I need to rage.

There's a number of things I want to rage about, and I'm having a hard time deciding, so I think I'll go rage about rape. It is very rage-able.

I know it's old, but did you hear about this case? There is a fairly recent (and not positive) update, though. In a rape trial, the victim was slapped with a gag order preventing her and the prosecutors from using the words “victim,” “assailant,” “rape,” “date rape drugs,” “sexual assault kit,” and “sexual assault.” The only terms she was allowed to use in her testimony to describe what happened were "sex", "sexual intercourse" and "intercourse".

Where does a woman even start with the rage here? Can you imagine a burglary case where the judge banned the use of the words "theft", "stole", and "crime scene investigation", and only allowed the words "transaction" and "property transfer" to define the crime? Can you imagine that judge keeping his job? Can you imagine the media not being all over that? But put "Tory Bowen" (the woman's name) into a news search at Google, and only 6 results come up!

I will never be allowed on a rape jury. Why? Because I know the mere fact that I'm there means there's a 95% chance the guy is guilty, and about a 5% chance he'll be convicted, and about a literal 1% chance overall that he'll do any time for it.

A little look at the statistics shows why justice for raped women is almost an impossibility. You know what statistics I want to see shoved down our throats as much as the one-in-four? I want everyone to be told just as often that at least 1 in 8 men is a rapist, and that 1 in 2 think it's OK "under certain circumstances" (which are typically everyday things -- spending a lot of money on her, she's wearing the wrong thing, they've been going out for a while, etc.).

Now, assuming you have a rape trial jury that's only half male (I suspect they're typically more than half male), that means there is a 55% chance that there will be a rapist on the jury. And a 98% chance that at least 1 of the male jurors will think rape is OK. When you consider all the men that are involved in a rape trial -- maybe police officers, maybe doctors, maybe lawyers, maybe the judge -- it's practically a guarantee that a rapist will be in at least one key position in the trial.

How can we ever expect justice in that sort of environment?

There is something seriously wrong with the way rape is presented to men as opposed to women. As I've ranted before, I was taught that rape was the absolutely worst thing that could possibly happen to me, far worse than even being murdered. That's so fucked up. And yet I think that my upbringing was pretty typical in this regard. I'm quite certain it wasn't terribly atypical.

I do not believe that half of all men are monsters. I don't believe that even 12% of them are.

Therefore I must believe that large portions -- no, humongous portions! At least half, as a matter of fact! -- of the male population is not taught to view rape NEARLY as severely as women are.

This needs to change.

Worse, somehow we need to lessen the way women as a group view rape while strengthening the way men as a group view it. I'd like to see both genders view rape as an assault. If someone gets stabbed, few people ask what they did to deserve it, or blame the victim for it happening, or expect the victim to be ruined for life. Likewise, few people think that it's OK to stab someone "under certain circumstances" (and certainly not under fairly everyday ones), and I'm almost certain that the number of men who have stabbed someone is significantly less than 1 in 8.