I should perhaps preface my comments by noting that my ex-wife was a domestic-abuse survivor of, not merely one incident of assault, but a very extended series of sexual, psychological, & physical assaults and batteries, by four different husbands, spanning years. So this is not a topic that I take lightly, or regard flippantly.
Nonetheless, by the rules and conventions used in the article, I too am a "victim of sexual assault" because I have, in my past, repeatedly had my butt non-voluntarily squeezed by a (very nice) gay guy whom I worked with. I would assert that any definition of "sexual assault" that is so broad as to include both incidents, is so broad as to be useless in any discussion, because it exists primarily to confuse, create fear, and pump up numbers of "recorded" incidents - not to inform intellectually.
I find Starling's article insulting - but a good example of why an entire class of very safe men refuse to approach women at all in public.
Certain statements within the article are even more insulting coming from a female private investigator (a profession adept at checking out people) who practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu (a martial art specializing in very aggressive on-the-ground grappling techniques). To suggest that any private investigator who practices martial arts lives in constant fear of murder ("so the cops can find my body") at the hands of people she dates, suggests clinical paranoia, not common sense.
The article veers into the territory of explicitly insulting when it explicitly acknowledges that it is speaking to "a good sort of [male] person," seeking "a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman" - and then presumes to imagine that it needs to advise me not to "rape, assault, grope, constrain, brandish?, expose myself, or threaten with physical or sexual violence."
Yes, Phaedra Starling, this should have gone without saying: No, actually I don't need to be reminded of this, and no, this is not the world you live in – where apparently "all men are potential rapists" -- even the ones that you explicitly acknowledge are not.
But let's deal with the statistics that Starling uses:
- Excepting war zones, women must deal with a much higher level of violent assault or murder than men: Simply wrong.
- 83.3% of American women will never be sexually assaulted in their lifetime: If 1-of-6 are, that means 5-of-6 are not.
- Except that there are 154 million women in the US and according to the US DOJ, less than 1,000 rapes and attempted rapes, including verbal threats, per year
- "Sexual assault" includes a wide variety of things, including assault (legally defined as unwanted touching) attempted assault, rape, attempted rape, incest, indecent exposure (in this context broad enough to include seeing someone's penis in a dating situation that you didn't want to see), forced sexual contact, attempted forced sexual contact, sexual harassment, and acquaintance and/or date rape with the concept of "consent" being conditioned on the caveat that "only partners with equal power can freely consent," and equal power being conditioned on differences in economic status, among other things.
- The chance of encountering a violent rapist or murderer in a public conversation is vastly smaller than encountering someone who violates some level of withdrawn consent in a dating situation.
- Risk is not evenly spread across ages and populations: Risk falls sharply once one is past the age of 19, with 20 year olds-and-over being exposed to four times less risk (according to statistics) than 16-19 year olds - again 16-19 year old's risk being primarily in dating/relationship situations that cross lines of willing consent, rather than in violent encounters.
- Yet actual reported rapes per year on the average college campus number 1-3 in private campuses and perhaps 2-6 on public campuses, and a large number of those coeds who feminist statisticians insist were raped, not only insist that they weren't, but later voluntarily date and have sex with the alleged perpetrators. See The Campus Rape Myth.
- Starling's "1-in-60 men is a sexual assaulter" (with her "rapists commit 10 rapes each" simply being made up out of whole cloth) equates to 1.6% of the male population, including all of the non-violent but not-fully-consensual actions listed above.
- In terms of violent crimes -- forcible rape, assault, murder, this is more properly below 1% of the male population - which oddly enough is the exact same percentage of criminals willing to physically assault, batter. bludgeon, maim and kill approximately twice as many male members of the population per year as females.
- However, it is not socially excusable that men "need" to be paranoid about every social interaction, nor regard every person who talks to them as a potential assailant.
"I set my own risk tolerance. "
Yes one does. And in a free society, if you want to believe even that you are in eminent danger of being kidnapped by alien scientists from the planet Zorb, that's just fine - as long as you don't bother others. However all ideas are not equally true in terms of objective reality, and it is not polite to attempt to impose empirically-unsupported ideas on others.
"you must be aware of what signals you are sending by your appearance and the environment. "
It is true that "you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Then again, Mother also said "Never judge a book by it's cover."
I'd have to assume, however, that the lovely fellow with gang symbols tattooed on his face is again not the sort of male likely to be reading this article. So again, this is insulting.
"Women are communicating all the time. Learn to understand and respect women's communication to you."
Predominantly, most nice guys learn by observation by their early 20's that women prefer to date pushy, aggressive, "dangerous seeming" men who walk up to them and aggressively chat them up, while ignoring, shunning, and belittling safe nice ones. Perhaps women need to adjust their communication too.
And lastly, the title, Schrödinger's Rapist, completely improperly implies that each and every communication opportunity of men with women has a 50% possibility of "going either way" toward rape -- a concept completely unsupported even by Starling's own rhetoric.
