That you need to consult Lexis/Nexis for the precise wording of your order of protection?

Love is a pastime that never will pall ...

Quite right. I must be getting old.

Carry on.

I will, thanks. Julie is much amused by this.

Caper the caper - sing me the song.
Death will come soon to hush us along ...

Glen Weston singing the Nino Rota/Eugene Walter song, "What Is a Youth":

http://students.ed.uiuc.edu/bach/rnj24/ninorotatrack6.mp3

This strategy provides some insight into how narrow a category masculinity is to walter_map. I'll take the broader version of manhood, thanks.

Did you read the part where I said I'm accustomed to being misunderstood and resented by the weak and the weak-minded? Also certain feminists, distraught wives, and the catty sort of unfulfilled woman stuck with a less-than-a-man.

Not that I mind particularly: in my own social circles I am respected and admired, so your respect and admiration won't be missed. Since I do not doubt myself you may wish to consider your problem with me does in fact lie with you, and not I.

Some may think only to marry.
Others will tease and tarry.
Mine is the very best parry.
Cupid he rules us all.

I'm more of a Mercutio than a Romeo, as it were. Not that it did him any good.

I second AKA with saying your Appeasement post was beautifully and insightfully written.

My first two sexual encounters were of the unwanted kind. I was a late blooming teen and had never dated and unknowingly fell prey to male friends. Truth be told, the second situation was more traumatic and a sexual assault, the first one being a very confused girl who had no idea about how to get out of something. But regardless, each experience left me a bit of a mess, mainly due to my age and inexperience, plus with no one to discuss it with.

So I understand you completely when you say that a lot of people see unwanted sex as a trivial issue. Really, what was so bad about it, right? It wasn't like you were beaten or had weapons inflicted upon you. No stranger jumped out at you from an alley, whats the big deal? In my case the responses, when I finally started to talk about it after ten years of telling no one, were along the lines of "well it wasn't like you were raped". A male friend just couldn't understand why I just didn't stop it all. There are a lot of people who just don't get what is going through your mind at the time of the assault and why you didn't behave differently. And its those types of comments that are never directed at other crime victims which leave you second guessing yourself even years later.

Although I must say that you confuse power and entitlement, saying the attack wasn't about power. Entitlement is power. People who feel entitled to things are in positions of power or else they wouldn't feel entitled to whatever it is they think they deserve.

I'm comforted to hear that you were never assaulted again. Too often rape victims act out in various ways leading themselves to be multiple victims without ever realizing how the first rape ultimately lead to subsequent attacks.

...till about the seventh page, I feel sorry for the current coming-of-age and 20-something generation. How did everything go so wrong? What happened to feminism? Is human nature immutable, or perhaps, are we just programmable robots?

40-something male.

No, "men" don't speculate in public about the desirability of women who have expressed no interest in them - only construction workers leaning up against a wall do that. This is not a wall and you're almost certainly not a construction worker. You're a clever boy, therefore you already know that. Therefore you are fucking with me by asking for an apology.

You'll find if you observe that I have very little agenda and no ax. If you make valid points, I'll back you up, regardless of your sex or your posting history. If you're full of it, I'll do my very best to pound you into the ground like a tent peg. And if you continue to attack people personally, I'll report your posts to the moderators, who made you agree not to do that when you signed up to post here. Do gentlemen keep their agreements?

It's a shame that you choose to dilute your arguments this way. You had some valid points, well put, but everyone stopped listening to you about ten pages ago because you can't behave decently.

Anonymous_too, thank you for sharing your perspective with us.

I feel, though, that I should point something out: beauty has nothing to do with whether or not a woman becomes a target for rape. Ugly women are often raped. Sometimes - as with a very obese friend of mine - women are raped BECAUSE they are ugly. (He repeatedly chastised her for being fat and ugly while raping her.) Trying to remember how many close friends I know who have been raped... I can come up with six... and if there's any common pattern, it's that they were chosen for being low-status fringe members of the group who would be less likely to report what happened to them. And, I'm sorry to report, the rapists were absolutely correct... not one of these women reported the rape to the police, for exactly that reason: "All of our friends would side with him."

You make a point worth repeating for the sake of other women reading this: If someone makes you uncomfortable, get away. Don't try to figure out what's going on and fit it into your expectations, don't pretend everything's normal and you must be imagining things: Get away.

In the early stages of a relationship, make it easy for yourself to get away. Don't go places with a man where you have no way to get home that's not dependent on him. Don't go places where you are the only new person among a group of his friends.