Criminalization
Can the law prevent date rape?
The law can prevent some date rapes. If a mart can be put in jail for exerting emotional pressure, men will exert less of it; if a woman who is under the influence can yell rape the following morning, fewer men will buy women drinks, so there will be less sex, so there will be less unwanted sex. And a stria law will also prevent millions of men from asking women on dates to begin with for fear that a romantic evening might become a ruined life. Which will also prevent date rape, there can be no date rape if there is no date.
The law can prevent most anything — the question is, at what cost?
To go from Stage fs "male pursue/female resist" to the feminist "male pursue/female sue" is not a progression but a regression. Big Sister will leave America as impoverished emotionally as Big Brother left Soviet citizens impoverished economically.
A law can give us security — but the hope of a date is love. Love requires risks. As does the life in which we hope to share that love. A law that prevents risks prevents love.
If we choose to retain laws against date rape, the punishment must be made suitable to the crime, creating degrees for rape as we have for murder. If intercourse with a woman who made a choice to date, made a choice to drink, and made a choice to have oral sex (which both Tyson and Kennedy Smith claimed) is put in the same category as sex at knife point, we both trivialize rape and criminalize only the male ропі on of the male-female role.
And if we choose to retain laws against date rape, then a false accusation of rape must subjea the accuser to the same imprisonment a conviaed rapist would receive. In China false accusations of any crime are rare — if the acoisation proves false, the accuser receives the punishment.
Finally, if we retain laws against date rape, then we must use DNA tests ^d lie-detector tests whenever possible; they must be monitored by a neutral party and given a second time when in doubt. Lie-deteaor tests are not perfea, but it usually takes special training to fool them — training few allege students and date rape litigants have had. To eliminate them as one admissible piece of evidence is со eliminace the single biggest protection men have agaiast their own lives being raped.
Ultimately, though, criminalization reflects the failure of prevention. So let’s look at prevention.
Rtsodolizotion
The solution to all this is not criminalization but resocialization. The law cannot compete with nuance. Body language is more powerful than verbal language; and eyes that say yes speak louder than words that say no. If the law tries to legislate our yeses and noes it will produce the siraitjacket generation — a generation afraid to flirt, fearful of finding its love notes in a court suit. Date rape legislation will force suitors and courting to give way to courts and suing.
The empowerment of women lies not in the protection of females from date rape, but in resocializing both sexes to share date initiative taking and date paying so that both date rape and date fraud are minimized. We cannot end date rape by calling men "wimps" when they don’t initiate quickly enough, "rapists" when they do it too quickly, and "jerks" when they do it badly. If we increase the performance pressure only for men, we will reinforce men’s need to objectify women — which will lead to more rape Men will be our rapists as long as men are our initiators. Increasing only men’s responsibility does not create female equality, it perpetuates female entitlement.
Laws on date rape create a climate of date hate. Only communication will lead to love. So how do we replace criminalization with resocialization and legislation with communication? By teaching a new relationship language