Blackmail, Rape Culture, Bill Cosby -- A very meandering blog post

You cannot be blackmailed without agreeing to it, especially if it's mostly implied threat. If YOU are afraid or ashamed, you give people power over you.

When Bill Cosby was sent a threat of blackmail by a woman he had slept with, he told his WIFE, called the police and met the blackmailer with police in tow.

You can't be blackmailed if you are willing to own up to whatever mistakes you made or choices you made and explain you were young and stupid or whatever and accept the consequences of your actions, which are likely to be less of a problem than the consequences of allowing someone to blackmail you.

I don't know what the truth is about the charges of rape against Bill Cosby. I do know a lot of women don't really want to admit they agreed to sex and a lot of people are happy to smear someone who has fame and money.

In the movie The Green Mile, one of the inmates is a Black man doing time for rape. He says he went home with a German woman he met at a bar, woke up to her husband unexpectedly coming home and she claimed it was rape.

I once kissed a friend goodbye who was extremely respectful of my boundaries but the world would not have approved of our affection for each other. The kiss was more than a peck on the cheek.

Years later, I ran across his unusual name online. Probably the same guy given how unusual his name was. He apparently went to prison for doing the same thing with a different woman.

Given what I knew of his behavior towards me, my guess is he went to prison on her word and very likely it was a situation similar to the story in The Green Mile: she got caught doing something she wasn't supposed to be doing and insisted he forced himself on her.

If caught engaging in "questionable" behavior, many women will claim to be a victim to protect their reputation. AND they often don't even know what they want.

I talk about this somewhat often: A woman posted to an online forum that she went to dinner with someone, got falling down drunk and ended up in bed with the guy. She said "I know I need to drink less, but how do I tell my boyfriend I was unfaithful?" and an Internet stranger had to tell her "Honey, you weren't UNFAITHFUL  You were RAPED."

Far too many people seem to not understand that the definition of rape hinges on the detail of CONSENT. They imagine it involves being violently assaulted in a dark alley and seem to not really comprehend that if you are too drunk to drive, you are too drunk to meaningfully consent to anything. 

If you had signed a contract involving big bucks, you could fight it in court. But women get plied with alcohol until they are falling down drunk by men who understand she will be falling down drunk long before he is unable to perform and the women feel guilty and don't realize they didn't consent to that, they couldn't consent to that, it was rape.

Because men are supposed to ask and women are supposed to only say yes or no and women aren't supposed to lust or read porn or masturbate or have a sexuality in their own right. They are merely supposed to be sex objects that look out for societal mores and not sexual creatures in their own right with sexual needs of their own.

In the same forum where that discussion happened, some woman was openly hateful to me for talking about the fact that I've done two college papers on date rape and it almost always involves alcohol. She was angry and dismissive of that and insisted "Men are just rapey bastards!" and told the tale of someone ATTEMPTING to rape her on a date and she successfully escaped being raped by clawing him bloody and "no alcohol was involved!"

I very politely pointed out that if either of them had been drinking, perhaps it would have been rape instead of merely ATTEMPTED rape.

Her story wasn't a rebuttal to my data. It fit exactly what I was saying and completely agreed with my research.

The punchline of this story is that it took her a DECADE to conclude it was attempted rape, in spite of clawing him bloody to fend it off. I said nothing about that detail because she was clearly a psych job hell-bent on taking her shit out on me in a classist toxic forum that had decided to mark me as one of the people the mods WANTED members to actively bully.

The biggest problem with so-called rape culture is that WOMEN are supposed to be "good girls" and that means women are supposed to marry for love, not "get experience", not lust after men, tolerate sex because they love him and want kids etc etc.

I've spent a lot of years not talking about Bill Cosby and the charges of rape against him because I don't know how to talk about that publicly yet but I do know that not being very careful what I say will get me viciously attacked and dismissed no matter the truth of the situation.

Please start here: I have stated I do not KNOW what happened. This post is NOT claiming Bill Cosby is innocent of the charges in question.

I'm ALSO not saying he's guilty. I'm saying I do NOT know what really happened.

But it's a public incident that he got taken to court. It's a thing to use as a jumping off point for things I want to talk about generally.

There is a scene in the movie The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human where she learns she's pregnant and talks to a friend and her friend is disapproving of her being nice about it and essentially coaches her to be accusatory and blame the boyfriend etc.

Women get expected to be paragons of virtue and go along with public conservative values about sex. And it often goes very weird places when something happens privately that no one else witnessed -- just the two people who were there -- and then other people get involved for some reason, maybe because she turned up pregnant, because he's famous, because someone caught them, whatever.

There's a reason we have the expression "He said, she said."

I refuse to pretend to go along with societal values of that sort because I learned early that being clearly innocent and the victim -- because I was a child when I was sexually assaulted -- would do NOTHING to protect me. Playing "the good girl" would in no way get me anything in life.

I live by MY values and do my best to not harm men whom I was sexually intimate with consentingly.  So far, that's generally gotten me better outcomes than what other women seem to get.

But it's certainly not meant I've never been hurt. I've been hurt plenty.

I've also had people HELP me in ways that supposedly "never" happen.

I'm a recovered victim of incest and everything I've read indicates children don't get over something like that, no matter how much therapy they do, no matter how long they live, no matter how much money they make or fame they have etc. The hole in their soul remains and never closes and they bleed in ways they may try to hide but which leaves a stain on their lives and on everything they do in life.

I was a huge fan of Bill Cosby in my youth and I had enormous respect for his choice to own up to the affair and meet his would-be blackmailer with the police in tow. I would LIKE to think he's not a rapist.

But I also know a lot of powerful men got there because they don't take no for an answer and it's not uncommon for men to keep pursuing a woman after she's told him no.

So it's possible in some cases he pushed too hard and she really did feel violated and in other cases she enthusiastically agreed and then changed her story later because her husband found out or something.

Whatever the truth is about this one man that America was so happy to drag in part because he was a BLACK man who did well in life, I wish planet Earth would get real about the fact that so-called rape culture cannot POSSIBLY be put behind us as long as women are supposed to be "good girls" who don't lust and CANNOT know what they want in bed or in a man without being "harlots" who "deserve to be raped."

If you do not know your own sexuality and what you want, it's not possible to meaningfully consent to anything sexual. And this shit may be why some fucked up women insist "All heterosexual sex is rape forced on women by men who are all rapey bastards."

Gee, I'm guessing you're frigid too given that testimony to your life experience.