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Prof Harold Bloom, she said, put his hand on the inside of her thigh after she invited him to her home for a candlelit dinner 20 years ago.

Wolf wrote that "he was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma", and she was "sick with excitement" at the prospect of being tutored by him. On her invitation the professor agreed to come to supper at her student house and promised to read her poetry.

When her housemates left she said she believed: "Finally! I thought we could discuss our poetry manuscript. He did not look at it."

She said: "He leaned towards me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed. I hoped he was talking about my poetry. The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh."

"The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink which was as far away as I could get.

"He came at me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting in shock. He disappeared."

She continued: "When he reemerged - from the bedroom with his coat - a moment later, I was still frozen, my back against the sink. He said, 'You are a deeply troubled girl.' Then he went to the table, took the rest of his sherry, corked the bottle, and left." In the article she went on to claim that she had been approached by students across the United States who had experienced similar incidents.

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[ 24 February 2004: Message edited by: Mycroft ]

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Camille Paglia accused Wolf of launching a witch hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.

"It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said.

"It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men and made a profession out of courting male attention by flirting and offering her sexual allure."

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I've never invited a male professor over to my house and manoevered my roommates out so that we could be alone over a wine and candlelight dinner in order to discuss school work. I generally made an appointment at professors' offices, or dropped in during office hours.

It's true that just because you invite someone over for a wine and candlelight supper, it doesn't mean you've consented to sex. But I can understand how a man might misread some signals in a situation like this one and think that perhaps she is interested in him romantically. When he realized he had misread, he left. It's true, he wasn't very gracious about it, but I wouldn't consider what happened to be a sexual assault, since he stopped when he realized she wasn't interested.

What concerns me more about this is his lack of professional judgment in the situation. A professor is in a position of authority over his students, so even if a student is willing to start a sexual relationship and is coming on to him, he should probably have the self-control to say no, or if he wants to say yes, then to sever the student-teacher tie first.

But I don't really see this as a case of a professor sexually assaulting a student, from the brief description in the article. I don't think I've ever met any female student who invited their male professor over for an intimate, romantic dinner in order to discuss school work. If a man invited me to his place and cooked me a beautiful supper, complete with wine and candles, I'd also wonder whether he was interested in something romantic. I wouldn't be positive about it, but the thought would cross my mind as a very distinct possibility.

[ 24 February 2004: Message edited by: Michelle ]

According to the link, Wolf is writing an article about two decades of sexual harassment at Yale for a New York magazine.

I did say above that as a professor, he shouldn't respond to advances from students in any case. But I can see where a person could come to a reasonable conclusion that this WAS an advance, and not just a student looking for information. How many times in university did you cook candlelight dinners to eat alone at your home with your male professors?

And even if she is using her own case as one example in a paper about decades of sexual harassment at Yale, I think she's doing the subject a disservice by using it, because as a feminist, if I'm sympathizing with the professor and thinking he's been smeared, you can bet the "establishment" is thinking so too. That certainly doesn't help other women, like yourself, with legitimate harassment or assault claims against professors or other students.

[ 24 February 2004: Message edited by: Michelle ]

It's not a great article, but it does include this passage:

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It's ironic that not so long ago, female students were objecting that the university administration had no business being sex police. My girlfriends would have been insulted by the notion that they couldn't make such decisions for themselves.

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edited to add...

[ 24 February 2004: Message edited by: terra1st ]

I've never felt entirely comfortable with such an absolute position, but there is no question that in the decades preceding, it was common enough for profs to think of students as perks of the job, and there really were no effective sanctions because everyone just smirked at such situations -- and if a student complained, faculty typically closed ranks around the offender, even when they knew he was a jerk. I saw that happen, more than once, although not often, since it would have occurred to so few students to bother complaining.

Maybe it's unfair to take this sentence out of context --

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Wolf wrote that "he was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma", and she was "sick with excitement" at the prospect of being tutored by him.

