Why is it the sole job of the woman to be the sexual gatekeeper when she herself often wants the same thing sexually as a man wants?

Because you cannot trust the man to do so, even if he is otherwise decent and respectful of you. And it is you, not he, who carries any resulting children, and bears the pain and risk of childbirth, and not he.

That's why.

And if she doesn't, well, now you're a slut and most likely will not be taken seriously anymore.

Which really ought to give you a clue. Have fun if you like - but be careful, and look after yourself first.

It's painful, reading the accounts of women here who have suffered the coerced attentions of men and the derision of men who hypocritically prefer 'nice' women, knowing that it should not and need not be that way. Here's hoping you figure out how to handle it.

Life isn't always fair, and in fact can counted on to be unfair. Therefore, knowing that it will be unfair, you need to take steps to ensure your own well-being. Do not concede your weaknesses to yourself, but train yourself to be stronger than the crap the world is surely going to throw at you.

Rely on your friends and family to help you with that if you need to and if you can, but ultimately you have to take responsibility for yourself. Blaming the world for its unfairness isn't going to make it change. Therefore you have to change. You have to promise yourself that you can be better than you are and just damn what anybody else thinks of it.

I've gotten a lot of crap from people for my posts here. I don't mind. People are entitled to their opinions, however misguided I may suppose them to be. It means nothing. Slides right off.

Try being that way. Maybe it'll work for you.

you're no gentleman, sir

Julie disagrees. I'll respect her opinion over yours, if you don't mind.

She thinks you're a twit. What do you think about 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.

I've observed that you're not only conceited but are a self-deluded liar. And that you very definitly have an agenda.

but everyone stopped listening to you about ten pages ago because you can't behave decently.

I love you too, dear.

Sweetest dreams.

You just pointed out something really important about the status of rape victims that I think makes it clear that rape is a power game. Most researchers believe that rape is as much a crime of violence, power, and control as it is of sex. Here are some stats I just got:

• Over two-thirds (67%) of all victims of sexual assault reported to law enforcement agencies, were juveniles (under the age fo 18 at the time of the crime). More than half of all juvenile victims were under age 12. That is, 33% of all victims of sexual assault reported to law enforcement were ages 12 through 17 and 34% were under age 12. Most disturbing is that one of every seven victims of sexual assault ( or 14% of all victims) reported to law enforcement agencies were under age 6.

-Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement,

7/00, NCJ 182990, U.S. Department of Justice

• 4 in 10 child victims of violence suffered either a forcible rape or another injury.

-BJS Survey of State Prison Inmates, 1991.

• About 80% of rape victims were under age 30--about 1/2 of these were under age 18. Victims younger than 12 accounted for 15% of those raped, and another 29% of rape victims were between 12 and 17.

-National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)

As you can see, younger victims are very much at risk. I had also read that peak age for rape was 14. Two thoughts occur to me. Many rapist pick victims precisely because the are less likely to be believed. That could vary from being at a disadvantage because of age or also because of circumstance, as when a higher status male (jailer, employer, teacher, shrink) chooses a lower status victim or a male victimizes a woman he has been seeing because to the perception of entitlement or ownership. Moreover, not only are lower status victims less likely to be believed they are also often less likely to be verbally assertive because they could suffer very real losses.

It does annoy me that women are not more direct in their communications. Sometimes it annoys me in my friends. For example, I have a friend who probably still hold it against me that she said, "Let's take in a movie. What do want to see?" So I just told her what I wanted to see. I forgot to ask what she wanted to see because we would have gone back and forth:

"What do you want to see?"

"Well what do you want to see?"

"I don't know. Make a suggestion?

"I want to see X."

"Are you sure you want to see that?"

I mean really! I could just scream.

Women need to learn to be more direct and assertive in all aspects of their lives and we need to stop punishing them for being so. If this many years after the women's movement of the 60s and 70s, women cannot say more firmly what they want -- whether it be the acceptance or refusal of sex, then we are sure culturally doing something wrong.

I think we ought to start teaching young women that they have a right to refuse sex and how to most protect them selves from physical encroachment in middle school. If the peak age for girls being raped is 14, we need to teach them how to say no, when to say no, and how to be safe.

However, we can't do that, and do you know why? Because we can't acknowledge that there are some circumstances where they will want to say yes. Astinence education leaves our girls helpless and in denial when they most need to be assertive.

I feel sorry for the current coming-of-age and 20-something generation. How did everything go so wrong? What happened to feminism?

A lot of men evolved into self-centered wimps, and not into self-respecting gentlemen, and a lot of the women have had their heads filled with crap by female 'relationship experts' who don't really understand social and sexual relationship dynamics but do know how to make a buck off insecure women.

Feminism focused too much on negatives and too little on positive changes. It's too bad. Feminism did a lot of women and men a lot of good but worked too hard to discredit itself.

A lot of people would rather whine than challenge their own weaknesses and improve themselves. It's just easier, and it's become acceptable.