And to those who feel that this law would actually work, or has a chance in hell of becoming reality, or if it did that it doesn’t matter if innocent men got caught by this law, or think that ALL women would refrain from abuse of this law, please get real. The world doesn’t work that way. Why not put our energies into changing the fundamentals of society in a proactive and positive way? Deuce’s Law may reduce rape in theory, and as I said I agree with the sentiment behind it, but it won’t eliminate rape, it won’t eliminate corruption in the system, and it certainly has no hope of becoming reality under our current system. It is a dreamer’s solution to the problem, but it will not work in the real world until we change the real world. Wouldn’t elimination of rape in the first place be a better goal? After that you could enact Deuce’s Law but at that point it wouldn’t matter. It would be irrelevant because it would address a problem that, for all intents and purposes, would no longer exist. For better or worse, society in its current state is not going to accept Deuce’s Law.

I would just like to say that I respect everyone here and would like to reintegrate that I meant no disrespect and did not intend to be hurtful with my words. This is a difficult and complex topic; I’m sure we can all agree with that. I may be a man but I have enough female friends and acquaintances to know just how widespread and damaging the crime of rape really is since it is rare to meet a woman who hasn’t been raped in one form or another. I have no love lost for those that commit rapes, and am in no way suggesting they be protected. I understand that false reporting is a miniscule fraction of reported cases, and it is not my primary goal to eliminate that. We have a society right now that encourages rape. We have a society that is still firmly patriarchal in nature despite the token advances made in the past century. Until we do something about those problems NO law will protect women fully. If you want to enact it after society has been altered then fine, but at that point it wouldn’t be necessary anyway. But I feel that to pour energy into something that will not eliminate the problem and has no chance of becoming reality is a waste of time and does feminism no favors in the end.

Thank you for reading my opinion. I respect the fact that you may not agree with it, but I hope you have at least taken the time to analyze what I’ve said before jumping to conclusions. Its time to fix society from the ground up, and if we all do our part it is possible. It may seem like a utopian dream, but just remember that societies have changed before just as drastically, so history has shown it to be possible if we work hard enough.

Did I deserve to get molested by two different people before I was five years old? Did I deserve to have a bunch of adolescents wank onto my face because I was ”too ugly to rape”? Did I deserve to get raped my not one but two of my male friends, on two separate occasions?

It sucks that you could go to jail for something -you say- you didn’t do (although rapists are notorious for not knowing, much less thinking and admitting, that they are rapists; the guy who fucked me when I was so drunk I couldn’t walk and was weeping and slurring, ”No, please, let’s wait until later” still claims he didn’t rape me, it was just ”bad sex”).
It would suck if Grafton ever went to jail for something he didn’t do too.

Hey, if it makes you feel better, right now, in real life, I might go to jail for something I didn’t do but can’t prove I didn’t do. It involves money, not sex, but it’s the same deal. And it would suck too.

But it sucks to get raped. It really sucks to get raped. And NOBODY DESERVES THAT EITHER, you fucking wanker. So think about that for a little bit and crack out your empathy machine, if you will.

It sucks for all of us. For some of us, it sucks in tangible ways. For example, even with counseling, I have intense PTSD flashbacks and often feel an overwhelming pull towards self-destructive situations and decisions. It’s gonna suck a little bit for me whenever I try to have sex with anyone, for the rest of my life, and I will never completely trust my body in any situation. Those are very real, very common effects of rape, especially child rape, upon the human psyche. It’s like I’m in jail because of something I didn’t do, except the sentence is life and the prison is my self.

Let’s work towards making life not suck for anyone. Changing attitudes towards women would be a good start; it would change attitudes towards rape, therefore leading to less rape. That sounds great to me.

Grafton,

I think you missed my point. While they are not exactly the same thing, they are very similar in nature. Rapists rape because they want to punish women and females for simply existing or being female. They want to hurt us. They want to hurt our genitals. They want to hurt our bodies. In many cases, they do want to cause irreparable and devastating damage to the female body. In many cases, that is exactly what they do. So, yes, the fear that females have of being raped is quite similar to your fear of being castrated.

What you are feeling right now is just a teeny, tiny, miniscule amount of the dread of having your body severely violated that women deal with every day. That is what every woman must live with. The knowledge that at any time a man could decide to do hideous damage to our genitals and the rest of our body. That you are so severely horrified by the prospect of having your genitals mutilated yet do not seem to fully acknowledge that women deal with that threat every day shows a great deal of privilege. And I suspect that was part of the point of this post: To show men what women deal with every damn day of the week…all over the world.

Now, don’t think I am some sort of chauvinist. Because I am not. Neither am I ugly, nor stupid. I was a very intelligent child. I learned to read and write fluently at the age of 4, and I learned English when I was 6 years old (I’m from a completely different country than most of you). I’ve always gotten high grades with minimal studying and minimal work.

