Misogyny, Guns, Rape and Culture..

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Bells, Jun 2, 2014.

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  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Of Course It's Texas ....

    ¡Texas Trivia Time!

    Okay, you ready?

    Q: How do you get away with rape in Texas?

    A: Get your underage victim's mother to help you marry the kid in Vegas.​

    Unfortunately, that's actually not a joke:

    A Texas drama teacher accused of having sex with one of his students has seen all charges against him dropped after he married the teen police had said was his victim.

    Ilich Guardiola, 41, was initially questioned by police in April when he was stopped for a traffic violation while riding with the 16-year-old girl in his car. The teen eventually told authorities she was in love with Guardiola and they were in a relationship, according to KHOU.

    Before authorities busted him in May for the improper relationship, Guardiola had flown to Las Vegas with the girl and married her with the teen's mother as the witness, according to KPRC.


    (McCormack)

    So, sometime between April and May, the girl went from too young to have sex to old enough to get married with her mother's assistance. It almost makes sense, but only because this is Texas, and damn it, if they can find a way to help a brother out by not charging him with rape, they damn well will.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    McCormack, Simon. "Sex Charges Dropped Against Drama Teacher Ilich Guardiola After He Married Teen". The Huffington Post. September 10, 2014. HuffingtonPost.com. September 11, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/10/ilich-guardiola_n_5799910.html
     
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  3. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    I've always been confused how the age of consent works in some situations, but not in others... based on the age of the other party...

    Ergo, a 16 year old and a 17 year old having sex is fine... but a 16 year old and a 19 year old is not...

    *shrugs*
     
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  5. Bells Staff Member

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    Have to wonder about the mother as well...
     
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  7. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Well, the law is intended to prevent, among other things, exploitation of children by adults. A 16 and a 17 year old would thus not run afoul of that part of the law. Also in many places even the 16 and 17 year old is illegal; the penalties are just lesser for the 17 year old than they would be for the 19 year old.

    And in many places (including California) even two 16 year olds who have sex are guilty of a crime - but in most cases it's simply not prosecuted.
     
  8. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Which also confuses me... we are assuming age to be a legitimate identifier of physical, emotional, and social maturity when, as I'm sure most people here have encountered, it is not.
     
  9. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Right, it's sometimes not accurate, it is just chosen so that, on average, it is.

    This issue is central to a lot of laws, not just age. Ages (17 for consent, 18 to vote, 21 to drink) are chosen for a lot of reasons, some political, some functional. BAC limits for drunk drivers? Some drivers are OK at a BAC of .10, some I've known couldn't drive safely at a BAC of .04. But .08 is a reasonable compromise; most people are not too impaired to drive at .08.
     
  10. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    I guess... just seems to me like trying to set that "specific line" can make things... muddy... for some. *shrugs* I dunno, maybe my fever-addled brain just isn't comprehending right now (more than likely)
     
  11. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    (Insert Title Here)

    I'm not certain how to phrase it gently, so I'll just go with the straightforward: Do you not see the high potential for exploitation?

    There's an old saying that I can't remember the whole of, could never recite it entirely, but it includes the idea that "three gets you five".

    Think of it this way: Short of open force or open cash, if you could convince a ten year-old girl to fuck you, sometime around 1875 in Boston, it was perfectly legal. And as much as people rush to defend that former standard by pointing out lifespan and childbearing, no, actually, median age of menarche has been decreasing—the little girls weren't viable. It was just about a bunch of dirty old Puritan men who wanted to fuck little girls.

    There is one state in the Union, and I forget which one it is and really don't want to look it up, but the age of consent is sixteen if she's a virgin, and twelve if she's not. In other words, once you rape 'em, then they can say yes.

    It's always about dirty old men wanting a chance at little girls.

    And, you know, they're going to give high school students something of a break, but even then, come on. Anyone who's gone to a four-year high school knows the senior boys have no business dating freshman girls.

    If the age of consent is anything short of adulthood, then yes, we need to guard against exploitation. It's one thing to know that my daughter will someday be sexually active. But, really, there's a reason the law will put a barrier between her and, say, the dumbfuck across the street who isn't a known sex offender or anything, but actually enjoys the reputation of paranoid neighbors thinking he's some sort of Russian mafia.

    And I don't know how often it occurs that you're walking around the neighborhood and hear a couple of neighbors having at each other in passion. Nor do I know if you have any neighbors whose congress sounds, when drifting out a window, such that you might otherwise wonder if an actual rape was taking place in your neighborhood except, well, you know it's them.

    No teenager needs to take that from a thirty-something. The sixteen year-old doesn't even need it from her nineteen year-old boyfriend.

    But think of it this way—Why do guys want virgins? Well, as the saying goes, "I'd wreck that if I had a chance!" And that's the point. I never understood why people like that glitzy, overdone pornography that reduces sexual congress to a comedic mechanical spectacle (badum-dum-dum-dum-dum-baaaa-dum-dum-dum-dum-wokkachikka-wokkachikka!) And, really, just take your torrent client out for a spin, set it to all file types, and start searching terms like "abused", "destroyed", or even something seemingly benign as "anal"; one of the most popular fake-amateur pornography is to hire a hooker, get her to consent to being filmed, and then absolutely devastate her as hard as the guy can.

