Brain Fertilizer

Okay, this is pretty much just a message to the guys. I know it may piss off some female readers, but them's the breaks.

Over at Kausfiles, Mickey quotes this anecdote:

[Sen. John] Tower, who was a friend of my father, had attempted to sexually assault me when I was 18 and a college freshman. Embarrassed and ashamed, I had kept this story a closely guarded secret for years.

Do you think she knew the words "sexual assault" when she was 18? That sure sounds like a cognate (if I'm using the word correctly) introduced more recently. Say, in the mid-90s, when it began to be okay for a female who regretted consensual sex to claim "date rape", and to treat such accusations as a convictable offense.

However, as the bio I link mentions, he died in 1991 in a plane crash...so he can't defend himself at all. She can, so I'd like to actually explore a little bit what I think happened.

She says he "attempted sexual assault". Well, "sexual assault", if I understand correctly, is the way you describe "attempted rape". So since he only attempted a sexual assault, she is literally saying that he attempted to attempt to force sex on her. That means he didn't actually succeed in trying to force sex on her, right? Chaining that together, it is pretty clear that he made an unwelcome advance, and she said no, and he desisted. She might have had to say no 2-3 times, but by her own words, he didn't actually sexually assault her. But she couches it in terms of criminal behavior.

Senator Tower, being a Senator, had power. Our society (and biology?) has developed so that women generally exhibit attraction to a man with power, and younger women sometimes exhibit attraction to older men. As I'm fond of pointing out, one of my favorite quotes ever was this exchange between female co-workers at a restaurant:

girl 1: Is he...attractive? girl 2 (17-years-old): Atractive? He's 27!

And none of the other girls within earshot reacted, which says something.

So here's the point. Guys want sex, for the most part. It's the way we are wired. But biology is not destiny. If you concentrate on it and work at it, you can move past your more base instincts.

And it would be to your benefit to turn off your focus on sex. For multiple reasons.

First, you don't get in trouble with your SO for girl-gazing.
Second, you don't get in trouble because light flirting with another woman turns into something too serious.
Third, you don't have your body writing checks your heart can't cash (as in, how many guys are in a committed relationship because of the method recounted in this post?).
Fourth, you don't end up mis-interpreting a young girl's admiration as something sexual, and so don't end up having someone make accusations of you attempting a sexual assault.

Even though Senator Tower is dead and can't defend himself, this is the sort of accusation in which what the female feels is much more important that what actually happened. But if you try to defend yourself (or someone else) by saying so, you are castigated and shouted down for having the gall to blame the victim...even if what you are trying to do is question whether she actually is a victim at all. A staggering number of women actually do deliberately lie about these sort of things for their own advantage. An additional staggering number of women are able to convince themselves (each other?) that it did happen so that no longer is a deliberate lie.

Since, under the current societal standards, you can't actually use those last two points to defend yourself, if you find yourself in that situation, you are screwed...just not in the way you had originally hoped. It is better by far to just train yourself to not think about or care about sex outside of a marriage.

I know this is not a popular message, even among Christians these days. But the simple fact is: you will have a far happier, content, successful, and peaceful life if you follow the 10 Commandments to the best of your ability.*

And I'm convinced (through some experimentation and observation) that no other religion's shorthand rules can come close to giving you such happiness, contentment, success, and peace. It's why I'm a Christian. It kind of cuts through the "What is Truth?" crap the sophists love so much.