When I walk behind women, they sometimes peep over their shoulder at me or slow down/stop so that I walk in front of them. I don’t even look like a rapist.
[quote]ElbowStrike wrote:
boxingash wrote:
It’s funny how most people will tell a nice looking girl to be careful over one who is not.
…because rapists select women who have the highest outward signs of fertility: youth and beauty. An attractive woman or teenage girl is, all other factors being equal, more likely to be attacked by a rapist.[/quote]
That’s awfully insightful; are you a rapist? 
Seriously though, you don’t really mean to suggest that stranger rape is simply a man seeking to spread his genes? This is just a biological urge then? Oo oh that’s a can of worms…
[quote]ElbowStrike wrote:
I believe the major reason that only 25% of female rape victims were attacked by strangers is BECAUSE of all the safety precautions we socially ingrain into women.
Besides, even men can’t walk around alone at night “anywhere they want to”.[/quote]
OR perhaps the bogeyman is just a bogeyman. I can and do walk around here alone at night. I’ve always done this, when I lived in Toronto and Vancouver and have had few problems, aside from a couple of minor incidents.
And this includes while living in East Van for a while. Parties, clubs and bars OTOH are very high risk especially for women who’ve been drinking. 11pm on the running trail, very very low risk.
I also see lots of other women out walking and running too. Not to mention the numbers of women who are out at night due to necessity–because they use public transportation and have work hours that extend past daylight–not uncommon when it gets dark at 4:30pm. There are lots of women out past dark; someone should tell the rapists!
its so unfortunate, and funny that some women, have been intimidate by me for no reason, and others seem to instigate trouble despite me weighing easily 100lb’s more than them, atleast most are semi normal and deal in reality, there’s usually nothing to fear from anybody, cause most people don’t want trouble.
Any way most rapes and murders occur within the family, so don’t look outside, they are under your roof…
[quote]debraD wrote:
ElbowStrike wrote:
That’s awfully insightful; are you a rapist? :P[/quote]
Years ago, I had a girlfriend who’d been raped. We were friends first and I helped her through the darkest of her PTSD, but after we shacked up her waking-up-screaming-in-the-night really got to me. Thanks for bringing it up though. That was a wonderful walk down memory lane.
Simply a man seeking to spread his genes? Just a biological urge?
Sexual attraction is a biological urge.
Dominance is a biological urge.
Feelings of inadequacy or rage against a mother-figure or partner-figure are “natural” responses to a history of abuse.
Fulfilling these “urges” when it’s not appropriate (ie; rape) is what is a crime.
At no point did I imply that becuase rape is a “natural” behaviour that it is therefore “okay”. Don’t even try.
[quote]ElbowStrike wrote:
I believe the major reason that only 25% of female rape victims were attacked by strangers is BECAUSE of all the safety precautions we socially ingrain into women.
Besides, even men can’t walk around alone at night “anywhere they want to”.
OR perhaps the bogeyman is just a bogeyman. I can and do walk around here alone at night. I’ve always done this, when I lived in Toronto and Vancouver and have had few problems, aside from a couple of minor incidents.
And this includes while living in East Van for a while. Parties, clubs and bars OTOH are very high risk especially for women who’ve been drinking. 11pm on the running trail, very very low risk.
I also see lots of other women out walking and running too. Not to mention the numbers of women who are out at night due to necessity–because they use public transportation and have work hours that extend past daylight–not uncommon when it gets dark at 4:30pm. There are lots of women out past dark; someone should tell the rapists![/quote]
Look up Edmonton’s “River Valley Rapist” as well as the copy-cat serial rapists that followed in his footsteps. I worked city parks services during the summers all through college. There are TONS of night-time sex attacks that go unreported, of those that are, very, very few ever make it to the papers.
What were the stats? For every ten rapes only one is reported?
Also, you listed Canadian cities. The majority of people on T-Nation live in the USA. A woman living in the United States is over three times as likely to be raped during her lifetime than one living in Canada, so experiences of living on “the mean streets” of Vancouver and Toronto really don’t compare well to say, Detroit or Washington DC.
I come from Edmonton, the “most violent city in Canada” and it’s still safer than all but three major cities in the United States. It’s simply incomparable and even then, there are tons of unreported sex attacks. Can you imagine how many there are in real dangerous cities?