    In a society where couples are told to explore and identify their boundaries, and that just gives a guy a list of things to try to get away with°, we really don't need to be turning frat boys loose on high school girls.

    And we sure as hell don't need drama teachers looking at our underage daughters as potential notches in the bedpost. Quite frankly, if we're going to wreck things, let's wreck the guys who do this shit. If enough guys are rotting in prison for decades because her mouth said know but they knew her eyes said yes ... well, that's the thing, isn't it? We don't know how well it would work, despite all our crime and punishment talk, because we won't try.

    Actually, no, that's wrong. We know how it would work. That is to say, it wouldn't. We would have the moral satisfaction of sending known violators to prison for a long, long time, but sending rapists to prison even in larger numbers will have, at best, exactly the same effect on the rape phenomenon that the death penalty has on the murder rate. Then again, at least those particular dangerous individuals would be quarantined from society.

    Here's a quote that I'm really, really having a hard time with:

    In fact, Geneva says, she’s been grabbed, chased, followed, and molested so much in her short life that she’s now made it a habit to lock the bedroom door at night and shove a chair under the knob so no one can come in; she’ll wait up, trembling, until everyone at a party is passed out cold before she can comfortably fall asleep. She’s learned to avoid being alone with friends’ dads, or with grandpas at village potlatches, or with boys at basketball games, who’ve repeatedly groped her breasts and buttocks. “It’s just random, like, you’ll think everything’s all normal and then you’ll feel something on your backside,” she says. “You just freeze.”

    Geneva is a tall basketball player with bright eyes, rectangular black-framed glasses, and a wide, eager smile. She has no trouble listing accomplishments and affinities: She’s ambidextrous by choice, grew up doing all the rugged outdoor chores men do, raves gleefully over beloved local foods like fried moose heart and walrus in seal oil.

    But for years, she felt scared, hypersensitive, and depressed. She never told her parents about the incident; she was too afraid of what would happen, and anyway, when she told one of her sisters, the only response she received was a dry laugh. “It happened to all of us,” her sister had said. “Just leave it alone.”


    (Bernard)

    Then again, I recall earlier this year when a study emerged suggesting young women were more and more coming to expect sexual violence from their male partners as a matter of routine, the cost of having a relationship. In Alaska, that's not exactly the case. Rather, it would seem that expecting sexual violence from men, period—i.e., regardless of whether or not an assailant is also an intimate partner—is the norm along America's Last Frontier.

    Oh, and by the way? Geneva, featured in the article, is all of thirteen.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    ° A simplified way of looking at it: Don't come inside? Don't come in my mouth? I don't want it in my hair? Right. While the idea is simple enough—establishing boundaries between partners—many men seem to look at boundaries like other rules; that is, they were made to be broken. And, yeah, guys, if you don't know how hard it is to get semen out of your hair, well, you owe it to the next person who gives you a blowjob to find out.

    Works Cited:

    Bernard, Sara. "Rape Culture in the Alaskan Wilderness". The Atlantic. September 11, 2014. TheAtlantic.com. September 12, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/rape-culture-in-the-alaskan-wilderness/379976/
     
  12. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    Sorry, Tiassa, I was composing while you posted.

    Replying to the "Guns" portion of the OP:

    George Zimmerman still has a CHL?

    Why? What the hell is wrong in Florida?

    Back to you, then. I don't understand brutality, either.

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  13. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Define "rape culture".
     
  14. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    That's sort of my point though Tiassa - WHY do we need to put a set "okay, it's fine here, but not here" type standard on it? How fucked up, as a species, are we that such a thing is required... it's prett sad.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    ?? You just argued the opposite - that different people have different limits, so it's somewhat foolish to have an arbitrary age limit.

    You need to have some limit. That limit is often flexible, because two high school seniors having sex is VERY different than a high school senior having sex with her 45 year old teacher, and the laws take that into account. No limit will be perfect, of course - even with exceptions.
     
  16. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Exactly what I'm saying - that "limit" should be what is appropriate on a case by case basis. Obviously, a mentally handicapped 18 year old is going to be far more susceptible to persuasion than a socially-skilled 16 year old; truth be told, I personally find the idea of a 40 year old copulating with an 18 year old a bit... weird, and question the motives there. However, personal feelings aside, I just think it's a bit damming to the 16-to-18 year olds as they try to find their way in this world. They are already dealing with coming of age and the changes to their body that presents, the ending of primary school and the search for what comes after, the pressures from society (parents et al) to "get a job" and "get out of the house", and to add to it, we've decided that 18 is the magic number where you are now free-for-all for all the creepy people out there?

    I dunno, just seems odd... but I can't think of a better system that'd actually work.
     
