Quote Originally Posted by Subotan View Post
Does "not so much" mean just that, or not at all?
No, but it does mean that I think there is no legal barrier to a woman being successful, nor are their any insurmountable practical ones. There may be room for inprovement, but it's almost entirely (in the West) about inproving individual attitudes, and only time will really do that.

Eh, the use of the word "manners" looks like a smokescreen to me to justify treating women who acted as non-sexual beings as china dolls.
That's because you're viewing it through a feminist lens, and that's skewing your perspective. You're not wrong, but at least women used to be judged by slightly more suble standards than how they looked in a pair of booty shorts. Whatever else they might be, china dolls are valuable.

Why does young women having casual (by which I mean, safe, consensual etc.) sex potentially have serious repercussions? Does the same apply to men?
Yes, physically, emotionally and economically. While we're here, lets drop the notion of "safe" sex; you might be relatively "safe" in terms of pregnancy but even then there's great potentially to catch something from the other person - if you're doing it right.

I would hope that everybody would encourage everyone else to intervene if they saw a rape taking place.
So would I, but as men do most of the raping instilling a proactively "anti-rape" mindest in young men and tying it directly to their masculinity is probably more frutiful than tying rape to masculinity in "non means no" campaigns. Yes, no does mean no, but that's a negative message, it can encourage a negative view of male sexuality. Much better to teach men, "if you hear a woman scream, it IS your business". Hand in hand with this, we need to recognise that some men are no better than animals and women need to take this into account in how they dress and whether they let a man they know (and can trust) walk them home at the end of the night.

Would that we could make this a perfect world, but we can't.

A criticism like that is very circumstantial.
I've heard it before, I consider it a relevent generalisation.

It's definitely patronising to always assume that women are in need of protection. Couldn't the reason for the decline in the need for men to protect people come about from the decline in violence you mentioned earlier?
Every year at Exeter University at least one first year girl is sexually assaulted, this year she was actually raped. The reason is always basically the same, she was walking home on her own in the early hour of the morning, possibly drunk, down a dark streat because she assumed my little city was safe. A couple of times pairs of girls have been attacked, I have never heard of a girl and a boy being sexually attacked. I am utterly convinced that the reason for this is that rapists are predators and a man and a woman together present a more difficult proposition than either a single woman or a small group. This is because generally speaking you can expect the man to move to protect the woman and by the time he is eliminated she will have run off and (hopefully) got help. We're talking about preventing a situation, not aiming to fight an attacker off.

I definitely agree that rape is about power and subjugation, but I don't think that conclusion can be reached from your premise i.e. that the breakdown of gender roles is causing rapists to rape.
Oh, I'm not saying it's making rapists rape, but rape should be happening less and less, yet we have a figure of 1 in 4 which (excluding marital rape) seems high even by historical standards. I mean, hell, it's not like we're living through the 30 Years War here. What is clear is that there's more than just violent power-rape going on, there's also date rape, which probably accounts for a lot of the unreported rapes, and that has to do with not respecting boundaries between men and women. You can point to rape by the upper classes, and even domestic abuse, but the fact is historically those weren't any more acceptable then than now, but it seems that despite supposed advances in women's rights men are still getting away with it , but without the protection of power or privilage.