"I think it's unfair to blame this sexual miscommunication on men."

Well no fuck, duh!

I've read onto the 22nd page. I hoped it might help, since the discussion seemed to leave the parameters of the original article and become more general, and I need help with that kind of thing. It hasn't helped. It's all so confusing and complex.

My best (and pretty much only close) friend just stabbed me in the back. There was a woman involved. After we met her at the same time, we made a gentlemen's agreement, I thought, that since I took the initiative and since he's leaving town next month, he wouldn't interfere with my efforts. To me, that means he would not be unfriendly to her, but definitely recuse himself from any advances she might make, because he should know damn well what an easy time he has with women, and how that would cause problems for me.

He did the exact opposite, and since then I have gotten the "friends" speech and the two of them are involved in a dissimilar love affair. He claims he didn't notice her attitude until it was too late. He says "she's not girlfriend material," which I don't understand very well. I don't think I fit in this generation. Someone once told me that the problem isn't with me, it's with the people I try to befriend/date. Maybe he, perhaps unwittingly, took advantage of my good nature in order to get laid repeatedly before he leaves town.

I talked to her first, DAMMIT! This is not what a friend should do. It's not what a gentleman would do. Do my decency, erudition, seriousness, et cetera doom me to perpetual celibacy?

Women, even the good ones, seem to want Rod Stewart, not Davey Havok or Greg Graffin. I like music metaphors. If a good man is hard to find, why am I alone?

Everybody's got Portishead on the brain lately.

I just had a 1992 flashback.

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 really think it's the other way around. I think people think they're entitled to something when they don't have the power to get it, but see others with it. Like sex with hot women. A man who sees other men with women he's attracted to and can't get might very well get angry. As he can't attack the other men and won't blame himself, the woman becomes the target.

A lot of men think beautiful women have power. Not true. Beauty is a physiological quirk, completely meaningless from a genetic standpoint, unless you like sick women. In America, at least, beauty has an inverse correlation to health. Certainly, it says nothing about a woman's character. What has the power over a man in this situation, at least, is his own libido, and I have to be careful not to let the pity morph into contempt.

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.

The experience freaked me out. I became even more introverted for a while, and it was shortly afterward that I became a bit of a slob. To this day, I don't wear make-up unless I have to in order to fit in, and it's still very subtle.

Beauty is a thing that people covet, but not necessarily value. That's a nasty position for a human being to be in.

Men are so focused on her looks that they often miss seeing who she really is. She is a mildly Aspie, hyper-intellectual avant garde club kid. That's just weird, isn't it? A bizarre combo. Hence, lonely. Beauty sure doesn't get you everything. Mostly it just gets her confusion. Reading people is not her forte. Neither is communication.

Funny, but that would be me, minus the club part and replacing avant garde with artistic. I'm more of a house mouse. I grew up to be the kind of woman who makes her own bread and even her own hair conditioner. I'm also introverted, which gets me labeled stuck-up. The plus side of being labeled stuck-up is that people tend to leave you alone.

I communicated directly when I was younger because I lacked the emotional skills to be indirect. I had to learn how, and I hate it enough to get irritated when I have to use it. It's like speaking a second language. However, it's a much more effective language in some situations, so I learned.

To this day, it can take men a few years to get past my face. One guy took three. Thankfully, I wasn't sleeping with him, but that was something it took me a while to figure out. For at least 18 months, "I love you" means "I think you're hot enough to put up with the fact that I can't stand you."

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.

You've intentionally misinterpreted my post in the service of the agenda you say you don't have. That's dishonest.

You need to work on that.

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.

That's only half of it.

What do you teach the boys? And what do you teach them so they'll remember it when they become men? I think you'll find that to be the more difficult part, but not at all impossible.