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-- but I snurfled my apple juice when I first read it. Forgive me, but -- have you ever seen or heard or read Harold Bloom? I met him in the late 1970s and sat through a couple of his lectures, and I would have snurfled at that description then. To be fair, Wolf is openly casting herself as naive in the second part of the sentence, but all I can think is, Man oh man, That Is Naive. To me, Bloom was then and still is a vortex of celebrity and ego and privilege and not a hell of a lot more.

If Wolf is feeling meditative, she might do well to wonder about her own earlier self, why she responded to self-satisfied "stars" the way she did back then if the glories of world literature were supposed to be what she really cared about. I'm not criticizing her behaviour then so much as I'm wondering what she thinks she's accomplishing now.

[ 24 February 2004: Message edited by: skdadl ]

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...because everyone just smirked at such situations

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Although there is definitely a power imbalance inherent in a professor-student relationship, generally by university everyone involved is an adult, and adult students are as responsible for their behaviour as professors are. In which case, if a female student makes advances on her professor, certainly he would be wrong to accept those advances and would have to take responsibility for his behaviour were he to accept. But if this case of what happened to Wolf is as presented in the article, then she is just as responsible for her inappropriate behaviour (creating a romanticized atmosphere in a relationship that is supposed to be professional) as he was for his.

And I think it's pretty disingenuous of her to cry sexual harassment after sending signals that anyone could be forgiven for misreading. If he hadn't stopped when she made it clear she wasn't interested, that would obviously be a problem. But that doesn't appear to be the case from the article we read - he left.

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Statistics that indicate one in four University of Alberta students currently have a sexually transmitted disease are "dreadful," says a doctor at the institution. "About a quarter of young people," said health education co-ordinator Judy Hancock, with the University Health Centre. "If you put our population at 30,000, that would come to about 7,500."

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... but between Naomi Wolf, Camille Paglia, the London Telegraph and Margaret Wente, this sounds like a rogues gallery of those who have done the least to advance women's emancipation and the most to profit from the efforts of committed feminists ....

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'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed.

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I don't know about Harold Bloom - is he the one who wrote the right-wing rant about the loss of the Canon

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That's him. He does the most conservative, Great Books, Great Men kind of criticism, dressed up a bit in more recent rhetoric but seriously slanted towards personality worship -- see his best-selling book about Shakespeare, where he froths about how important it is that we return to thinking of a genius like Shakespeare as A Genius , and where he also emphasizes character-creation as Shakespeare's and the plays greatest strength.

vickyinottawa, I mostly agree with you, mostly ... There is something coercive about some of the zero-tolerance policies, though, that continues to bother me. Even if I had been exploited, I'm not sure I would want an extrajudicial body to come clomping into my private life and insisting on making it public, and I think a nineteen- or twenty-year-old should be free to say that, respected enough to make that decision. I also know that the flesh is weak ...

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Even if she invited him to dinner, he should have recognized the power imbalance and politely refused.

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There were, initially, other people there, so perhaps Bloom didn't realize he was entering a situation with power imbalance.

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That's a coup de gras if I've ever heard one.

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Hey! Today is Mardi Gras, no? lagatta: do your duty! Where is our pancake/crepe thread?

But I also don't think it's reasonable for Wolf to file a formal complaint with Yale *twenty years after the fact* and expect them to do anything (they dismissed it saying they have a two year statute of limitations on sexual harassment cases). I mean how are you supposed to conduct an investigation on this twenty years later?

She may be correct about Yale not taking sexual harassment seriously but filing a complaint two decades after an incident and then saying *see, Yale doesn't take sexual harassment seriously* when they dismiss the complaint sounds like a bit of a set up.

[ 24 February 2004: Message edited by: Mycroft ]

In Italian there is the expression "gattopardismo" as in the leopard changing his spots and the famous book Il Gattopardo (translated as the Leopard) about changing everything (superficial) so nothing changes. Remember, this is the woman who set out to relook Al Gore.

As for crêpes, latkes, tortillas, blini and other pancakes, skdadl, I've been very busy working, so I've just been looking in in a most cursory manner ... No time to look anything up.

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doesn't matter. If a person in a position of authority takes advantage (or attempts to take advantage) of a person over whom they wield authority, it's harassment.