ElbowStrike
My first reaction is to apologize for the obvious joke but since you decided to suggest my joke has anything to do with causing you trauma I’m more inclined to tell you to either grow a pair or grow a sense of humour. But I suppose you can be traumatized by whatever you want. Jeezus! I’ve never been so offended by someone’s response to my offensive joke.
Sociologists, criminal psychologists, academic feminists and others have been trying to determine what causes a man to rape for years but you very matter of factly stated the precise cause in one sentence. It really is not that simple. At no point did I say that what you said was natural and therefore okay. You need to read a bit before getting defensive. Seriously, calm down.
My reason for bringing up Canadian cities is because I happen to live in a Canadian city as well as yourself. What the statistics are in some other terribly frightening crime laden city is not relevant which is largely the point of the OP-- peoples fears are exaggerated to a ridiculous extent and worrying about the fact that there has been a serial rapist in Edmonton is also ridiculous. There was a serial rapist in Toronto when I was living there too. There are also millions of women who don’t get raped…
You’re not the first person to claim to have special secret knowledge when it comes to unreported [stranger] rapes but I can’t take you on your word there, sorry. (I am distinguishing stranger rapes because unlike acquaintance rape there is no reason for women to not report them.)
Also, if a rapist was driven by the biological urges you stated previously, then whether the city is more or less crime laden would have no effect on women’s safety.
[quote]ElbowStrike wrote:
debraD wrote:
ElbowStrike wrote:
That’s awfully insightful; are you a rapist?
Years ago, I had a girlfriend who’d been raped. We were friends first and I helped her through the darkest of her PTSD, but after we shacked up her waking-up-screaming-in-the-night really got to me. Thanks for bringing it up though. That was a wonderful walk down memory lane.
Seriously though, you don’t really mean to suggest that stranger rape is simply a man seeking to spread his genes? This is just a biological urge then? Oo oh that’s a can of worms…
Simply a man seeking to spread his genes? Just a biological urge?
Sexual attraction is a biological urge.
Dominance is a biological urge.
Feelings of inadequacy or rage against a mother-figure or partner-figure are “natural” responses to a history of abuse.
Fulfilling these “urges” when it’s not appropriate (ie; rape) is what is a crime.
At no point did I imply that becuase rape is a “natural” behaviour that it is therefore “okay”. Don’t even try.
ElbowStrike wrote:
I believe the major reason that only 25% of female rape victims were attacked by strangers is BECAUSE of all the safety precautions we socially ingrain into women.
Besides, even men can’t walk around alone at night “anywhere they want to”.
OR perhaps the bogeyman is just a bogeyman. I can and do walk around here alone at night. I’ve always done this, when I lived in Toronto and Vancouver and have had few problems, aside from a couple of minor incidents.
And this includes while living in East Van for a while. Parties, clubs and bars OTOH are very high risk especially for women who’ve been drinking. 11pm on the running trail, very very low risk.
I also see lots of other women out walking and running too. Not to mention the numbers of women who are out at night due to necessity–because they use public transportation and have work hours that extend past daylight–not uncommon when it gets dark at 4:30pm. There are lots of women out past dark; someone should tell the rapists!
Look up Edmonton’s “River Valley Rapist” as well as the copy-cat serial rapists that followed in his footsteps. I worked city parks services during the summers all through college. There are TONS of night-time sex attacks that go unreported, of those that are, very, very few ever make it to the papers.
What were the stats? For every ten rapes only one is reported?
Also, you listed Canadian cities. The majority of people on T-Nation live in the USA. A woman living in the United States is over three times as likely to be raped during her lifetime than one living in Canada, so experiences of living on “the mean streets” of Vancouver and Toronto really don’t compare well to say, Detroit or Washington DC.
I come from Edmonton, the “most violent city in Canada” and it’s still safer than all but three major cities in the United States. It’s simply incomparable and even then, there are tons of unreported sex attacks. Can you imagine how many there are in real dangerous cities?
ElbowStrike[/quote]
It honestly seems to me like you believe I’m arguing that rape is solely a result of biological “urges”. This is not the case at all.
All human behaviour is a result of an interaction of biological, psychological, and social factors. If there were no biological factors influencing rapists then the behaviour simply wouldn’t occur. Also, rape would not occur in other species as it does among orangutans and chimpanzees.
