I think it's problematic at best to bring up your "gray area" scenarios when talking about such a serious and widespread problem. It gives the impression that your priorities are dealing with a minority occurrence (guys falsely accused of rape) as opposed to the much, much more common occurrence (women being raped). That's not to say the problem of false accusations aren't an issue; it's just so infrequent compared to cases of sexual assault. So when people discuss the problem of rape, bringing up an outlier makes it seem as if you don't care/deny the main problem.
As someone else pointed out, it would be like a discussion about the evils of the KKK being interrupted by comments about one time when a really, really bad black guy was lynched and he supposedly deserved it for his crimes. Okay, I could see that happening in theory, but it's so rare that it's odd to even bring it up. It distracts from the real discussion, which could be very good, to focus on an oddity or anecdote.
That's what CDS was upset about. He's just so fucking terrible at communicating with people he would rather sling insults and smugly imply that you're somehow a rapist as well.
Yes. But I genuinely hate people who compartmentalize the world in white and black, then pretend grey doesn't exist.
Obviously, some 95% of all rape cases are men raping women, for example. Ignoring the specific needs of men raped by women (or women by women, or men by men) because they're a fringe, is just as bad as pretending rape isn't serious.
Claiming there's NO case in which, perhaps, the person accused of rape isn't at fault, is calling for mob justice - lynch whoever rapes and be done with it! If a woman claims you raped her, you deserve to die!
Moral issues are never - never- NEVER - black and white. Insisting they are and ONLY paying attention to the largest and most common group is a recipe for disaster. It's the mentality that led to "acceptable" losses, it's the acceptance of sacrificing good people to bad causes, it's - and now I'm goign to get CDS's feathers up again I expect - the type of thinking that leads to racism and discrimination.
Simplifying the world into black and white may be nice and easy and you can stop thinking a lot earlier - but it's dangerous, and wrong, and bad. It's the type of thinking that means that, for example, if you're accused of assaulting the nanny, no matter what really happened, your political career is over. It's the type of thinking that mezans that the media are judge, jury and executioner.
"Oh, that's a statistical outlier, that's rare, you do'nt need to have contingency plans for that"? No. Absolutely not. Never.
I'm so far on
the other side of being a rape apologist, that I genuinely can't think of someone not beign against rape. For me, the moral baseline is "rape is bad, and all rapists deserve to have their balls cut off and stuffed down their throat" (except for female rapists. Err, cut off their outer lips adn stuff them down their throats? I dunno.). That, to me, is a given. Not "sex is good and perhaps it can be OK to push yourself a bit if the other one's isn't too unwilling, sometimes you misinterpret, you know, oh well". That's sick and sickening. From that point, it IS necessary and ok to say that, somewhere, sometimes, there *are* cases where "rape" was called unjustly. Just like there are cases where, say, the police is in on it. Or cases where it's the daughter raping the father (to go for a really extremely rare fringe case). No matter what - you'll be able to find an instance, somewhere, sometime, of it having happened.
I'm not saying it's frequent. I'm not saying it "justifies" anything or anyone. I'm not saying that you should
always look at things that way. Far from it. I am saying you have to be open to the possibility and allow for such cases in the law (not as in "it should be allowed" but in "the law should be written in such a way that it's applicable in such a situation as well". Good example of law gone bad? The old (now long-changed, abandoned, etc) idea of "it's not porn if you don't see any pubes". Yeah, I can see how you'd get there in another era - but it also pretty much opened up waaaay too many options for child pornography. Unthinking can destroy more than you want to save. Another law gone horribly wrong that used to exist - "it's not rape if she doesn't clearly and explicitly states she doesn't want it". Which, of course, led to clobbering her unconscious beforehand, or taping the mouth shut, or whatever, so that she
couldn't say no.
And heck, I'm doing it myself, right here and now - by constantly referring to the victim as "her" and the perpatrator as "him". That's stereotyping. I'm willing to bet (though I do'nt know of it) that, at least somewhere at some point in time, a law was written against rape that was worded in such a way that raping a man wasn't technically illegal, because it assumed it would be a woman being raped.
I'm having trouble expressing myself as well, here, but I hope to have made myself somewhat clear....I doubt it though.
Let's try again.
1. Rape is bad.
2. Rape is always bad.
3. Even rape isn't always as black-and-white as it seems.
4. There needs to be a LOT of protection of the victim.
5. There
also needs to be some protection for the perpetrator.
6. No matter what it may look like at first glance, you
have to be open minded enough to accept that he's not necessarily Evil and she's not necessarily an Angel. Closing off your mind to possible alternatives is short-sighted and certain to cause enormous distress to innocent individuals in the end.
7. Thinking
every case is one where mitigating factors apply, where "he didn't mean it that way", where "you have to consider the other point of view" and whatever is just as despicable as the opposite, if not more so. In the vast majority of cases, the situation is unfortunately exactly what it looks like.