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This is certainly 100% true in situations where one participant is underage, or where the power balance is overwhelming (such as a guard/prisoner), but universities don't necessarily have a policy with regard to adult students and instructors socializing or dating. The university I work at has had some noteworthy student/instructor romances, both Male/female and Female/male.

Interestingly enough, we also have two senior staff members who are married, even though He is subordinate to She. She's his direct manager. If what you say is universally true, they'd either have to divorce, or one of them resign. And yet despite the obvious power imbalance of a spouse who could fire you, they seem to make out OK.

http://makeashorterlink.com/?R2B232387

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Wolf said she had been asked by Yale to help raise money and said "I felt I had to tell them why I was reluctant to do so."
"I then had many conversations with Yale authorities over a period of recent months, telling my story, hoping for an off-the-record meeting to address my concerns about the school's grievance procedures. I got nowhere," Wolf said.
"Several distinguished women have come forward in my piece to attest to the fact that there is a systemic problem at Yale University," she said.
Wolf said she had been asked by Yale to help raise money and said "I felt I had to tell them why I was reluctant to do so."
"I then had many conversations with Yale authorities over a period of recent months, telling my story, hoping for an off-the-record meeting to address my concerns about the school's grievance procedures. I got nowhere," Wolf said.
"Several distinguished women have come forward in my piece to attest to the fact that there is a systemic problem at Yale University," she said.

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Let's see... Yale asks Wolf for help in raising money for them. They in turn refuse an off the record meeting regarding Yale's greivance procedure. I know I'd be telling the university where to go after that treatment. To turn a blind eye to abuses at Yale is the old boy's club way.
There's many ways to receive the short end of the stick in University, especially if you're in an area that is subjective such as the arts. If Wolf sleeps with the prof, she gets an A. A lay for an A. A low grade for refusing the sexual advance. This still goes on. Does it discredit the University when they ignore such allegations? Absolutely. Sexual harassment policies at Universities are no more than a bad joke.

But in this case, the student made what could arguably be considered "the first move" by creating a completely inappropriately intimate atmosphere. There is a difference between a professor approaching a student with the first move, and a student approaching the professor. The student is an adult and presumably, as an adult, understands what is appropriate and what is not in a teacher-student relationship. She made the conscious choice to cross that boundary by creating the atmosphere she did, and I think most reasonable people would be able to see where that atmosphere could be mistaken for one of romantic intention.

Inviting a professor over for a cozy twosome over candlelight, wine, and homemade dinner is not the same thing as wearing a short skirt to class, so your analogy is faulty, in my opinion. In the dinner situation, the atmosphere has been created directly for her tete-a-tete with the professor, whereas in the skirt situation, her decision to wear a short skirt is not directed at anyone in particular.

It's true that he also behaved in a way that was unprofessional. But so did she. She created the whole situation, and he went along with what he thought her intention was. He was mistaken, and he should have refused anyhow because you shouldn't get intimate with students. But I don't think there is a consent issue here, and therefore I do not consider it a sexual assault.

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"She is fully aware of what is on the statute, and she had no intention at all of bringing a claim against Harold Bloom."

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She was looking for some recognition of the harassment problem at Yale.

These kinds of attitudes keep victims of harassment silent. People may not think it's a big deal, but for many victims of harassment it can have lasting effects.

There is a lot of faculty control over university harassment policies, just because of the nature of university governance. While there is not total protection from frivolous or vexatious accusations, victims of harassment do have to go through a lot of hoops, so few of them actually do come forward.

