I’m not saying that date rape doesn’t happen – it does. And often. But prevention and holding both parties responsible would reduce those rapes better than litigation.

Prevention includes teaching men that being a man includes a lot of duty and renunciation and teaching women that being a woman includes a lot of self-respect and discretion. Both need to try to understand human nature rather than assuming that men are, as Shannon puts it, “chronically immature, impulsive, driven by base desire etc” They don’t have to be.

With most good laws, it’s easy to prove that someone was harmed. Either there’s a body, or someone’s gone missing, or someone’s property has gone missing, or someone’s got some injuries that were clearly caused by human attack, or something along those lines. Usually, if you can’t find someone who you can prove has been harmed, that a good sign that the law ought to be junked.

Except in the case of “date rape”. The act is exactly the same as consensual sex, except that it was done over the objection of one of the participants; all forensic evidence is identical in both cases, but only one is (or should be) a crime. And of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases, there are no witnesses other than the two participants, one of whom will lie.

In programming, you often come across a piece of code that does not appear to belong there; careful examination reveals not the slightest clue what it’s doing there. And then, when you remove it or change it, the whole application breaks, which sometimes lets you know what its ultimate purpose was.

So it is with the rules of society. They are rarely commented, and over time the people that remember what they’re for die without telling anyone. Then we remove them, and find weird stuff breaking, and discover again what they’re for.

Not that we should just leave well enough alone forever. Sometimes, you have to break the code, and rewrite it the right way, in order to improve the app or add functionality, or fix whatever problem motivated you to dig into the source code in the first place. And some rules of society clearly need to be discarded, and other solutions for whatever purpose they were serving found.

The rape problem is a side effect of privacy, which is itself a work-around for the phenomenon of ever-expanding government. If you limit the ability of the government to see what people are up to, you limit its ability to enforce laws that never should be written in the first place. Unfortunately, there are a few laws (such as those against date-rapeO) that should be enforced that can’t be properly enforced in the presence of strong privacy rights. Better lie detectors would be a good patch to add here, once they come into existence. Other than that, I can’t think of a good solution.

I’m reminded of the time I was in a mosque in Cairo. My host explained to me that the men stood in front of the women during prayer because if it was the other way around, the men’s thoughts would not fully be on Allah. That’s all good and well, and if that helps with the devotion of the followers, great, but I certainly can see how that might contribute to a worldview that holds women inferior as a consequence, intended or not.

Leaving the issue at the social level, however, and perhaps prompting a dialogue might engender some kind of informal change in attitude, or perhaps attitude shift in society. Because I definitely don’t want to be thrown in the hoosegow and labelled a rapist because I got liquored, had a one night stand, and forgot to use a condom. (Although if my college efforts at attempting to get liquored and have one night stands is anything to go by, I’d have nothing to worry about.)

One of my husband’s specialties is men’s studies – Victorian. I do think they had a sense of both what could be destructive about human nature and how it could become, still being itself, something quite good.

One of the problems I see with a lot of the cultural attitudes about masculinity as portrayed in popular culture is the idea that men are chronically immature, impulsive, driven by base desire etc. There seems to be the expectation that men will not restrain themselves whether the desire is sexual, gastronomic or technological. I worry about the image of masculinity that my son gets. How will these ideas affect his self-restraint when he is older?

Masculinity used to be all about self-restraint. Men were trained not to give into emotion, to view themselves as providers and protectors, and to tend to their responsibilities first and foremost. The traditional male archetype might have been a dominating jerk but he was responsible dominating jerk.

I think traditional culture spent so much time training men up that way because men who did not think of themselves in such a manner became major problems.

I can’t think that generation of men trained since childhood to consider themselves creatures of impulse will make for a safe date.

Society has spent thousands of years developing codes of chivalry and definitions of being a “man”–many of them designed to channel that old desire to kill one another into more useful channels (and thereby, of course, saving women a lot of grief). What they did to encumber women was less restrictive–though partially because we were, I suspect, less of a handful. Of course, it was men’s energy (and combativeness) that needed to be controlled. And, of course, keeping it in the banks, it roared with energy and propelled the dynamo of western civilization. As men stopped killing each other, they were able to spend their time more profitably building roads and inventing trains, exploring and discovering and thinking and, well, probably even writing.

We’ve swept away, well some, of a civilization’s common sense and are surprised at what we found. In the sixties and seventies, we scoffed at all the old notions. But, today, with three daughters, I think those old pretty weak pieces of advice (like don’t get drunk on your first date, for God’s sake, and it isn’t a great idea to go to a stranger’s hotel room) had validity. Of course, those suggestions assumed that men were pretty rowdy, pretty aggressive, pretty hard to control (both by themselves and by women). And, of course, men were taught that a real man would never take advantage of a drunken woman, would never take advantage, indeed, of naivete.

Although most Feminist would violently disagree, I think that much traditional morality focused on controlling destructive masculine behavior. The mechanisms that evolved more often than not used females to accomplish the goal but the driving concern was violent or irresponsible behavior on the part of men.

I think a lot the “criminalization of the Y-Chromosome” springs from the need to rebuild the restraints that traditional culture placed on men but this time using formal law.

When Y chromosomes are outlawed, only rapists will have Y chromosomes — by legal definition.