex, 100% of the time (or so darn close to it that it might as well be). There's no mention of "well what if she finds him ugly?" or "what if he's bad in bed?". No, she always just falls head over heels for whomever the designated protagonist is. Part of the issue is also the fact that the "designated protagonist" is male so darn often. If representation in film/TV were closer to 50/50, then we wouldn't have this "Woman=prize" perception as much, because half the time it would instead depict "Man=prize", thus taking the gendered crap out of it. But instead the default is a male protagonist, and "the girl" pretty much always defaulting to being his love interest, and they inevitably get together at the end after he "wins" in some way.
The thing of it is, if you claim a person will do (or not do) something 100% of the time, you're effectively claiming they lack agency in the matter. This doesn't end up being problematic when it does in fact describe most people's behavior - for instance, claiming that no one jumps off a cliff out of the blue. But it gets very problematic when such a claim doesn't match how people behave in real life. "Women always choose the winner" is kind of like that. It is true that women tend to be more attracted to successful men, but it's far from a 100% tautological equivalence. The way things work out in your average TV show or movie is so wildly inaccurate to the point it's laughable. But we pick up the idea that it's true 100% of the time, hence why you get a ton of men that spout BS ideas like "20% of men get 80% of women" and "Only rich and conventionally attractive guys get laid" (both are obviously false).
This leads into Blinking_Spirit's earlier idea that men want to fool themselves into thinking women want them, even when it's just not true. In this case, guys will tend to use logic like "well I'm a winner/rich/conventionally attractive, clearly she does in fact want me!". The same thing might be what goes on in the whole "pressure subordinate for sex" deal - guys just selectively ignore evidence that the woman in question probably isn't actually interested in him. They'll hit on the secretary, and when she reciprocates, it won't occur to them that she might be doing it out of fear of losing her job. Alternatively, guys who are in positions of wealth/fame will tend to assume such a status makes all women want them, and again, ignore all signals (or even direct words!) that conflict. To make matters worse, I've heard a TON of stories of men losing their ***** when a woman dares to infringe on this fantasy by giving them an unambiguous no.
The long story short of it is, our media gives men (and not women) lots of reason to believe that they've "earned" or "deserve" sex, and that is just. not. true.
We do tend to indicate that kind of thing is ok. There's also the wide-scale objectification of women in media; this pretty much always carries the subtext "Women exist for your pleasure". Women are not depicted as possessing the same desires, humanity, and agency that men do. It shows up in things as basic as fairy tales, in which the princess is the "prize" the prince gets for doing awesome things. There's this overriding narrative that men who are "good" will be rewarded with positive feminine attention and sex. But that's not how the whole consent thing works, sex/consent/attraction isn't something you "earn" or "win", but our media constantly depicts it that way.
I think this really gets at the crux of the issue. We say out loud "Rape is wrong", but then constantly broadcast subtext saying that it really isn't. This is the "Rape Culture" that gets spoken of sometimes - culture that implies personal boundaries aren't really that important, or that women secretly want to be treated a certain way (regardless of what they tell you), and so on. Bad sex ed is half the equation, the other half is this media crap that ends up filling in the gaps we purposely refuse to educate our young people on.