I found a pretty good piece on harassment vs flirting on MUN's website.

check it out here

Faculty are not completely unwilling to address the problem of abuse of power. I got this from the MSVU website:

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A CODE OF ETHICS ON SEXUAL HARASSMENT: MODIFIED GUIDELINES. TAKEN FROM THE ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS

I.

a. Sexual harassment within academe is unethical, unprofessional and threatening to academic freedom and an individual's integrity. In the academic context, the term "sexual harassment" may be used to describe a wide range of behaviours. It includes, but is not limited to, the following: generalized sexists remarks or behaviour, whether in or out of the classroom; requests for sexual favours, sexual advances, whether sanction-free, linked to reward, or accompanied by threat of retaliations; the use of authority to emphasize the sexuality or sexual identity of a student or any other member of the university community, in a manner which prevents or impairs that individual's or the employee's right to full enjoyment of education benefits, climates or opportunities; and sexual assaults. Such behaviours are unacceptable because they are forms of unprofessional conduct which seriously undermine the atmosphere of trust essential to the academic enterprise.

b. the potential for sexual harassment is not limited to incidents involving members of the teaching profession and students. Use of asymmetric power by individuals, resulting in sexual harassment of colleagues or staff, is also unethical and unprofessional.

c. Further, it is unprofessional behaviour to condone sexual harassment or to disregard complaints of sexual harassment from students, staff of colleagues. Such actions allow a climate of sexual harassment to exist and seriously undermine the atmosphere of trust essential to the academic enterprise.

II. In addition to sexual harassment, amorous relationships that might be appropriate in other circumstances are inappropriate and should be avoided when they occur between members of the teaching profession and any student for whom he or she has a professional responsibility. Implicit in the idea of professionalism is the recognition by those in positions of authority that in their relationships with students there is always an element of power. It is incumbent upon members of the professional not to abuse, nor seem to abuse, the power with which they are entrusted, since relationships between members of the profession and students are always fundamentally asymmetric in nature. such relationships may have the effect of undermining the atmosphere of trust among students and faculty on which the educational process depends.

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I think it's insulting to women's intelligence to claim that an adult woman doesn't have the sense to know what is inappropriate behaviour in a working relationship with a professor. I knew at 20, and I'll bet you did too. And yeah, if it was a friend of mine who told me she had created such an atmosphere in anticipation of an evening spent with a male professor, and then couldn't figure out why he would get the impression that she was interested in him romantically, I would, as gently as possible, tell her to feel her head.

While I was working on my honours thesis, my advisor was a fairly cute male prof, but I always met him either in his office with the door open, or out at a campus coffee shop or something. Even the few times we sat out on the lawn I was really careful to not let on in any way even that I thought he was cute, or to do anything at all remotely ambiguous.

The reason I think student-professor relationships are unethical is because, even if the student entered into the relationship fully willingly, there is a dynamic there that might make it difficult to sever the relationship if they no longer wish to be in it. And I don't believe there should even be the appearance of impropriety when it comes to evaluation of a student's work. It's just as possible that a professor might not feel he or she can give the student a deserved low mark or a deserved high mark, depending on how the relationship is going.

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The reason I think student-professor relationships are unethical is because, even if the student entered into the relationship fully willingly, there is a dynamic there that might make it difficult to sever the relationship if they no longer wish to be in it. And I don't believe there should even be the appearance of impropriety when it comes to evaluation of a student's work. It's just as possible that a professor might not feel he or she can give the student a deserved low mark or a deserved high mark, depending on how the relationship is going.

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http://makeashorterlink.com/?N1EB61687

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Is Harold Bloom a bad man? No. Harold Bloom’s demons are no more demonic than those of any other complex human being’s. Does this complex, brilliant man’s one bad choice make him a monster? No, of course not; nor does this one experience make me a “victim.” But the current discourse of accused and accuser, aggressor and victim is more damaging than constructive.

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Does this complex, brilliant man’s one bad choice make him a monster?

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Good grief. She makes the guy a nice romantic candlelit dinner, he makes the mistake of thinking it's a nice romantic candlelit dinner, he touches her once and leaves, never to touch her again.

Twenty years later she decides to claim (but never prove) this, and write some magazine articles about it, but at she's generous enough to concede that he's not a monster.

The professor shouldn't have touched her thigh, she probably shouldn't have invited him to dinner.

The thing is she has gone on to be quite successful despite this.

[ 26 February 2004: Message edited by: Rufus Polson ]

I apologize, vickyinottawa, for not supporting your statement of principle more strongly. These stories, especially those from other women -- named, except for one -- assaulted or harrassed more recently at Yale illustrate well the need for such principles.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Um. I just read the article. To me, it changes things considerably -- it certainly changes my judgement.

