The Damages and Rammifications of Global Rape Culture

This article brings up a very valid point and elaborates on it pretty evenly.
I'm going to go ahead and embed the video here to help express the points I'm going to try and make that go in hand with it.  These points are not me bragging.  Far from it.  As the article states, it's a sad state of affairs that it even has to be said.





Okay.  You know, he is absolutely right.
I lived through a similar scenario entirely.  Even plastered off my ass, I didn't force myself on someone else.

One of my more important ex's in my life had a tendency to drink.  Right off the start though she warned me about this and we discussed it.  If we were going to get intimate, the first time could not be while we were drunk.  She had outright warned me she gets rather touchy feely when she drinks and is around those she likes.  I respected her wishes.  The most we ever did was cuddle.

There was one instance during Christmas in 2005 though.  We were all playing drinking games at a friends house.  All of us were over 21 mind you, and we were being responsible about no one driving if intoxicated too.  In fact it was the reason I ended up staying with her on that couch all night on Christmas Eve.  She had too much to drink far too quickly from beer pong, and was laying on the couch using my lap as her pillow.  Eventually the amount of liquor caught up with her and made her sick.  She warned me, I yelled trashcan to the others who were all too inebriated to make sense of that.  One tossed a box with a hole in the bottom, the other brought over a kitchen pan.  Finally one of them grabbed a bucket.  She puked, I cleaned it up. (As an aside, binge drinking is not healthy, but accidents do happen. So keep a bucket or trashcan at the ready.  Drinking is not something you should do in excess either, but again mistakes can happen.  Especially when you are still learning your tolerances.  It's best to at least be prepared on those occasions to be safe and responsible. Also, do not drink around those you cannot trust. That outright is a safety hazard for your own well-being.  If you know someone has taken advantage of it before, odds are they will again in the future.)

Afterwards, she pleaded with me to not be mad, which I wasn't.  She begged me to stay by her side.  So I did.  I continued to be her pillow all night.  She got a bit more friskier that night than normal, but considering everything we'd talked about before even in being her personal close guy friend(she had an issue with the word boyfriend I never understood) at the time, it wasn't right.  I wasn't comfortable that night with even resting my arms on her so we could both sleep.  I simply let her use my lap as a pillow as she asked, and kept my arms to myself at the top of the couch.  Mostly to protect her from others that might try to take advantage, but also because honestly I was quite uncomfortable about this myself.  Even more so when she started nibbling on me, but thankfully she turned her head and stopped when I didn't respond. (Really, I was chanting in my head "please don't react, please don't react, please don't react" over and over and over again because of what she had said previously.)  So my Christmas Eve of 2005 was spent sleeping on a couch in a sitting position.  My Christmas morning of 2005 though was me waking up looking into the eyes of a woman I thought I loved.  So while nothing happened that night, it is still one of the best Christmas memories I have.  (Seriously, if the right parties want to verify the veracity of that claim, by all means, go ahead and contact me.  I have nothing to hide.)

The thing is though.  Real men don't take advantage.  Consent is mandatory.  It's sad that I even have to keep saying this.  That people are even that afraid of men because of the monsters out there that they have to create tests to verify their honor and dignity.  That boys even use such words as "rape" in their everyday vocabulary to even make women think they might.  I've had that thrown in my face before by someone.  I didn't argue it though.  She was right.  It was something I should have never said.  Did I mean it as she thought it sounded?  No, but that makes no difference.  Even having said that word in her direction made her uncomfortable.  She had every right to feel that way, to want to protect herself.  Everyone does.

Sadly, one of my friends likes to play devil's advocate and says a lot of things he shouldn't.  Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in that with guy speak.  That doesn't make it okay.  That's not an excuse.  This does not rationalize it.  In fact this is the very problem.  Now granted he does know if he ever put a finger so much as even near a person I cared about in the wrong way, he'd be a eunuch right after.  That doesn't mean that others understand that though.  That doesn't make me using it as a joke any less problematic.  I perpetuated something that is a genuine real world concern and it should have never been said.  It's not something that should ever be joked about or even considered.

