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If I woke up tomorrow to discover that during the night I’d transformed somehow into a woman I would buy a gun before I had breakfast.
I’m being completely serious, and this is when I lose most people because what I’ve just said is funny and they’re distracted because they’re laughing.
I know this discussion is a strange one to be having, but when I look at the statistics showing the number of both rapes and attempted rapes in this country I profoundly wish two things. Firstly and most profoundly, I wish that ignorance, and the savagery it promotes could be eradicated from the earth, and, recognizing that wish to be hopeless, I instead fervently wish that the majority of women owned guns.
One The FBI estimates that 58% of women report when they are raped. Forty-four percent then obviously do not. When the estimated number of unreported rapes is added to the number of rapes that were reported, the numbers apparently say that one out of four women will either be raped or will have to fight off or otherwise escape a rape attempt.
I think some men have a tendency to dismiss this issue because in most circumstances the incidence of men raping men are far lower than men raping women.
But I can’t even imagine how awful it would be to have to recover from such a thing. I would feel stripped of will and dignity, violated in a fundamental way. If I were ever raped, it would become the central event of my life for quite a while. I would spend all of my time wondering what I could have done differently to avoid being in whatever situation I’d been in. I would wonder if once I’d seen my rapist and understood what was going on, could I have fought harder to avoid being raped.
I have a feeling that lots of people reading this might find the above slightly repulsive because you’ve never thought about what being raped would do to you on a psychological level, and there is no reason to wonder. Rape fucks you up, it breaks you, at least for a while.
. The ideal solution is to somehow discover what it is that makes people rape, and the act is so breathtakingly cruel that I know it cannot be motivated much by sex.
I’ve been thinking about my hole if I were a girl I’d buy a gun thing for a while. Primarily because I said it when it popped into my head, but I wasn’t kidding and most people thought I was.
I tell people, and they don’t get where I’m coming from.
My thinking goes like this. We can’t eliminate rapists, and men are stronger than women. These two facts result in a highly unfortunate chain of events far too often. The solution. women should buy guns.
There are some who would say that if my solution were to be taken seriously then we would have more guns in this country. If we have more guns in this country, we will probably have more murders in this country. And further they will say that you will have murders even if the guns women buy are used to fight off rapists.
They are correct, but I except it as the price to pay for a much lower incidence of rape.
The issue is one of physical makeup. There have been times in my life where I was worried for my safety because the people around me were obviously stronger, faster and in the hole more vicious than I was, but for the most part I’m pretty secure. I don’t ever imagine an assault to be coming, I never worry, for instance, that some crazy unwashed fiend craving a fix is going to shiv me and steal my wallet as I’m in the middle of doing something perfectly normal on an average day. Nor do A thousand scenario’s a great deal more likely trouble me at all. I don’t worry about sudden death all that often either which I recognize to be a privilege of living in a good area.
But women who live in similarly well off areas don’t have that protection, as to my mind rape is one of the five or six things that can happen to you which is not as bad as death but is just a touch better.
No one seems bothered by this. No one I see every day says to me, “Jason, one out of four women is either raped or has to beat the hell out of some moral degenerate to avoid getting raped.” And I feel like people should be upset enough to talk about it a lot more frequently.
It took me a long time to figure out why I was suddenly so furious about this issue whereas before today I was upset about it only when someone brought rape up, but had otherwise been able to go through my life not thinking about it at all. What I realized, and I hope this doesn’t strike very many of my readers as profound is that I would never rape anyone.
I just have never contemplated it and I don’t get how people do.
I’ve gone through dry spells, and I’ve had friends who’ve gone through dry spells, and none of those guys has ever said to me, “Hey, its been a while since I’ve gotten laid, I think I’ll just rape someone, relieve some of that no sex tension.”
People don’t do that which shows you that we judge rapists harshly within society. I believe that I would turn my father and male friends in for rape instantly while with murder I’d give them that minute to explain themselves.
But yet, rape itself is the evidence that some people think rape is ok, and I think it would be permissible for people attempting rape to be shot if that’s the only way to get them to back off.
That is not overkill, its a fair exchange of force. If rape is devastating emotionally, if it takes years to fully recover from, then surely the use of a firearm to prevent rape cannot be excessive. If you were given a choice to let a rapist either die, or rape a girl and live, you would want him to die. Similarly, it isn’t as though we might threaten a rapist with the simultaneous threat of rape to discourage him from his per suits, which would, in a strange and twisted world be the most fair solution.
So because we cannot stop rapists from attempting to inflict there vileness on others, and because men are stronger than women, they need to buy guns, learn how to shoot those guns, and respond to the threat of rape with gunfire.
I have begun to think of attempted rape as a type of arms race. Its been played out before, in the context of nation building and the constant quest for dominance within the international arena.
Look at any conflict between two groups of people and it usually comes down to arms. The native Americans that we decimated to found our country were not less intelligent people than the European colonists that killed them, they were simply weaker, and that weakness was mainly one of technology. To quickly sum up, Europeans had guns and had been using them for a long time, whereas native Americans, while quickly adapting to guns, could not make up the deficit in the proficiency with them fast enough to prevent all of there societies from being ground into the dirt of history.