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Huh. Me too. They certainly described the situation a lot differently than that original article did. I was FULLY wrong.

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Bloom agreed to meet with me weekly. At my adviser’s suggestion, he wrote me a letter of reference for my Rhodes Scholarship application. Then I could not get a meeting with him. The semester was slipping away. When I saw him on campus, he would promise to go over my poetry manuscript “over a glass of Amontillado.” I’d heard that some faculty met with students at Mory’s, and that Bloom drank often with his male students there. I also knew that there was an atmosphere at Yale in which female students were expected to be sociable with male professors. I had discussed with my friends the pressure to be charming but still seen as serious.

Finally, Bloom suggested that he come to the house I shared with one of his editorial assistants and her boyfriend. At dinnertime. I agreed.

The four of us ate a meal. He had, as promised, brought a bottle of Amontillado, which he drank continually. I also drank. We had set out candles—a grown-up occasion. The others eventually left and—finally!—I thought we could discuss my poetry manuscript. I set it between us. He did not open it. He did not look at it. He leaned toward me and put his face inches from mine. “You have the aura of election upon you,” he breathed.

I hoped he was talking about my poetry. I moved back and took the manuscript and turned it around so he could read.

The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.

I lurched away. “This is not what I meant,” I stammered. The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He moved toward me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting. Bloom disappeared.

When he reemerged—from the bedroom with his coat—a moment later, I was still frozen, my back against the sink. He said: “You are a deeply troubled girl.” Then he went to the table, took the rest of his sherry, corked the bottle, and left.

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I had assumed that such cases were all in the distant past, but then I received a call from a lawyer called Cynthia Powell. In 1992, she was an American Studies graduate student and a law student. Powell says that one of her tenured professors assaulted her sexually. The professor asked her to dinner, she said, with himself and a dean. At the last minute, she was told the dean could not come. After dinner, he insisted they have a drink at his pied-à-terre nearby, and she had one glass of wine. He started making advances; she resisted, saying “No, no” several times, but then started experiencing blackouts. When she regained intermittent consciousness, she says, he had removed her clothes and penetrated her.
Deeply traumatized, Powell had her bruises documented at the hospital. She also called the police, but was made to feel there would be no point in bringing a criminal charge against someone she knew. “But I filed a grievance at Yale. Immediately, they brought in the university’s counsel. I was not allowed to have a lawyer there. Because I am an attorney, I understand that their principal concern was litigation. Their attorney said to me several times: ‘We are really glad you are not going to make a crusade about this.’
“The committee said he was tenured, so they couldn’t just terminate him. Off the record, the university’s attorney told me they wanted quietly to push him out. I didn’t know why it had to be ‘quietly.’
“They said he’d been ‘careless,’ ‘reckless.’ They didn’t want to use the word rape.”
Powell says she was never given a copy of the report and was able to read it only by going to a specified room where it was kept in a drawer. A few months later, the professor resigned and was promptly hired by another university. According to Powell, Yale offered her $30,000, which she rejected.

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Nothing about the experiences in the article surprises me. It's probably just the tip of the iceberg.I wish the universities would take out of their mission statements the flowery crap about how they value students and believe in treating them with respect blah,blah,blah.

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If a Yale undergraduate came to me today with a bad secret to tell, I still could not urge her to speak up confidently to those tasked with educating, supporting, and mentoring her. I would not direct her to her faculty adviser, the grievance committee, or her dean. Wishing that Bart Giamatti’s beautiful welcoming speech to my class about Yale’s meritocracy were really true, I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman, for her own protection, to get a good lawyer.

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Years ago, when we first moved to Toronto so that Mrs. M. could do her M.A. at UofT, she encountered a professor who took a more than unhealthy interest in her. He never touched her, so he still has all of his teeth, but he certainly created a poisoned environment for her.
Informally, she found out that she wasn't the first female student who'd had this experience with this guy. There were many. The school had been made aware of his actions, but since he never crossed any unambiguous lines (such as touching, or inappropriate e-mails or voicemails), nothing ever came of it.

