Letters to the Editor

• @AKA Smith (again)

  [Read the article: Roundup: Are Republicans secretly crushing on Hillary?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Of course there are people who will contend that many women barter sex for something else: How dare she say no to me when I just paid for dinner!

  But don't some women barter sex for other things with their partners? And don't some men willingly give some things or concede some things to their partners for some sex? I'm not being facetious here. Stripped of all the cultural baggage that it's accumulated over the centuries, isn't this what marriage started out as: A contractual partnership in which women in patriarchal societies offered regular physical intimacy (and other things, of course) to men in exchange for food, shelter, financial support, and help with the kids, while men offered those things to women in exchange for regular physical intimacy (among other things?)

  The term that you will see certain people use over and over is the term real rape. Have you ever noticed those people who want to diminish the significance of rape altogether will use the term real rape and claim (as this judge does) that whatever is before them is not real rape? In truth, there are people who actually would love to the return to the era when the only rape conviction to be gotten was when the woman can establish that she was a virgin walking to church on Sunday morning in her white gloves and modest dress when she was assaulted by a man (preferably of another race) who jumped out of the bushes, beat her near senseless, threatened to kill her, and that she screamed bloody murder the whole time as he was strangling her with a necktie he lifted from the set of an old Alfred Hitchcock thriller.

  You're really stretching here with some cheap and unfair hyperbole. Who, other than a few insufferable assholes, really desires to "diminish the significance of rape altogether"? Sheesh, talk about your straw men! And your virgin-in-her-Sunday-best-being-ravaged-in-the-bushes-on-the-way-to-church example is just silly. You know better than that, and you can argue far better than that.

  Reasonable people can disagree about some rape cases that fall into the gray area, because we all know (or should know) that some false accusations are made, that there are some misunderstandings in intimate relationships, that there are some breakdowns in communication, and that there are widely differing interpretations of what constitutes rape. As a perfect example, refer back to your illustration of a man who ejaculates inside a woman during a consensual sexual encounter after he'd said he wouldn't. Well, that might seem like a an obvious case of rape to you, but I'd bet that it wouldn't to the vast majority of men and even many women, and that's not because they're "rape apologists" or whatever the insulting and demeaning ad hominem slur-du-jour is. The point is, there is rape, and there is rape. There are sex assault cases of all manner of complexity, black-and-white cases that are obvious to just about everyone, grayer cases that are more debatable and ambiguous, and a range of severity from minor incidents (like the ejaculation example you provided) to far more severe and violent ones. That is why the law breaks sex crimes into many different categories and further subdivides them into degrees of severity, and calls for fair and public trials by jury, due process, and the presumption of innocence until the defendant is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

  I apologize if I'm reading too much into your posts, and attributing sentiments to you that you don't actually hold, but you seem to be flirting dangerously close to lumping all "rapes" together into the same category, from the ejaculation example you gave, to the prostitution case being discussed in this thread, to the violent stranger rape of the little girl on her way to church that you also gave us. I think reasonable people can distinguish major differences among those examples, and to the extent that you can't, then I'm sorry but you've stopped being reasonable.

  Permalink Sunday, October 14, 2007 12:34 PM