why is this a common story?

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I suppose that one has to be extra cautious with these arranged marriages, or with hold-onto-your-virginity-until-the-wedding-night marriages. If this had been an American style courtship, where they had been living together for several years prior to the wedding, then the bride would probably have been more aware that something was off.

Possibly, in centuries past, the adulteress would have been stoned to death.

Nowadays, Chinese women are in such short supply that they can't be wasted like that.

Here is a poor fellow

http://news-hound.net/depressed-chinese ... irlfriend/

who cut off his own dick over his frustration at not being able to acquire female companionship.

The penis has function as a liquid disposal appendage as well as an intromittent organ. The man obviously wasn't thinking about that aspect, or he was having trouble urinating as well.

I still find this unconscionable. It's no different than if I had a kid who wrecked the family car--and it was directly his or her fault for causing the wreck. No, you won't be driving again for a LONG time. But don't compound stupidity by not calling me for help. You actually NEED me to bail you out of this one. We'll worry about the consequences later.

My whole point in bringing up parenting styles was kids must be made aware at as early an age as they can understand that they are more likely go get in trouble, situations they cannot control, when they make decisions that lead them into circumstances in which those behaviors are commonplace. Our job as parents is to prevent as much as we possibly can those kinds of things from happening, and that means saying "NO" when a child is about to do something, knowingly or not, something terribly risky and stupid.

So here I have to echo my previous point: All a girl is at fault for in these kinds of situations is for behaving poorly by placing herself somewhere parents never would have agreed to as a safe, wholesome place for children/teenagers. So what...the girl gets placed under lock and key until she ages out.

If she sneaks out, does drugs, drinks, etc., and ends up getting raped with ensuing "hilarity" getting posted to YouTube, I as a father would see it as lesson learned, and I doubt she'd have a problem from that point forward living under tighter rules designed specifically with the purpose in mind of 1) making sure it NEVER happens again, and 2) shielding her from subsequent fallout and embarrassment.

Hence there is no need for "I told you so" kinds of garbage.

The most important thing is that I know what happened so I can help make things happen so that the scumbag who violated her gets punished for what he did--preferably getting scarlet-lettered as a sex offender and losing whatever societal standing he previously had.

If that happened to my daughter, "What were you doing there?" isn't even going to enter my mind. I'd think with every parent out there the response would be different if it became personal. I can't have the same empathy with other kids that I have with my own.

...

Look, I understand what you're getting at, I really do. I've tried looking at this from several different angles, and it seems to me that the majority attitude, or at least the most vocal attitude, is the prevailing one. All I've ever heard regarding rape was for girls/women to report it immediately. I thought that was just common sense. Which is why I have a difficult time comprehending that it really is THAT difficult. As I've said before, all you can fault a girl for is sneaking out and disobeying her parents. No one compelled anyone to rape her, and I agree that the fault for rape lies squarely with the rapist. However, no one can help the girl if she doesn't speak up about it.

I'll go out on a limb here, play the bad guy, and suggest that maybe failing to report is tacit compliance, consent to sexual intercourse after the fact. In EFFECT that's what it is. Perhaps if we view it in that light it would convey the importance and urgency of reporting rape?

So, AngelRho, imagine that you're a woman who has been raped. The rapist basically told you, 'You do not matter as a person. You are only a body for me to do what I want with, and what you want does not matter. You have no dignity, because bodies do not have dignity. You have no rights, because bodies do not have rights. You have no honor, because bodies do not have honor. You have no control over your life, because bodies cannot have control.' She has been humiliated and shamed, and she faces the prospect of going to police who will then humiliate and devalue and shame her further, of a rape kit that will force her to endure even further violation of her body and might not even be tested anyway. If the rapist goes to trial, she will face a gauntlet of people accusing her of 'having wanted it,' and of lying about what occurred and of simply having changed her mind after bad sex. She faces police asking her, 'What did you expect?'

Can you not see what kind of strength that takes? Can you not see that many women will not have the strength to face that immediately after having been raped, and might logically chose to lick their wounds in private?

*Sigh*

OK...I really, REALLY don't like saying this, but purely for the sake of discussion:

Could it be, given all of the above, that rape really isn't THAT big a deal? Perhaps we're merely conditioned to think that it is, and the "psychological" or "mental trauma" is a conditioned response, or an overreaction?

As an example, my wife was robbed at gunpoint. There are those people who'd fall completely apart at having a gun pointed at them or witnessing an armed robber press a handgun to a co-worker's head. Being directly confronted with her friend's mortality and possibly her own has not phased her. Rather, she feels sorry for the guy, understands that this guy is not in any kind of right mind, and genuinely hopes he gets help (turns out he got caught within an hour--he'd been on an armed robbery spree in the days leading up that...he's going away for a LONG time).

Could it be that rape is some over-hyped thing that ultimately doesn't really matter all that much? It's a nasty violation, but no worse than being attacked by someone throwing feces at you. My wife has the advantage of having earned a university degree in psychology, so surviving the ordeal she endured, short as it was, was not quite as difficult as it might have been for the young woman with the gun to her head.

BTW...the point of this is not that it's somehow "OK" to rape women. The point is to question whether if it is possible that (some) women would rather stay silent than report rape that rape is really THAT big a deal. I want to question the real difference between rape as a crime and, say, enduring being covered with a bucket of fresh pig guts on stage at the homecoming dance. To SOME, being raped might amount to little more than a temporary annoyance or a prank. What are the real reasons why we tend to freak out about it, and why don't we freak out about it enough to change the culture surrounding reporting rape crimes?