P.S. That really sucks what happened to your partner. I didn't notice any philandering between students and professors while I was at Queen's, but then I wouldn't notice because most of the students were a decade younger than me, so I wouldn't have been privy to the grapevine.

[ 27 February 2004: Message edited by: Michelle ]

When Mrs. M. was struggling with what to do about the Prof that was making her feel like puking, she considered blowing the whistle, but realized there wasn't really much she could say. Everything happened in private, and everything could be interpreted one of two ways. His harrassment was like a double entendre: interpret it one way and it's innocent, interpret it another and it's smutty.

The University later had to deal with harassment complaints from the graduate student when the professor gave her a failing mark. After the University had dealt with it, it was also processed by the BC Human Rights Tribunal:

http://www.bchrt.bc.ca/down/decisions_1999/mahmoodi_vs_ubc_and_dutton_oct_26_99.pdf

This report is over 90 pages and goes into a lot of detail on how the university and the police all tried to get to the bottom of this thing. It wasn't easy. There were even technical issues of the type you'd expect to see in a TV show. The professor's stereo equipment had accidentally recorded the audio portion of the scholarly encounter, and that all had to be figured out.

A major complicating factor was that the complainant was a known liar from other contexts. Could she be believed in this case? At the same time, the professor's story was a long way from adding up to its own totals either.

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Originally posted by HeywoodFloyd:
Magoo, I'm impressed you didn't give that prof an excuse for rhinoplasty or orthodontic enhancements. I'm a little too neanderthalic to let that pass without some intense, personal discussions with the letch. Just ask Mrs. F.

She had a creep leering at her at her when she was in occupational therapy. One quiet discussion, in which I politely pointed out that the therapist could be making a lot more money off him in the very near future, and the offender took up the habit of leaving the room when the missus entered.

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A textbook example of Albertan interpersonal skills,...which are, as we all know, precisely modelled on the Texas Examplar.

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Originally posted by Erik Pool:
A textbook example of Albertan interpersonal skills,...

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Edited to add

Wait until Erik figures out that I grew up in BC. That mirror will look a whole lot different.

[ 15 July 2004: Message edited by: HeywoodFloyd ]

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Originally posted by Hinterland:
The abuse of power is a profoundly vulgar thing.

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Does that include the abuse of personal, physical power, by a younger, stronger man assaulting an older, weaker man? Or for that matter, a man his own age, who just isn't as large or strong as himself, one who has spent his life in the world of books, not the gridiron?

How would you extend this to bullying in the schoolyard? Do you not find it a bit strange that most kids who are being "bullied" in school, that is assaulted, perhaps injured, do not see themselves as victims of crime, but just as failures and weaklings who cannot successfully defend themselves, unlike their action heros on TV?

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Originally posted by HeywoodFloyd:
And a good GFYS to you too.

Edited to add

Wait until Erik figures out that I grew up in BC. That mirror will look a whole lot different.

[ 15 July 2004: Message edited by: HeywoodFloyd ]

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What does GFYS stand for?

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Originally posted by Erik Pool:
What does GFYS stand for?

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Originally posted by clearview:

Ask Paul Martin, it's what he told all the Chretien supporters to do.

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And isn't it refreshing to learn that in the socialist paradise of the Babblers everyone is well beyond that kind of primitive thinking?

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Critics of sexual-harassment standards argue that you can’t legislate passions; true enough. But you can legislate what to do about people who act on them improperly. Powerful men and woman who belittle and humiliate their subordinates manage not to belittle or humiliate their supervisors. Neither men nor women tend to harass upward in a hierarchy.

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Certainly it won't stop everything by everyone, but there might be more than a few professors who suddenly have to consider the possibility that the student they're harrassing might be gathering some irrefutable, inflammatory evidence that will see them unemployed, divorced and disgraced. It might also be empowering for the harrassee to know that they can do something concrete and credible to put an end to the harrassment.

