Well that was interesting

[andrewducker]

It seems to me that part of the reason why discussions of sexual assault, get very heated very quickly is that some people view "assault" as a great big thing.  If someone was assaulted then _something very bad happened_.  This means that when something happens that they don't see as being that awful, then they object to the word "assault", because it doesn't emotionally resonate with them as feeling similar to the act that occurred.  What happened wasn't assault because it wasn't that bad (someone got kissed when they didn't want to be, it was just a hug, etc.).

At the extreme end you end up with things like Whoopi Goldberg's defence of Roman Polanski because what he did wasn't "rape rape" - because that would make Roman Polanski evil, which would make her a bad person for liking him.  At the milder end you have people arguing that kissing someone against their will isn't assault, because if it is then it means that people can be charged for drunkenly snogging someone they fancied in the pub without checking first.

In any case it means I end up with 70-odd comments while I'm away at a meeting on the other side of town, which I wasn't really expecting.

Comments

Re: Definitionof "metarape"

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Rather than defend her choice to still care about a flawed human being who had done a bad thing but may well have had redeeming features, (which is defensible) she chose to deny his faults (which is both idiotic and dishonest).
Too many people do that over all sorts of issues and it's a huge problem because it isolates the victims.