Look at any conflict and it is usually the more violent faction that ultimately wins it. I know there are exceptions to this rule, the mostly peaceful protests in Egypt, and Gandhi’s campaign to free India, and Martin Luther King’s nonviolent protests to make real the promises laid out in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, but the only reason these nonviolent approaches worked was because the world was watching and forced to talk about what it was seeing, it was further forced to admit violence and savagery when it saw it, as apposed to being allowed to ignore it which is what happens when wars are fought in private, for lack of a better word.
The real problem is that women have to be ok gut shooting someone who is attempting to rape them, and here is where I think we might run into some trouble.
I know that if I owned a gun, which I do not, and was in a situation where I thought I was going to be raped, I’d shoot someone to prevent it. I’d shoot him in the stomach or the leg if I could, and if that didn’t seem like enough I’d shoot him in the head. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to do that without much reflection during, and without all that much guilt afterwards.
But it is the hesitation to kill or mame that would, I suspect, be most women’s undoing in this situation.
I can’t know for sure, and trying to predict is only stereotyping, but I take as evidence that buying a gun to prevent rape is not a solution that is complex. It didn’t take me hours of careful thinking to come up with. I just thought that if I had to contend with rape, I’d buy a gun.
The fact that the vast majority of women haven’t done this already is the worry I’m left with, as stopping rapists from doing what they are somehow predisposed to do is basically impossible.
I look at the steps women have taken to prevent rape, and I am skeptical. Rape whistles and self-defense classes.
As to the latter, the commitment that it takes to get good at self-defense is a large one of time and physical conditioning.
Its one thing to tell someone that the way to discourage a rapist is to stomp on his instep, breaking small bones in his feet, or it is to kick him in the testicles, rendering him helpless, and its another thing entirely to expect a person, in the heat of what is in essence the first fight for her life, to remember to do such a thing, and once remembering, to have the ware with all to pull it off successfully.
I’ve never had to fight someone who was twice as strong as me. I’ve wrestled people my strength, in the type of fights young men engage in for fun, not quite serious things that are more about testing each other than anything else, and I’ll tell you the obvious truth, that fighting someone exactly my strength for any length of time is tiring work. Fighting someone half again as strong as I am would be almost impossible. I’m not saying that it is a fight that I would lose right away, I like to think if put in such a position I wouldn’t do so badly, but I’ve also been thinking on and off about the most efficient ways of hurting people for a long time, against the day when I’ll actually have to do it.
But most people, I believe, do not spend free moments picturing fights so as to be prepared to have them, and a physical confrontation that you have not prepared for is one you will probably lose.
Moving on to rape whistles.
I think rape whistles are retarded. I wouldn’t go running if I heard one, I’d just think, oh, someone’s blowing a whistle, and I’d continue doing whatever I was doing.
If I were trying to rob someone and they stopped to blow a whistle, I’d hit them in the stomach as they raised a hand to blow it, and that’d be that.
Similarly, things like mace aren’t enough of a deterrent. If I were maced in the face, I’m sure I’d be in terrible pain, but pain is a matter of willpower to ignore, and if I were determined enough I suspect that I could fight my way through mace.
So we’re left with a knife or gun. Guns seem the obvious solution, as they do the most to equalize, if not to entirely invert, the physical disparity between men and women.
I would never rape anyone, but if in some crazy world I was faced with the choice of going after someone with a gun verses someone without a gun, the choice would be such an obvious one that I really don’t have to tell you which I’d choose.
We need to face the fact that our mild sanctions are not enough to prevent rapists from raping. Attempted rapists don’t always get life in prison, an oversight so monstrous that I refuse to contemplate it for very long.
Women owning guns, and knowing how to shoot them effectively, would change the face of the cost and rewards of rape. The cost is now a six in ten shot of being reported, and, unless I miss my mark, a very low probability of being seriously injured or killed while attempting to rape someone. Both of these things depress me.
How many people knowingly try and rob a navy seal? Not that many. And while it is of course unrealistic to assume that all women will put fourth the effort to transform themselves into instant killing machines, it is not unrealistic for women to take an eight week class on how to blow someone’s brains out of the back of his skull, and stay in the state of readiness that would allow them to pose a serious threat to anyone that tried to rape them.
It is fucked up, but raping women and hitting women are similar. I’d never hit a girl, either, I shouldn’t even have to point that out, but its important for this discussion. I probably wouldn’t randomly hit another guy, either.
But my mindset for why I won’t do both these things is different. I won’t swing at random women because they are weaker than I am, they have not been raised to take a punch and come back swinging, and attacking someone who will typically put up such a poor defense feels so deeply unsporting and unfair that I’ve never seriously contemplated seeing how it actually felt.
I won’t try and punch men because it would instantly turn into a fight. I suspect that if I walked up to the next dude I saw and hit him in the face, he’d try and hit me back, and I don’t want to get into a fight.
Its important to note the differences in motive here. One is a choice motivated by civilization and one is a choice motivated by the fear of getting hurt in return.
I wouldn’t fear for my safety, striking a woman, whereas I would if I struck a man. This needs to change if we really want equality.
I recognize that it shouldn’t have to change, I believe that physical strength is decreasing in importance the further we get from the savagery that once surrounded us, but at the same time I know that savagery will not be wiped out of our culture in my lifetime, and that requires adaptation.
I have been going on about this at some length, and I think its time to rap this up.
Women need to become more physically threatening, and the easiest way for them to do that is to learn to use firearms. They need to become more threatening because once some do, the perception will be that most are threats. Rapists will not rape so cavalierly if they suspect that most women carry guns and will use them if threatened.