I apologize if I am not great at articulating my curiosity.
If women share in being sexually intrigued by a stranger's physical features, it seems hypocritical to fault men for doing it.
I am bewildered that sexual desire based solely on physical features is considered rapey.
Fair enough. And, just to be clear, I'm
not suggesting you are rapist...
I'm making an important point about male language and mindset towards women.
Bottom line, you're not a woman. You haven't had a lifetime of experiences like being whistled at, told you've got a nice arse/rack, randomly chatted up by men you aren't in the least bit interested in. That's kinda on what we might euphemistically term the "softer end" of male behaviour. Look at the underlying stats and it's depressing; every
10 minutes, somewhere in the world, an adolescent girl dies as a result of violence. Nearly one in five girls is
sexually abused at least once in her life. In the United States,
18 percent of girls report that by age 17 they have been victims of a sexual assault or abuse at the hands of another adolescent. That's nearly 1 in 5. That's quite a lot.
So with these general conditions - and you might reasonably say, "
I'm not like that!" - we must look at the way men think, what they say and why they think this kind of behaviour is acceptable. There is a loooong history of men using, abusing, owning women and there is a collective memory of that dominance.
It is often considered fair game for men to pass comment on a woman's looks or discuss who you'd like to fuck. It's an early building block in a train of thought that reduces women to their body parts or sex organs and says
That is not really a person, that is something I want.
It's all on a spectrum, not a healthy one, and a spectrum that doesn't view women as equals or partner but as things.
So begin at the beginning and challenge that kind of behaviour and language when you see it in your friends, co-workers, whoever. It's wrong.
