[rape] seven short posts on the matter [3]

The way it should be

Mike Tyson saw Desiree Washington in a line. That’s as he would have liked it, all the girls lined up for his inspection. He chose her and from the field, I would have too. He was a known lecher, a brute, everything he’d done and said indicated that:

"A lot of young women don't know what they're getting themselves into. A lot of them think it's fun, a game. . . . But they truly don't know what they're into when they lock themselves into a room and engage in sex with a man who knows how to handle a woman."

She went up to his room later, flattered and curious. He says that, by crossing that threshold, it was permission. She said it was not – that she was a naïve girl, summoned by her hero to talk about things. Did she honestly believe, in that society and at her age, that it was to play tiddlywinks and chat about philosophy?

She might have. I’ve known many seemingly worldly women who were still easy to con, who were the product of their relatively sheltered upbringing, despite later developments.

The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve. [Jean Rhys, the Left Bank, 1927]

There’s the rub. Naïvety and the desire to be wanted but how many times, once it’s clear he wants her, does she see the matter as closed, that in his mind the ultimate denouement of the libidinous dance is a simple inevitability but in hers, she’s already thinking thoughts of other things. She’d be shocked if he kept pressing his attentions.

The way the woman thinks. The way the man reacts. It’s patently obvious that a woman cannot understand the way a man’s biology works. And a man never really understands that for a woman, desire is a tool.