Regarding what I REALLY think about it...I think it should ALWAYS be reported. I get that it involves further violation in proving a crime was committed. The problem, just like with my wife getting robbed, is that if a rapist gets away with it, there's no stopping him from doing it again. It's never for ourselves that we expend our energies seeking justice: It's for making sure that nobody else has to suffer the in the ways we do. Admittedly, I have very little respect for a lot of feminists or their positions. However, I think a hyper-vigilance regarding how cases of rape are handled is merited. I also favor a justice system that favors an alleged rape victim's word against the rapist's any day, but that's perhaps a different topic...

^^^You would not think that if you had been raped.

If anyone is upset by some of the ideas being discussed in this thread (and I wouldn't blame them if they were,) I would like to let them know that they can personally vent at me in a PM (I'll be sympathetic.) I can see a flame war ahead and would like to prevent it.

No, I don't think he would at all. That's all I'm saying.

How would the poster (male I presume) feel if he was raped by a man? Violated? Reduced? Filthy, defiled?

Shall we liken that to a 'temporary annoyance or prank'?

I think it's easy commenting on how a woman would or would not feel when one isn't a woman.

Another thing. Poster's wife is raped. What's he going to tell her - hey honey, it's no big deal? I don't think so.

I see what AngelRho is saying - to a point. Fear of death, you could argue, is conditioning too.

I'm not comfortable with that statement either. I've been through stuff and I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as I'd imagine rape to be. I've heard other women talk about here, a WP member posted about her experiences and how it caused lasting psychological damage and fear, among other things. I do wonder, are those your actual beliefs, or is it truly just for the sake of discussion?

Who? Me? Purely for the sake of discussion.

I hate bringing it up. But there IS a point. What is it about rape that makes sticking it to the perpetrators more trouble than it's worth for rape victims? Is it because SOME of have become hyper-sensitized to it, perhaps some more than others? Is it possible some rape victims just don't think it's a big deal?

Where I grew up (rural area), sexual activity at young ages wasn't a big deal. I mean, 5th and 6th grade, and it wasn't a big deal. The way some of us grew up, we were just playing around with neighbors or distant cousins, or in some cases I was aware of, not-so-distant. We'd get into fights in the middle of a field and nobody cared. Rape or sexual manipulation happened, and it amounted to the same thing--there was no point in talking about it, and I knew girls in that age range and younger who already thought sex was fun. It didn't screw anybody up for life as far as we could tell.

The way I grew up, as opposed to the way other people I knew grew up, is my parents sent me to a private school where it was actively taught that certain kinds of touching and behaviors were not only improper, but actually dangerous. I didn't understand it, but I didn't push it either, so I avoided kids that lived around me.

I saw a lot of that kind of thing going on, and about that time I remember hearing in the news about people getting busted for rape that happened, like, 20 years before after victims "remembered" repressed feelings and described those events under hypnosis. It turns out a lot of those may have been false memories implanted through hypnotic suggestion. I dunno. But I remember things like that along with images of people crying about how they can barely function in life because their daddies touched them or some such. And don't forget the scarlet-letter effect of sex offender registries. Seriously, we live in a time in which convictions of sexual deviancy carry a lot of weight. I think asking whether the act of rape is as bad as we seem to think it is is a legit question.

If it doesn't REALLY harm women (or anyone) that bad, then it's not a big deal if it goes unreported and we've grown hyper-sensitive to it for no good reason. If it IS harmful to women, especially if rapists are able to continue to commit crimes, then reporting it seems almost compulsory, don't you think?

It's like if you're involved in a car accident. It HAS to be reported. You don't just get to walk away from it. If the bad guys get away with wrecking cars, lives are unnecessarily endangered. One person gets away with rape once, what's stopping him from the next, or even worse crimes? If rape is that big a deal, it MUST be reported if for no other reason than to stop it from happening again.

Which is why I find this whole discussion so mind-boggling. If we're so hyper-sensitive to sexual violation, why do we even still have situations in which women still feel they can't report rape? Just look at the response people have had to my previous post!! ! We get mad about it and go on the warpath. And that seems to prove my point. And that makes it difficult for me to believe that things like this (women unable to report the crime) are really THAT commonplace.

There is an unspoken social stigma that comes with being violated (i.e. raped) that nobody every talks about and that can be as bad as people openly treating the victim as if the fact they were violated were completely their own fault.

I have heard many stories in my life and some of them don't make sense to me either, but people have the right to do with their lives what they want and what feels most comfortable. If someone doesn't want to report a rape, it's because they are scared - for many many reasons, some of them very good reasons. Not everyone lives in the same kind of universe nor does everyone have the same kinds of rights, in law or in society.

Unspoken rules still rule this world, and I find it particularly annoying when intelligent people forget to account for this in their reasoning.

Hookay, I'm done here. Thanks, dudebros.

Maybe more women should rape men to level the playing field!

^ I believe you mentioned being raped once, and from what I remember you didn't like the experience. So no.

AngelRho, murder witnesses exist who decide to not come up to the authorities for various reasons, knowing the specifics is not as important as knowing those reasons exist. And we can both probably agree that murder is a terrible thing to do, and a big deal. And if this is possible for murder, then this is also possible for rape.

All in all, many things seem to point out towards the same conclusion: a long term goal worth striving for is an environment where women can feel safe, and well they won't be stigmatized or pressured against reporting rape if the worst happens.

Also, the fact that we are being hypersensitive is because the people participating in this thread is a very small sample of the population in general; and would be people who are interested in the topic in the first place. The same can't be said about the majority of people. I bring this example again; the town where a raped teenager was bullied to suicide for not keeping her mouth shut is a prime example of why a case of rape could go unreported. In my country, a 19YO woman was allegedly raped in the parking lot of a very expensive restaurant, and the owner made a commentary on how she had shown up there wearing a mini-skirt. The commentary section showed people who believed women should cover themselves up as well, instead of leading men to sin. Disgusting, and I don't use that word lightly.

Also, I wonder what dudebro means