When I was 8, I met my aunt for the first time. I loved my aunt, and I stayed over at her place at least twice a month during the weekends. When I had recently been bullied, I went to her house and cried out…

On my 10th birthday, my aunt said she had a present waiting for me at her house. Naive as I was, I went over to her 2-story villa. She was very wealthy, and had two daughters. When I opened the door, I was instantly put to sleep with some sort of drug. She tied me up on her bed and went all the way. I was terribly scarred and ashamed, and I had no idea what had happened. It hurt a lot, and the fact that my aunt, who I had loved for so many years, had violated me was beyond my belief, and I refused to accept it.

During my teenage years, I, much like other males in my age, was very sexually fixated. I had a girlfriend who I slept with every now and then, and that did it for me. I had not forgotten what had happened previously, though. You don’t forget being raped that easily.

Well, my girlfriend was thinking that I was cheating on her, and decided to do the same thing back to me. So she called me up one Monday and asked me to come over. When I got to her house I saw her and one of my closest friends having intercourse in the living room. This was one of the hardest moments in my life. She had betrayed me, and it hurt so much that I did not show up in school for weeks. After she had found out the truth behind the rumors about me being unfaithful, she tried winning me back, but failed.

Having a hard time accepting this, she went to her friends (one of them a very strong girl… 6′ tall and built like a man) and told them to make my life hell. The girls decided to go to my house a Friday after school and under the disguise of classmates got in. My mother also showed them to my room. As soon as my mother had closed the door, I asked them what they were here for. Their reply was “brace yourself”. The tall girl took out a pocket-knife and threatened to “cut my throat open” if I did not take off all my clothes. I hesitated at first, but realized that I was not in a position to refuse. They made me swallow erection pills and covered my mouth so that I would not be able to make any sound. I was raped for 3 hours, and it was brutal. They stroked my penis with the blade and also tried shaving my pubes. My genital area was a mess after this incident.

A year later, I took it up with the police as well as taking up my aunt violating me, but neither case was ever brought up again, because a woman raping a man isn’t as usual as a man raping a woman, right? What was even worse was that three months ago I got a call from my lawyer, telling me that a girl had recently filed a lawsuit against me. “For what?” I asked. Rape. I, who have been abused sexually since the age of 10, was accused of raping a woman. The woman who filed the lawsuit was none other than my previous girlfriend.

Do you think I deserve the punishment you brought up? I cannot prove myself innocent, because I have no alibi. Neither can she prove me guilty, but considering your logic, she doesn’t need to.

Thanks for reading my story.

Rape can and often does involve serious trauma to a woman’s, or child’s, genitals. There are females who are left sterile as a result of being raped. For some women, the trauma done to their reproductive organs is so severe that they -die-.

So, yea, “genital mutilation” is part of the fear of rape, Grafton.

That in a hypothetical situation such as this, all you can think about is how someone who doesn’t like you could have -accused you of rape-?

What am I supposed to think of? I am not airing concerns about rape. That’d be a different post. I am airing concerns about this post. I thought it was a proposal to create justice. I find that it does not, at all. The opposite — it is, in fact, a proposal to create a deliberate injustice.

Justice does not consist of trading off on who gets to abuse whom. Certainly, yes, women have been abused far too long, but that doesn’t mean abusing somebody else will make the world better.

(I can’t imagine how it could possibly be hard for men, or anyone, to stop being abusive. I think the culture just needs to stop making so much fucking effort to demean women, and stop raping them. I can’t fathom why this is supposed to be hard. Not raping people is a total snap. Leaving other people the fuck alone is the easiest thing in the world. But I am, of course, cognitively disabled and childishly naive. )

I get it, in theory, I understand what you mean, but dude. Again. Fear of rape vs. fear of rape accusation. One of these things … not like the other.

Why do you think I said that they were like each other? As far as I know, rape isn’t like anything. Probably the rapes you experienced aren’t even like the rapes that people I know have experienced.

If you’ll read back, you’ll find that I haven’t compared rape to anything. I have been told that the original post is implicitly comparing rape (or men’s power to commit rape with impunity) to a hypothetical situation where women can maim men with impunity by accusing them of rape. This ‘reversal,’ I am told, is how this proposal is a ‘thought experiment’ that’s supposed to illustrate how bad the current situation is for women (ND wrote, “As of now, we’re being asked to tolerate a system just about as horrifying as this one could be in the worst of circumstances,” and previous, and etc. from various others.) Since rape isn’t like anything else I’m sure you can understand why I didn’t get the supposedly intended meaning of the post and in spite of this being said in various I still don’t fucking think it says that. Maybe I seem to have made that comparison, but if I did, it’s only because I was kinda trying to play along with what I was told the post really means. I did say it’s a crappy analogy.

That in a hypothetical situation such as this, all you can think about is how someone who doesn’t like you could have -accused you of rape-?

It’s still ringing hollow. I get it, in theory, I understand what you mean, but dude. Again. Fear of rape vs. fear of rape accusation. One of these things … not like the other.

And again, as crass and brutal as it sounds — at this point, if someone HAS to suffer, and in this post-capitalist oligarchic patriarchy, it seems like someone has to suffer … I’d really just rather it not be me, or other women. Because we’ve been there, done that.