GregoryTheWatcher wrote:
A lady wears a microskirt, a low cut blouse which shows miles of cleavage, wears an intoxicating perfume, and hits the "cheaper" part of town to have fun, she shakes her *** all night, she gets drunk, she outrageously flirts with a number of guys. She gets raped.
The problem is that I disagree with your analogy. If 100% of the rapes involved were similar to the muggings, I'd agree with you. But they aren't.
Let's play "upside down world" for a second:
Let's pretend that someone has created a great stir about "aquaintance mugging". They show alarming statistics about the number of people who have money borrowed from them by friends and family which is never repaid. They show that quite often it occurs when they are maybe out on the town and after having a few drinks and get a bit loose with their money.
We might create a nationwide program to deal with "aquaintance mugging". We might have lectures at college campuses warning students about this danger and that they need to be careful about who they hang out with. We might conduct polls showing that 1 in 4 college students have been "aquaintance mugged". We might even declare an epidemic and demand action.
We could then use these statistics to push for new laws that expand the crime of mugging to include these horrible aquaintance muggings. After all, losing money is losing money, right?
And after we change those laws, and change people's opinions, and firmly include aquaintance mugging in the lexicon of bad crimes out there, your analogy would work just fine. Sure. Not all muggings are aquaintance muggings. And sometimes someone you know does beat you up or threaten you in order to get your cash. Just as that does happen with rape. So hey. It's still rape, er... mugging, right?
That's the problem with your analogy. What we're seeing is legal cases where the woman in your example, dressed scantily, willingly intoxicated, goes off with some guy and has sex with him. The next day she presses charges. After all, she didn't say she wanted to have sex, and she didn't plan to have sex with him until after she was intoxicated. He clearly took advantage of her intoxicated state to get sex from her, so that clearly is "rape", right?
Wouldn't you expect him to argue that she was "asking for it"? Why be surprised that this "excuse" is on the rise? It's on the rise, because the percentage of rape cases appearing in the courts relating to a vague question of consent rather then obvious physical assault is increasing as well. You'd expect the same if we added "aquaintance mugging" to the law as well, right? Why be surprised?