On a similar but different note, tenants in our building been disturbed by some late-night demolition going on in the building beside us (a company called verity.ca is building an indoor swimming pool for an exclusive women's club). The contractor doesn't have a permit to extend the work hours past 7pm, but the work had been going on until 2 or 3 in the morning, and consisted of dropping industrial waste from a 3rd story building into a large dumpster. Attempts to get them to stop were met with obfuscation and disrespect, and we didn't know what more to do. Then we started photographing them. Every time. When the trucks arrived, they got photographed. When the dumping began, they got photographed. Every time we heard them we'd either take some photos (or pop a large flashgun to make them believe we were). Once they realized that this wouldn't be "he said she said" anymore they started to take us seriously. As long as it was our word against theirs they were willing to take their chances, but once we had proof, they backed right down.

Depending on the cirstance there can be other motives. Revenge, peer pressure, booze/drugs, horniness, fear, lack of confedence in ones masculinity, stupidity, guilt, insanity, despration, love/obsession(kind of goes with insanity), the danger, not paying attention.

[ 16 July 2004: Message edited by: Rev. Phoenix ]

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Originally posted by Rev. Phoenix:
Saying all rape is about power, is like saying all murder is about money.

Depending on the cirstance there can be other motives. Revenge, peer pressure, booze/drugs, horniness, fear, lack of confedence in ones masculinity, stupidity, guilt, insanity, despration, love/obsession(kind of goes with insanity), the danger, not paying attention.

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Regarding your first point, I don't think the analogy is accurate at all - indeed, your list of other motives supports power as the driving force.

Revenge is about power, about making someone pay. Peer pressure is also about power, about showing others that you have power/that you're not powerless. Booze/drugs never made anyone do anything - they might remove the inhibition against it that you'd have if you were sober, but they don't themselves cause rape.

Horniness? People who are horny go home and masturbate or hire a prostitute, they don't force someone else against their will. How is it satisfying to fuck an unwilling partner?

I'm not sure what you mean by fear so I can't address that - I don't know what kind of fear would cause someone to commit rape. Lack of confidence in one's masculinity, however, is also about power: demonstrating to a woman/to himself that he's man enough to "have" her/make her submit to his desire.

Stupidity, guilt, insanity, desperation: while stupid, guilty, insane and desperate people may well commit rape, I don't think those are causal (perhaps insanity...I'm not well-versed in mental illnesses that prompt violence).

That love and obsession are linked is a little sad. Why would someone ever rape someone that they loved? Rape is painful and degrading, not things that you want to make your beloved feel. Obsession, on the other hand, might factor in but again, I believe that obsession hinges on power, the notion that if the lover can't have the beloved, then no one will, the desire to control the beloved, to have the beloved submit to the lover's will.

I might concede a little on your point about the danger; someone might somehow find it exciting to get away with a violent act. But isn't that too about power, about committing a wrong and escaping retribution because one is so powerful that no one can touch them?

And not paying attention? To what? To the other person saying "no, I don't want to do this"? And isn't ignoring someone a way of having power over them? Of refusing to acknowledge their rights as a person?

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Originally posted by Rev. Phoenix:
This whole sexual harrassment and sexual assualt problem is very serious.

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Personally, I think it's very much yesterday's issue. The real prevalence of this kind of thing reached a peak in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Boomers had just reached adulthood and were convinced that with the "sexual revolution", they were entitled to a certain amount of sex. If it wasn't materializing, they figured it was OKay to use a bit of coercion to fill the gap.

In today's world, I think it's a rarity, at least among "good employers". In situations in the service industry, bars, nite clubs, restaurants, where you still have a youth-dominated work force, and one that has been pre-selected on factors such as looks, there may still be an ongoing issue due to the overall climate of the workplace.

[ 17 July 2004: Message edited by: Erik Pool ]

It was boomer women who put the brakes on that kind of shit, although anyone who thinks they stopped it entirely is too naive and protected to be true.

Further:

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In today's world, I think it's a rarity, at least among "good employers". In situations in the service industry, bars, nite clubs, restaurants, where you still have a youth-dominated work force, and one that has been pre-selected on factors such as looks, there may still be an ongoing issue due to the overall climate of the workplace.

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