vanna,

It is no concern of mine whether you believe it or not - in the '70's, during my primary school years, I used to join in with the boys to play cricket - why is that so unbelievable? The boys let me play because I had the skills to match them - it was the teaching staff at the behest of the patriarchal system who enforced the punishment.....in any case I was using my experience to make a broader point.

And you've hit upon the crux of the argument - one to which Squeers alluded. Wouldn't it be wonderful if women shunned the status quo and instead put their efforts into moving humanity toward a more sustainable and authentic human experience...

Vanna,
I'm an autodidact. I left school barely literate at 14 and from sheer insecurity began a thirty year course of undirected reading from the Western canon and various other obscure texts, often recommended by the author I happened to be reading. I blush to tell you my GPA; but it was easy, you mostly just give them the puerile assessment they want.
Universities are not turning out radicals, more's the pity.
You'll be delighted to learn that I'm currently teaching two Literature courses (think of all those minds I get to pollute!), but that the students are compliant little bah-lambs, looking to get slotted into the system and not interested in critical thinking.
In any case, the Humanities are largely given over to Business, economics and suchlike, and it doesn't get more conservative than that!

You should read Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" and "A Room of One's Own", wherein she argues that women have rarely had the "opportunity" to create, and in any case have been systematically expurgated from subsequent canons. This is true. Take the important English Romantics: six men. Yet women of the time were far more prolific, popular, and indeed published. There names were simply not included in the canon that's been handed down to posterity, by men! On the down side, the female Romantics were conservative then too, whereas the men were were mostly radicals.
Read Camille Paglia, she's a feminist who acknowledges man's achievements. You seem to begrudge acknowledging women for anything, yet they've had to make the best of it with a well-nigh psychopathic maledom in order to follow their programming and keep the generations rolling along.
I know it sounds like cliches, but women are only just emerging from male oppression (mostly psychological), and only in the West, though unfortunately they seem mainly content, so far, with equality in terms of conspicuous indulgence.
Women have the voting power, what they need are some visionaries and an utterly "alternative" agenda.

This article sounds awfully like victim-blaming rape apologism. Women don't need to take responsibility for being raped. Men need to take responsibility for raping. I don't know why this is so hard to understand. If a drunk man got raped by a man, would his conduct come into scrutiny?

Pelican and Suze

I would suggest that "she asked for it" or "deserves to be raped" are your interpretation of other people's words, not their actual words. Your choice to interpret their words in this way says more about you than about others.

Ema, you are absolutely right :)

Poirot <"There is no equivalent men's movement because they have always run the show - and they continue to do so. Feminism has only ever sought to co-opt itself into the existing paradigm. The game hasn't changed at all."

Quite possibly this is the most insightful comment on this thread Poirot, as far as I am concerned :)

I too am of the opinion that the vast majority of women already take responsibility for their own safety and actions.
There are many women who are elderly and raped in their own homes. Nothing they did 'encouraged' their rapists.

Nothing ANYONE does, or doesn't do, should lead to rape.

Women don't need a lesson in morals (religious overtones?) in a misguided quest to stamp out rape.

We need to stop (castrate?) the violent men (the very FEW men that have these tendencies) from raping women in the first place.

Let's not blame the victims :

suzeonline, you quote Poirot <"There is no equivalent men's movement because they have always run the show - and they continue to do so. Feminism has only ever sought to co-opt itself into the existing paradigm. The game hasn't changed at all."

Feminism's biggest mistake was to focus on co-opting itself into the existing paradigm, The existing paradigm on the whole is a failure. The game will never change as long as we cling to the existing paradigm. The whole point of radical feminism was to change the paradigm but that didn't work.

And if you continue to read my article and my comments in the forum as holding a rape victim, male or female, responsible for the attack on them, I can only conclude that you are so resistant to hearing what I'm actually saying that I could say it for eternity and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to your position.

I have nowhere suggested that anybody "encourages" a rapist. I have referred to a specific set of circumstances, raised because of McFadden's stupid song, of young women getting blind drunk and being sexually assaulted, and said that we need to teach them to take responsibility for their drinking and how that affects their safety because nobody else can do that.

From that you've concluded that I blame grandmothers for their own rape.
Do you feel good about manipulating my words to achieve such a vile conclusion?