Tuesday, May 12, 2015

"The Truth About So-Called Rape Culture"

I've written before I've know girls in my hometown who started having sex at 13 and 14. Yet they still had relationships and still got married and had kids. Some of those marriages did not work out and sometimes they were married two and three times.

I have meet very few women who've had sex with 30 men. But one I know referred to herself as a "people pleaser," who who couldn't say no. I guess she was afraid these men would not like her. She apparently realized this about herself after seeing a therapist for a long time.

In a sentence, everyone wants meaning, importance and community in their lives.

This article was written by Suzanne Venker and is from here.


Gender relations on campus have never been more tenuous, as evidenced by our current obsession with what we’ve carelessly labeled a ‘rape culture.’ Yet among all the rhetoric, no one has thought to ask the obvious: How did we land in such a messy and litigious sexual environment? Do we honestly believe the average college male poses a grave threat to the average college female? That would mean the previous generation of mothers just happened to produce a giant crop of rapists. Either that or something in the water caused men to turn on women en masse.

C’mon. Sex on campus isn’t new—what’s new is the nature of that sex. There was a time when unmarried sex was, for the most part, restricted to those who were in serious, monogamous relationships. If a woman had sex at all, it was with a man to whom she felt bonded or with whom she felt she had a future. But for years feminists have insisted this dynamic is a silly sexual stereotype. So they assured women they’re not only capable of divorcing sex and emotion but should.

Such thinking is naïve at best and ignores a mountain of evidence about the male and female brains. Women are literally made to bond. Their bodies are steeped in oxytocin and estrogen, two chemicals that together produce an environment ripe for attachment. Oxytocin, known among scientists as the “bonding hormone,” causes a woman to attach herself to the person with whom she’s intimately engaged.

Men have oxytocin, too, but a much smaller amount. They’re more favored with testosterone—which controls lust, not attachment. That’s why women, not men, wait by the phone the next day after a one-night stand. That’s why the movie "He’s Just Not That Into You" wasn’t titled "She’s Just Not That Into You." When a woman has sexual contact of any kind, it is an emotional experience. The moment touch occurs, oxytocin gets released and the attachment process begins.

Which means: when two friends or acquaintances get together and take off their clothes, the results can be disastrous. Men are simply more capable than women of separating sex and emotion. “When women have regular sexual relations with someone, they tend to become involved even if they had not intended to do so,” writes John Townsend in What Women Want—What Men Want.

When women have regular sexual relations with someone, they tend to become involved even if they had not intended to do so. And therein lies the rub.

There is no rape culture on campus. (Note I didn’t say no one’s ever been raped on campus.) What there is is an awful lot of gray between the sheets. And this phenomenon exists because, for one thing, two people are drunk—which is a problem in itself—and because women are under the impression their libidos are the same as men’s. They are not. When women have sex, it isn’t recreational. It’s significant. That is why women sometimes lie about having been raped. They’re distraught over the previous night’s (or previous year’s) events.

Yes, women lie about rape. (If this upsets you to hear, you have an undeniable bias against men. Your knee-jerk reaction is that men are inherently bad and women are inherently good.) They lie because not many women are able to have sex for fun and walk away unscathed. That’s why they’re almost always drunk when the sexual liaison occurs.

That isn’t victim blaming, nor does it make men blameless. It just means the real phenomenon that exists on campus is that men, who are more sexually charged by nature, are responding to women’s advances and getting burned.

Note to college guys: stop responding.

Women get burned, too. In her memoir Loose Girl, psychotherapist Kerry Cohen examines her promiscuous past, which included sleeping with dozens of men. Cohen reviews the reasons why she had sex in the first place, why she chose the boys and men she did, how she felt leading up to each encounter, how she felt afterwards, and what she expected to happen compared to what actually did happen. The bottom line? Ms. Cohen wanted guys to like her. “I let these men inside me, wanting to make me matter to them.”

The average male would never author a book of this nature. The average man does not ruminate over who he had sex with or why he did it—he knows why he did it. Nor does he have sex with a woman because he wants her to like him. If he has sex with a woman he doesn’t love, it is purely for physical reasons. “For a man, this might be a pleasant trip down memory lane, counting up one’s conquests,” wrote Cohen. “But for a girl, it’s a whole other story.”

Indeed. And the sooner America gets this message, the sooner this madness will end.

3 comments:

Shaun F said...

I am always cautious when people self diagnose themselves. My default is that I presume they're deceived and they will not be truthful, although they will believe their lie. "I let these men inside me, wanting to make me matter to them." means "I like to use people for my pleasure without any thought of consequences". Translation: this woman is a narcissist.

Unknown said...

This is stuff the 'sex educators' don't tell girls and women about their bodies. The false god of equality and/or feminism matters too much to tell them they are different from men.

Robert What? said...

"Rape Culture" is a religion, much like "Global Warming". No amount of contrary evidence will move the devotees. Christianity is far more evidence based than either of these other religions.