Melania Trump says Sexual Assault victims shouldn't report unless they have evidence

[Amarok]

IMO the malevolent presence of a rape culture is not as obvious to me as it is to you.

Well, it wasn't that obvious to me until fairly recently. It took quite a bit of reflection and awareness (prompted by insights and experiences shared by many women) to really see how widespread rape is, and how much as a society we tend to trivialize the extent of rape in our culture.

It shares an insidious vagueness with another noxious phrase, “black attitudes.” It’s an ill-defined box into which people can put pretty much anything they want to vilify or bend to promote political aims. As such, I am very skeptical of attributing criminal sexual assault to other broad ambiguous concepts such as so-called toxic masculinity. Is the thug role glorified by hip-hop music responsible for gang-violence? I don’t think that likely. Even if artistic presentations of thuggishness were a contributing factor, I would be inclined to assign it a minor role.

You can't compare the two. The evidence is clear in our society that rape is widespread, that we have the tendency to blame the victim of rape rather than fully blame the rapist, that we expect rape victims to behave in certain ways without understanding what they're feeling and going through because we're under this delusion that the world is just and supportive when it's not always so.

Your denial of rape culture further propagates it.

At the same time I do not deny the possibility that certain cultural attitude can indeed dramatically encourage rape. Having opportunities to rape the wives and daughters of ancient Rome’s enemies was used as an incentive to encourage voluntary conscription. But his is several orders of magnitude above using innocuous proverbs like “boys will be boys” to justify young male penchants for getting, dirty, rough-housing, and aggressive role-play, i.e. cops & robbers, king of he hill, etc.

Innocuous? Phrases like "boys will be boys" have been used to excuse rape. And you call this innocuous?

And why would you even bring up the ancient Romans in this case just to say they did worse than modern people do? I don't get it.

I see more harm in going against 300,000 years of evolutionary programming than recognizing broad generalizations, positive and negative, about masculinity and femininity.

Programming? You do realize evolution doesn't set things in stone, right? That you can adapt flexibly to the changes of this world because you are rationally capable of doing so? Because the human brain has evolved to allow for such flexibility?

And what exactly is harmful about going against the grain of evolution?

I do not know if being a “woman of easy virtue” actually carries an increased risk of victimization. Similarly, I do not know if social acceptance of male promiscuity allows some men to justify violence towards women. Maybe, maybe not. There seem to be good arguments for the opposite. Naïve and prudish girls could be inclined to misinterpret the advances of players as harassment – the same advances that would get them slapped by more sexually confident women. Socially awkward boys might use violence to overcome their fears, whereas men who are secure in their masculinity can slough-off rejections.

So perhaps these boys and men should learn to interact with women like human beings instead of as means to some end.

In a less sexually promiscuous culture wedding rings would serve as more reliable indicators of consent than tentative grasps and inviting whispers during casual encounters. Men’s crude boasting would be met with peer contempt while restraint during temptation would be esteemed. I think it is clear that claims of not having given consent would be more readily accepted if outward signs of consent were expected before engaging in sexual activity.

Nice lovely chauvinist fantasy you have there, but it has no basis in reality. That which you describe never happened so purely or innocently ever in the past, and the present is not worse than the past. If anything, while there is clearly a long way to go before sexism is eradicated for good, women (despite the current shitty hurdles that they still have to face) fare slightly better now than in the chauvinistic past of the 60s and earlier.

I also think that if secular culture treated sexuality with more respect; Trump’s vulgar locker room talk would not have been so easily dismissed.

Thank the Republican politics for that, and institutional sexism/misogyny in general.

These are very unpopular positions today and conservatives are ridiculed for these supposed old-fashioned virtues ...

You poor thing.

We can still learn from the so-called sexual revolution (like demystifying female orgasm or dispelling unrealistic expectations about male libido) without succumbing to its excesses.

There's nothing excessive about acknowledging that rape culture is a thing. If anything, we still don't seem to understand just how bad it is, despite the many scandals of the last couple years.

Holy shit what century is Wooter from this nonsense is absurd