There is no biological benefit to walking around on one’s hands all day, and no amount of social or psychological conditioning is going to convince anyone that that is the way to go.
I have no patience for the academic ideology surrounding the exclusively “psycho-social” model of human behaviour, with its ridiculous assertions that biology plays an insignificant role and that human beings are infinitely malleable by social influences. It’s a politically-correct barrier to more accurate understandings of the world we live in; an overreaction to historical over-reliance on the biological model of human behaviour.
Murder is natural, theft is natural, assault is natural, every crime in the books is “natural”. It’s laws and civilization that are artificial.
So we discipline ourselves and each other to follow these laws of civilization so that if a person is ever to find themselves in a state of mind, emotion, and urges that they are tempted to commit an act that we have collectively termed unacceptable (which does not make it “unnatural”), they are responsible for resisting that temptation and conforming to cultural norms.
For example, a man growing up in a safe city, with safe streets, is far less likely to come out psychologically and emotionally damaged person as is a man growing up surrounded by the plethora of damaging experiences inherent in a dangerous ghetto. In this crime-laden ghetto where violation of other peoples’ boundaries has become a common occurrence, it is far easier for a man prone to commit rape (due to his own unique biological, psychological, and social influences) to do so. It’s a crime of opportunity as well, so a high-crime city likely has a shitty cop-to-criminal ratio giving a habitual rapist greater confidence to repeatedly offend.
(And before anyone brings up the “what about free will” bit, that falls under the umbrella heading of “psychological factors”.)
So far as I’m concerned, evolutionary psychology’s bio-psycho-social model explains all human behaviour. Its conclusions just make people feel uncomfortable or even afraid, so many often try to debunk it by straw-manning it out to be the biological model in disguise. Not saying you’re doing this, it’s just a common tactic.
For the last 10,000 years the human race has been engaged more or less constantly in intertribal hand-to-hand, up-close-and-personal, face-to-face warfare. The anti-social traits that might give an ancient man an extraordinary advantage in war (callous, fearless, guiltless) are also the traits that would lead him to think little of raping and pillaging his enemies’ village after the battle.
Remember “the prisoner experiment”? How “unnatural” the prisoners were treated when the researchers set up social conditions to create an antagonistic, dominance relationship between an “us” versus “them”?
Some rapists have a history of an abusive mother or female care-giver, some an abusive wife or ex-wife, but a common pattern I’ve noticed, which may possibly have been examined to death by some academic in an ivory tower somewhere, is that somehow or another, “women” become “the enemy”. The “them”. The enemy tribesperson, or a surrogate for the woman on which they want revenge, who can be thought nothing of during the attack.
First rule in warfare is to dehumanize the enemy. Some rapists may have internally dehumanized women to make them a “them”. Some are simply psychopathic and all human beings are perceived as members of the “them”. Others have fetal alcohol syndrome and have a limited capacity to understand the long-term consequences of their actions, so they lack any empathy for their victim out of an incapacity to do so.
Rape is obviously a complicated behaviour with a multitude of influences, but to out and out deny that it is intimitely intwined with inherent biological inclination towards reproduction and social dominance? I cannot accept that.
And sorry for the over-react before. It’s a sore spot for me and I posted before a decent cooling period.
ElbowStrike
I was just think about this thread lately.
Why?
Oh, I don’t know. Girls walking in front of me on campus (in the middle of broad daylight) apparently think I’m going to come rape them. Same story as the first time I posted - it’s totally irrational.
I was literally walking behind this girl for about a minute heading to the gym today. I think I stepped on some sideway salt and she heard me. She turns around, glares at me, slows down her walk to a SLOOOOW trot, and lets me pass her. She continues to the gym, right behind me.
Every time this happens, whether the girl is hot or not, I want to tell the girl not to flatter herself.
[quote]SSC wrote:
Girls walking in front of me on campus (in the middle of broad daylight) apparently think I’m going to come rape them. Same story as the first time I posted - it’s totally irrational.
I was literally walking behind this girl for about a minute heading to the gym today. I think I stepped on some sideway salt and she heard me. She turns around, glares at me, slows down her walk to a SLOOOOW trot, and lets me pass her. She continues to the gym, right behind me.[/quote]
I hate when that happens!
Avoiding walking outside at night, down dark alleys and secluded “second locations” is one thing - a fear of all men, everywhere, in all situations borders on the pathological.
ElbowStrike