...all of these things are red herrings in the Duke LAX case.

The real issue is that some men believe that some women are meant to serve as receptacles for their appetites. And the women most likely to be viewed as receptacles - the women most likely to be thought of as deserving of no more - are 'bad girls'. The girls on campus known to put out a little too much, the girls with wild reputations earned in beer-induced comas. And the girls always voted Most Likely To Be Bad are, of course, sex industry workers - prostitutes, strippers, dancers, porn actresses. There is a type of man who believes that these women, by dint of their profession, are either a) always asking for it or b) don't mind when they get it - even uasked for - because they 'deserve' it for being in the job they are in.

If a rape occurred that evening, I guarantee you it wasn't because the LAX players were doing it because she was black, or because they thought the combination of their whiteness, wealth and campus status if not entitled them to do it, would at least make sure they got away with it. No, it occurred because the guys in question saw the stripper as less than a fully realized woman - less human than they saw themselves, at any rate. In their minds, her job created a simple equation: she stimulated them sexually and now had to put out; they paid their price, and now she was paying her price. This was the only equation in operation that night. Sure, the fact that she was black might have lent a vicarious thrill to the situation for a lily-white drunken band of brothers - but race wasn't an overriding causal factor. If (and it's still a big IF) they are guilty, their defense wouldn't be: she's black and deserved it, nor would it be I'm rich and deserve to get away with it. It would be: she's a slut, a piece of trash - her job proves it. And who cares what I did to a piece of trash. *That* is why they felt entitled to do it, and feel entitled to get away with it.

It's not about her blackness or sexiness or poorness, it's not about their LAX-ness, richness or whiteness...it's about men feeling entitled to do what they want with (whom they deem to be) 'bad' girls, and using the time-tested, mother-approved maddonna/whore view of womanhood to justify it.

Oh, come on. This is an incredibly suspicious statistic - how is rape being defined here? This should be clarified before it's simply reported as an inviolable fact. One in twenty is a veritable epidemic of violence. When I was in college, no way was this the case. So the conclusion is - rape has become quite commonplace on college campuses. Are arrests more common? What's being done about campus security? The process of interrogation? It seems with such a dramatic upswing in this crime, police and universities have, unfortunately, ample incidents upon which to base programs for prevention and prosecution. Why are the law enforcement and journalistic (not to mention academic) completely ignoring these important follow-up stories to this terrifying statistic? And what about parents -- aren't they worried about sending their daughters to college? I sure would be - 1 in 20 is just too much of a chance to take. If you had a 1 in 20 chance of being killed in a car accident, would you drive? If you had a 1 in 20 chance of getting AIDS when having sex, would you do it without a condom? If you had a 1 in 20 chance of being robbed if you walked down California street, would you avoid that street?

It doesn't help women - or men - to unquestioningly publish obviously problematic statistics like this.