"Why Brock Turner Believes He Isn’t a Rapist"

"We’re sociologists, and our talk about current events remains purely scientific, but as we discussed this case, our conversation turned into an exchange of stories of sexual aggression that seemed so painstakingly ordinary that we had never told each other about them before. For Nicole, there was the guy who refused to leave her apartment until she had sex with him, even after she told him at least six times that she didn’t have any interest. He used to intern for Bernie Sanders and now works at a non-profit in DC. There was also the guy who claimed he was too drunk to drive home after a second date and asked to sleep over, promising he wouldn’t try anything. He pinned her down and humped her for half an hour as he tried to get hard, and as she repeatedly told him that she wanted him to stop. That guy is a sex educator at a middle school...

Neither of us would call any of these individual encounters particularly traumatizing. It’s not because they aren’t terrifying or didn’t leave us feeling violated, but because they’re so common that the easiest response is to take a shower, grab a glass of wine, and binge Netflix while trying to summon up the courage to go on another first date...

We aren’t alone in feeling this way—and this is where we can put our sociology hats back on to understand our own experiences. Researchers have found that it’s exceedingly common for women to mislabel their sexual assaults as “bad dates” or other types of unfortunate experiences,[1] especially if they have some relationship with the perpetrator, as most victims do.[2]"

http://slcfeminist.com/why-brock-turner-believes-he-isnt-a-rapist/

FB: "For rapists like Brock Turner to take responsibility for their actions, we need to take all sexual assault seriously, not just the sensational cases that end in a bystander chasing down the rapist. The men in our lives need to reflect on their own behaviors and recognize that they have almost certainly crossed at least one romantic partner’s boundaries in a way that could have left them feeling scared and violated."