A few days ago social media was alight with ladies outing
men who had done wrong by them or their friends or their friends’ friends.
By the time the dust had settled there were a lot of hurt
feelings, sheepish smiles and some very angry people on both sides of the
gender divide.
The sad part about it, is that narrative was taken to the
extreme end of the pendulum. Rape. We went form 0 -100 in a few megabytes.
I think to handle rape, you don’t handle rape. You start by
recognizing the wider perspective of everything from, these days, cyber
stalking to sexual harassment to sexual assault. A rapist does not jump out of
the box, out of the blue, they probably go through a progression of unwanted
sexual behavior before one day, boom!
It’s like domestic violence, we focus on the physical act of
beating and forget the lower levels of domestic violence which build up to the
main event.
In conversations on twitter, you could see disturbing
confusion about what is and what is not acceptable in our social interactions.
What constitutes consent was an interesting discussion, but
I think it put a lot of onus on the object of a person’s desire to set the
boundaries of what constitutes admissible behavior. Which is ok, but isn’t
there a case for a certain level of common decency, a baseline of behavior if
you like, that frames our relationships?
It may be asking for too much. In the murky and ambivalent world of male-female interactions there are a lot of influences that colour how we relate to the opposite sex...
Beginning with the signals society sends out, our
socialization. Signals emitted by people we respect, our parents, our teachers,
our priests and pastors. And we haven’t even begun to examine the messages we
get from our peers.
These are overlaid on our own inadequacies and insecurities.
All this makes for a very confusing environment in which to grow and operate.
It was interesting to witness all the shrill voices, mostly
women, admonishing their own, that no man – relative or not, should be trusted.
Most sexual assaults are by people known to the victims and therefore this
looked like wise counsel. The counter would be that this distrust could be the
very thing that prevents relationships from growing beyond the fugitive glance
at the bar.
On the other side of the divide were the defensive, almost
petulant male voices, warning that this widening of the boundaries of what
constitutes acceptable social behavior would kill a lot of budding relationships.
It’s not as if every woman you are interested in responds positively from the
word go and if we were to turn away at every rejection people would not get
married. The counter to that is the first approach need not be offensive,
obtrusive or crude for a relationship to kick off.
For anyone with even a rudimentary experience in the dating
game would be hard pressed to argue with that last part.
But it seems the wise thing to do is to err on the side of
caution.
Let us not only jump up and down when rape allegations are aired. Let us be appalled when people invade others private space or “accidentally” touch another in unwanted ways or make comments that cause discomfort to another or even look at someone else in a way as to cause shivers to run up and down their spines....
As for the fears that this interference in the mating game
could very well mean the extinction of the human race? We need to calm down.
There are enough mutual attractions around to keep the specie rolling along.
Jokes aside.
There is clearly a need to publicise the wider spectrum of
sexual crimes, that rape is only one extreme of. We need to recognize that
rapists rarely start off as rapists but climbed up the ladder of sexual
violence and who knows if we can catch them early we can prevent them going to
the extreme.
It is interesting that with more development, better
communication has led to a weakening of social ties and therefore social
interactions are personal affairs rather than the coming together of families.
This responsibility to a larger grouping than the two individuals, kept some
anti-social behaviours underground.
