Sweetums wrote:
Uh, if we're going to trim the sex offender database, we may as well trim the ones that aren't actually harming people... like drunk guys taking a ****, et al.
That's absolutely a good starting point.
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Not someone who deems it their right to forcibly coerce a woman into having sex.
/Shrug. The guy in the OP is at worst the sexual equivalent of the school bully. And just like the school bully, he's usually afraid to actual go through with the threats he makes. He counts on being able to find suckers to give him what he wants just by threatening them. He doesn't have to actually do anything, so he figures it's ok. And since it works, he keeps doing it.
A-hole? Absolutely. Dangerous sexual predator who needs to be tracked in a national database? Not really. People like that teach us life lessons. And here's the deal. The girl in the OP will get to live to learn that lesson, wont she?
It's funny (Ok, not really), but I was talking to a friend of mine just this weekend. She brought up a situation when she was a teen that was somewhat similar to the OPs. She went on a date with a guy. After the date, he dropped her off at her house and invited himself in (her parents were out of town). By her own words she was "young and dumb". She let him come in. She let him do far more than she wanted to. At the end of it, she'd lost her virginity to some guy she didn't really like that much and despite not wanting to do it, she either couldn't or wouldn't stop him. She's told me this story many times over the years. It does bother her deeply. She honestly can't remember if she told him to stop or not. And she did what many girls will do in that situation: go along with it. And for a whole bunch of reasons. Partly fear. Partly not wanting to look like a tease once things had progressed that far. But mostly (and this is the really bad thing) the belief that if she appears to go along with it, then only she will know that deep inside she didn't want to.
The point is that even knowing all this she didn't ever accuse him of rape. Not because she was afraid of him, or of revealing what happened, but because she realized that she went along with it. She recognized that he didn't actually force her. He just put her in a situation where she felt extremely pressured.
The second point is that she said the same thing I just did. That what she went through was not even vaguely as bad as the sort of "serial rapist in the bushes" scenario I outlined earlier. For her, part of getting past that issue was to *not* think of herself as a victim. She realized that she made choices that day. They may not have lead to an outcome she wanted, but she did make them. She realized that she could sit around being angry at him for the rest of her life, or she could own the degree of responsibility she bore for what happened, accept it, and move on.
I'll point out that for those who are violently raped by a stranger, the grieving process is the exact opposite. You have to accept that there was nothing you could have done to avoid what happened, and that you bear *no* responsibility. But that very reality makes the process of healing that much harder. You can learn how not to get into the kinds of situations that the OP or my friend found herself in. But you can't learn how to avoid something you had no fault in. That's why not just on a physical level, but a psychological level that is much much worse for the victim. There's just no way to move past it. You just have to hope that over time, you'll forget. Well, enough not to be scared all the time.
Those two situations are not even remotely related. They really aren't.