  17. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    That's great in theory, not so useful in the real world.
    Let's say your 16 year old daughter was just caught having sex with her 25 year old science teacher. What will you want the limit to be?
    Let's say you are the 25 year old teacher and you feel she was old enough because of her maturity, experiences etc. What will you want the limit to be?
    Laws work because they have hard limits against which actions can be judged. They're not always perfect, but generally do better than "just do it on a case by case basis."
    Well, in that case at least you are protecting 16 year olds. Like I said nothing works 100%.
     
  18. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Let's See How Badly I Can Phark the Delivery ....

    To the other, though, I get his question. He and I are standing on opposite sides of the street, watching the same car pass. Are the wheels spinning clockwise? Depends on which one of us you ask. But we both agree the car is heading south.

    Other than that, I think we're all in a kind of agreement. As I put it in a elsewhere:

    You know, a contradiction sticks out, here: The girl wasn’t old enough to have sex, but she was old enough to get married with her mother’s permission. Why not skip all that and just carry a note from your mother saying you have permission to have sex with a forty-one year-old man? I mean, fuck, it would be a lot easier.

    And for those of us who might be at least a little unsettled by such a notion? Well, it’s Texas after all. Compared to everything else? Yeah, this sounds about right.

    It's the blunt version, to be sure. But there is only so much we can keep saying, "It's Texas."

    And, yeah, note the part about being at least a little unsettled. Such outcomes would be disastrous. The thing is that it's really easy to see the damage coming when we frame it in the context of teenage girls. Opening up that sort of access would ... would ... it is very nearly ineffable, the damage that would do. I am strikingly deficient in my comprehension of the dynamics and dimensions when older women exploit young boys, but for all the erratic returns in sexual and intimate violence statistics among homosexual relationships, it's above the societal average in general, and almost incalculable for variation for gay men. We're talking at least a generation obliterated psychiatrically. It's just ... I don't get it, the perversity of the situation is appalling to my understanding of a healthy society, but yeah, it actually sounds about right for Texas.
     
  19. Bells Staff Member

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    *Sigh*

    At a bare minimum..

    Rape culture is a phrase used to describe a culture in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender, sex, and sexuality.[1][2]

    Examples of behaviors commonly associated with rape culture include victim blaming, sexual objectification, trivializing rape, denial of widespread rape, or refusing to acknowledge the harm of certain forms of sexual violence that do not conform to certain stereotypes of stranger or violent rape. Rape culture has been used to model behavior within social groups, including prison rape and conflict areas where war rape is used as psychological warfare.



    It is when women are blamed for when they are raped, such as questioning her dress, if she was drinking, how she acted, who she is dating or married to, when she is told that she simply should not have married or dated her rapist, that she should have known better, that it's just sex, when excuses are made that it's not really rape, it's just the man's biological urge to breed, when she is blamed for her rape, when she reports it to the police and she is slut shamed and accused of making it up or wanting it, when excuses are made and questions asked if it's really rape, when the existence of rape is denied and defined as something else altogether, where rape is not really seen as a real problem, and so on and so forth. There are always examples of rape culture.

    It's not really hard to define or find, really. Surprised you had to ask the question, to be honest.
     
  20. Bells Staff Member

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    Rush the Rice..

    In a monologue about Ray Rice, the NFL's response and apparent and possible cover up and the response from men in the game and around football in particular, Rush Limbaugh let everyone know he was offended. No, he wasn't offended that this happened at all, he wasn't offended that there may have been a coverup, since they knew about it months ago and tried to hide it and ignore it. No, Rush was offended for a whole different reason:

    “Folks, … this is crazy,” Rush Limbaugh said on the Friday edition of his successful radio talk show. “We’re feminizing this game, and it’s a man’s game, and if we keep feminizing this game, we’re going to ruin it; if we keep ‘chickifying’ this game, we’re going to ruin it. It’s going to become something that it was never intended to be.”

    Limbaugh’s worry came in response to the growing demands for introspection being directed toward the NFL in the wake of the public release of video showing Ray Rice assaulting his partner. “So many men — executive in the league, and sports [media] — are in a race to see who can be the most politically correct, feminized guy,” Limbaugh said. “It’s comical.”


    Apparently demanding that football players don't hit their wives and girlfriends and sending out the message that beating your wife or girlfriend to the point of unconsciousness is not acceptable is "chickifying" the game.
     
  21. elte Valued Senior Member

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    I'd like to ask for sciforums members' commentary concerning Oscar Pistorius' shooting and killing of his girlfriend. I see it as an example of egregious misogyny involving a gun.
     
  22. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

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    Thats a grate reply for you'r prevous puzzlement.!!!
     
  23. Waiter_2001 Registered Senior Member

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    Women and Men can be encapsulated as simply as those who have everything and nothing can be: we must be without such abbreviations.

    Someone who has everything CHOOSES between good and evil, as do all men and women, but those who have none are without such a choice.

    The same can be said of women and men: we cannot encapsulate because each woman and man is infinite.

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