Difficult topic but a continuation on a theme – if one in three women and one in five men have experienced sexual assault, but the number of convictions of rape are less than 2% against the total number of reported rapes, and most rapes go unreported, there’s a likelihood that anyone reading this message was either raped, knows someone who was raped, or you don’t know you know someone who was raped, but they haven’t shared that information with you.

When you stridently defend folks like R. Kelly or Bill Cosby for whatever reason, please realize something – people who may not have told you about the time when someone took something from them – violated a trust – was a friend or a family member – or made an assumption that because you were drunk or high that “you wanted it” – that person is reading what you are saying.

There’s a very short list of people that I would call upon if I really got into trouble. These are the people I consider my truest friends. They aren’t just folks I’d drink with in a bar or share a giggle. These folks are the foundation on which I draw my strength.

There are some things that once you say them, in my mind, you get moved onto another list.

I can’t trust you if some part of you thinks its OK to defend rapists.

Why?

I was raped a very long time ago.

To this day, it still shapes my level of trust, my attitude, and how cautious I am about things totally unrelated to sex and relationships, because on some level, I still blame myself, even though I know it wasn’t my fault.

Taking a gift not freely given, for whatever reason, deeply affects a life, and creates a scar that can’t ever be fully healed.

Yes. Men get raped, too. Sometimes by women. Sometimes by men. More often than not though, its men doing the raping. Sometimes its overt – they said no, and you chose not to hear it. Sometimes they are drunk and they said yes when they were conscious, but now they are passed out.

They don’t have to be begging you to stop for it to be rape. If they are asleep, intoxicated, or in any other way not coherent, it’s rape. If you have coerced them into saying yes by brute force or other means, its rape. If you are their boss and they’ll be fired or not promoted if they don’t touch your dick, that’s rape.

Sex is a gift freely given.

Rape is theft. You are taking something that did not belong to you without permission of the person who owns it. You are violating a trust. You are altering the path of a life in ways you cannot comprehend for a few moments of release.

For a person to use their strength to steal from a person who may not be as strong as you is a deeply cowardly and reprehensible act.

As a man, I hope I’ve never, even unconsciously crossed a line and violated someone in this way but honestly, I can’t be sure that someone in the world doesn’t think of me as a rapist.

If you haven’t considered this as a possibility, take a few minutes and think about this:

Have you ever intentionally gotten a person drunk to have sex with them?

Have you ever put a person in a position where they felt as if they were not free to say no?

Have you ever touched a person inappropriately while they were sleeping or passed out?

Do you think of sex as a commodity, something to be obtained, and totally separate from the living, breathing human being?

When in a bar, is the objective to find someone to fuck, with no regard to whatever lie you need to tell to get what you want?

When you heard “no,” or “that hurts” or “please, stop”, or even no words, just a frozen pained silence, did you keep going, thinking they’ll feel good in a moment?

If you’ve done any of those things, there are a whole lot of people out there who think you REALLY need to change your attitude, and you are VERY lucky you are not already in jail.

If you are joking about Rape, using the term casually, as in using it to describe how you were over-charged for something, or how someone beat you in a video game, an attitude change is in order.

A You-Tube video from someone I admire was released.

She’s very good at explaining things so everyone can understand them, and usually, she’s funny.

Not this time.

The people who would get the most from this video are the people who will likely never watch it.

How Slut Shaming Becomes Victim Blaming