Rape is not a subject I take kindly to, and is one of the things that can make me hate a girlfriend's ex-boyfriend with a passion to the point I might actually hurt them if she's not near when or if I see that person.  I'm not trying to gloat or brag, and I hate that I even have to point that out.  The internet has a habit of attacking white knights though.  Even tin foil ones.  They treat being good as some ploy, some act to get a desired result, and it's not.  My life's events are just what they are.  I'm being forthcoming with them as examples and situations can vary.  I'd hope that others can see how they are supposed to act if put into similar positions.  If from this just one person decides to step up and be a real man if ever put in that spot, then it's worth it.

The problem is society tries to tell men that our natural state of being is that of a rapist.  We are Schroedinger's Rapists.  They tell us we cannot be trusted.  Some want to go so far as try to even push us to that.  See how we break to become that.  A real alpha male isn't a rapist though.  An alpha male is a protector.  Someone that will keep who they care for safe no matter what.  They do not force themselves on others.  An alpha male is a real man.

It's easy to see why society thinks this with every act perpetrated by boys onto others.  Look no further than the link above and how it talks about the Steubenville case.  How people reacted to the predators in that was distressing.  They tried to defend these little monsters and talked about how their lives were ruined.  No one talked about the victim.  Many of them blamed the victim.  The person that was violated was blamed for the crimes committed against her.  Those boys should have been castrated and their parents incarcerated for not teaching them better than that.

It's not much better in politics.  We wonder why others can even fathom rape, and yet politicians are presenting bill's to become law all over the country that are tantamount to rape.  They get no punishment for this whatsoever.  Just more money thrown their way to perpetuate the problems and make the world more toxic.

Gamers toss the word rape around like it's nothing as well.  In fact the second they realize it might bother you, they use it more.  They delight in destruction, and yet wonder why girls rarely want to speak to them in game or at all.

This whole thing just is too big even for me to voice though.  Just trying to voice this from a male perspective is impossible.  Even with my own history, this isn't something I can truly voice entirely.  I can only tell you from what I've seen and heard from living in this world; the things I've experienced and witnessed from my own life.

It's not much different for men though.  If you do get drunk or drugged at a party.  Others will do things to you thinking it's a laugh.  People laugh at the degradation of others like it's a joke or prank.  They make jokes about "mushroom slaps" and trying to stick their dick in a guy or girl's mouth while passed out.  All of that is still sexual assault though.  Yet the mentalities people have is that it's funny.  Something to be amusing.  A prank or story to tell that others will pat the perpetrator on the back about because it's harmless.  It's not though.  It's a crime.  It's assault.  You are sexually assaulting another by doing that.

It happens to other people, but it's different when it happens to you.  You shouldn't wait until it happens to you to think differently though.  Put yourself in the position of the person attacked.  How would you feel dealing with that?  Have some empathy.  Be human, not a monster.  Stand up and stop them.  Don't just sit back and watch it happen.  Don't just be an accomplice by inaction.

I have no answers to this though other than saying stop hurting others.  I wish I did have some big answer to it that'd make it stop.  I just know what's wrong from how I was raised, and the life I've lived.  There is no single solution to this, just many questions of how life degraded to such a state.  It's not something as simple as saying humanity has debased itself into thinking it's an animal so it now treats each other like animals.  It's not something as simple as saying it's because we've forsaken religion or spirituality either.

It's a topic and word people take too lightly.  It has gravity to it, and should be treated as such.
At this point I'm just pretty much repeating because I can't think of how to really continue this topic.  Hopefully later as Kinney Pride continues to grow, we can have a specialist come in to handle and deal with this topic.  X-23 herself is ripe for it as literally that's what everyone has done to her from birth.  Maybe not sexually, but her life was raped so that others could feel powerful.  Her innocence and youth were taken away before she could truly even know what it was.  It's not any different.